2024 Week 7

⚙️ Work

We put the finishing touches on the survey we’ll be using to gather feedback from UCalgary community members about their experiences with our programming, and what they’re looking for from us.

The first Learning Technologies Advisory Committee with a new Vice Provost co-chair. What a great discussion! We’re rebooting the committee by rethinking what’s needed, given that the TOR was written like 5 years ago and there have been at least a couple of changes over that time…

📚 Reading

• Cormier, D. (2024). Learning in a Time of Abundance: The Community Is The Curriculum. Just starting this, as my pre-order finally arrived.
• Deslauriers, L., McCarty, L. S., Miller, K., Callaghan, K., & Kestin, G. (2019). Measuring actual learning versus feeling of learning in response to being actively engaged in the classroom. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(39), 19251-19257.¹

Interesting pre-pandemic data on measuring the impact of active learning - but active learning is a skill that has to be developed over time, and can’t just be dropped in as a single class session to replace a lecture to determine the value. Effective active learning takes time to develop - both for the instructor and student. This feels more like the Pepsi Challenge (which was successful for Pepsi because people prefer more sugar in smaller doses - the taste test - but prefer less sugar in larger doses - actually drinking a can of the stuff) than a real measurement of active learning. They respond to this in the paper:

it is likely that a significant part of students’ comparably negative response to this intense style of active learning is a result of the disfluency they experience in this cognitively demanding environment

And they conducted a follow-up study where they actually taught active learning and metacognition early in the semester. Students found that was useful, and also found that active learning was more effective after that foundation was in place. Cognitive dissonance reduces learning? Who knew?

• Andy Weir released a “lost” chapter of The Martian, to celebrate 10 years. via Jason Kottke.

🔗 Links

• Mary Grush in Campus Technology - Presence and Integrity in Online Learning: A Q&A with Gardner Campbell Gardner Campbell talks about his approach to (academic) integrity, online presence and engagement, and rituals.
• Matthew da Mota, Centre for International Governance Innovation: Toward an AI Policy Framework for Research Institutions The paper describes one potential benefit for the use of generative AI in research institutions is to fill a gap in quality metadata for collections of data/resources/content. As we saw with learning object repositories, librarians create excellent metadata, but non-librarians… don’t. A tool to help generate good metadata for non-librarian-managed info would be great. (And is what we see in tools like Photos using AI to generate “this is a photo of uncle Steve, on a sailboat, in Hawaii. A palm tree is visible behind him.”)
• Air Canada was held responsible for AI hallucinations of a chatbot on their website. Good to see they didn’t get away with “how can we be responsible for what nonsense our chatbot generates? On our own website. That we provide to customers. Who assume that the information provided on our website is accurate.”
• Benj Edwards @ Ars Technica: OpenAI collapses media reality with Sora, a photorealistic AI video generator. Wow. I need some time to think about this, but it feels like it’s a big advancement.
• Beth Mole @ Ars Technica: Scientists aghast at bizarre AI rat with huge genitals in peer-reviewed article. Although… maybe we’re safe from the generative AI takeover for a little longer… (but how on earth did these obviously-hallucinated generative AI images make it through peer review??? That raises bigger questions that have nothing to do with generative AI…)

🍿 Watching

• New videos from Reg and Rose Crowshoe.²
  • Smudging with Reg and Rose Crowshoe
  • Sanctified Kindness with Reg and Rose Crowshoe
• Don’t Worry Darling. Meh. Total Recall meets The Truman Show meets The Matrix meets Shutter Island? Or something.
• The Wolf of Wall Street. The Barbie prequel was not what I was expecting.
• Kurzgesagt - Did The Future Already Happen? - The Paradox of Time. Time is weird.
• Killers of the Flower Moon. Lily Gladsone. Wow.

🧺 Other

• I did the longest zone-2 ride I’ve ever done. 57 minutes in zone 2, with another 17 minutes at zone 3. Amazing. It’s hard to keep my heart rate that low. I usually shoot up to like 95% of my max heart rate to get it done as quickly as possible.
• Flickr turned 20 years old this week. Amazing. I was a pretty devoted Flickr-user for many years, but decided to move off it when the whole sale of Flickr from Yahoo! to SmugMug happened. I didn’t want to continue relying on a platform that I didn’t have a stronger sense of ownership in, so I moved my photo publishing into my own blog. I lost the social aspect - no more Interestingness dopamine hits - but I kept the practice of posting my photos as part of my personal archive and didn’t have to give even a moment’s thought to “I wonder if someone will decide to sell/break/sunseet a platform that I rely on and cause me to have to scramble”. My photos are on my own website, and nobody can break that. (Of course, it also means that when the inevitable day comes - hopefully decades from now - where my domain lapses, everything goes poof all together…) It turns out that Flickr avoided enshittification, but I’m still happy that I let it go. Also, happy to see it continue to thrive. Not bad, for something that started out as The Game Neverending…
• Tried an IPA from a local brewery that I hadn’t heard of before. It was really good - looking forward to trying some of their other beers.

🗓️ Focus for next week

• Finishing the EDUCAUSE learning lab on developing a digital learning strategy.
• Team meeting, several project meetings.
• Beginning to map out the various committees, units, task forces, etc. that overlap to shape the strategy and operation of learning technologies across the university.