When I restarted these weekly things, I wasn’t sure I’d have anything to write about each week. It feels like “the usual”, with nothing of note. But, writing it all out. Holy. There’s a lot going on. And there’s a lot that I can’t document here, too.
⚙️ Work
Thanks to a lucky combination of Family Day long weekend and my taking Fridays off to burn off my vacation balance, it was a 3 day work week. I could get used to that.
This week’s theme for online learning platforms was apparently “well, that’s a new one for me”:
Our YuJa video platform’s automated transcript generation has a “profanity filter”. Which sounds great - who wants profanity in transcripts for videos? But, we got feedback from our faculty of medicine, that it was being a little overzealous. Videos about certain parts of human anatomy were being generated with “******” instead of words like “labia” or “anus” - both of which are perfectly valid and acceptable words when teaching human anatomy. We had a team discussion about the pros/cons and risks/benefits of turning off the profanity checker. If it’s off, transcripts could have naughty words. But. (BUTT!) the words would have been in the audio of the recording. And recordings are not anonymous - they’re recorded by someone (usually an instructor), and we have existing university policies about appropriate conduct. So. We discussed it for a few minutes, and reached consensus to disable the profanity filter. It’s better to have reliable text transcripts for all media than to compromise the quality in order to avoid “profanity”.
And we have one faculty using a third party exam grading tool. It’s integrated with Brightspace via LTI, but the accounts and data are all in the third party platform. A student just started the process to delete their account. That shouldn’t be a problem - it’s a third party account, with no real connection to our university except for the email address used for the account, and the link from Brightspace so students can get to it easier. BUT. This is a platform that is used for assessment. Which means that it needs to support academic appeals and misconduct processes. Say a student is suspected of academic misconduct in an exam or assignment - can they just have their account deleted and all evidence goes poof? That opens a whole ’nother can of worms. So, one of my things this week was trying to figure out who needs to help make the initial decision re: this one student request, AND to inform a policy stance that protects students while also ensuring academic integrity.
📚 Reading
- Finished Dave Cormier’s Learning in a Time of Abundance. Lots of good ideas in there. It started off as more of an economics book than a teaching-and-learning book, but it’s all connected. I’d bet that he’s going to be able to use parts this book as the Background chapter of his dissertation. Looking forward to seeing where he goes with it.
- Abbas, M., Jam, F.A. & Khan, T.I. (2024). Is it harmful or helpful? Examining the causes and consequences of generative AI usage among university students. Int J Educ Technol High Educ 21, 10. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-024-00444-7. Includes 2 studies aimed at developing and validating a survey to measure ChatGPT usage.
- The Winter 2023-2024 issue of Interaction Design & Architecture(s) Journal has lots of interesting-looking articles on AI in education. (via Rick Schwier)
🔗 Links
- Andrew Nikiforuk, in The Tyee. Alberta’s Brutal Water Reckoning (via Apple News and Grant Potter). This is one of the biggest things that I worry about, living in a city of almost 1.5 million people who all get their drinking water from glacial meltwater. We have some serious expertise in water management, but the province struck a drought advisory committee, and named people like some guy from the Trans Mountain Pipeline to help solve this with no need for any input from uppity water- or ecology- types. imindanger.gif
- Benjamin Shingler, in CBC News with a fun chaser about the zombie fires smouldering through the winter, and drought conditions across the country (via Grant Potter)
- Franklin Covey - The 13 Behaviours of High Trust.
- Natasha Kenny - Exploring the structure of a coaching conversation
Digital Learning Strategies
I’ve been gathering links to digital learning strategies produced by post-secondary institutions (and related orgs).
- Bow Valley College: Digital Strategy (institutional digital strategy)
- McMaster University Digital Learning Strategic Framework - Academic Excellence - Office of the Provost
- University of Ottawa Digital strategy and learning innovation (Advisor to the president, a mandate, and some directed project funds)
- University of Toronto
- University of Waterloo Digital Learning Strategy | Provost Office (committee structure and plan to begin developing a DLS)
- Province of BC: Digital Learning Strategy - strategic priorities, recommended actions, guidance and resources to support the post-secondary system with digital learning in B.C
- eCampusOntario Virtual Learning Strategy - directed funding in grants for projects that apply to meet the goals of the strategy
- Mohawk College Digital Learning Strategy | Mohawk College (Hamilton Ontario)
- Durham College Digital Learning Strategy | CTL (Oshawa Ontario)
- University of Edinburgh Digital Skills and Training – At The University of Edinburgh
- JISC Framework for digital transformation in higher education - Jisc
- UC Berkeley - Digital Learning Strategy | Information Technology
- University of Nebraska-Omaha’s 5-year digital learning strategic plan (from 2017)
- Canadian Digital Learning Research Association
- MIT Executive Education course - Digital Learning Strategy | MIT PEL (April 10, 2024 - October 9, 2024)
- MIT Institute-wide Task Force on the Future of MIT Education Final Report July 28, 2014
- University of Surrey (UK)
- CUNY CITE Framework – CITE Learning 2023
🍿 Watching
- I am Mother. (Netflix) Your basic post-apocalyptic Terminator meets Raised by Wolves meets Finch meets The 100 scenario.
- Fool Me Once (Netflix)
- Constellation (AppleTV). I really want to like this, but am struggling to get into it after the first episode. An interesting premise, and I hope they land it. Gravity meets Solaris?
- The Abyss (Netflix). The #1 movie on Netflix, because it’s new. A Swedish version of Volcano or a tamed-down San Andreas. It shouldn’t have been the #1 movie on Netflix.
- Spider-Man: Far From Home. (Netflix) I got complete superhero fatigue during the run-up to Endgame, so I hadn’t seen the latest Spider-Man movies. But, they’re on Netflix and it was either this or Tom Cruise to distract while on the bike. This movie would have been about 5 minutes long if anyone at SHIELD knew how to run a background check…
🧺 Other
- The latest Hugo update finally broke the
tweetshortcode, because Elon decided to change something with how things are referenced or something. I don’t have the energy to try to tweak old blog posts to somehow embed tweets in a new way that will work until Elon changes something else, so I just added a new customtweetshortcode to override the default behaviour, removing all embedded tweets. I didn’t remove the tweets, Elon broke something and I won’t be bothering trying to keep up. - While I was messing around in Hugo, I modified the Archives page to include all content types, and added emoji icons for each type. I built a suuuuper kludgey javascript thing to filter the list by content type. Next, I need to figure out how to hide headings with no visible content beneath them, maybe with some kind of JQuery jiggery-pokery…
- It’s been 2 weeks since my credit card was cancelled because someone used my magic numbers to make a bunch of fraudulent charges. Starting to get warnings about automated bill payments being declined. Super impressed with our modern credit card transaction management system of “give these numbers to people, but hope that they don’t misuse them in any way because you’ll get to jump through a bunch of hoops because of something you have no control over”. After a couple of phone calls, some online verification and activation, followed by another phone call, I’m back up and running. I can’t wait until the current credit card transaction and security model is modernized.
- I received a summons to serve as a juror. First time I’ve ever been called. Should be interesting!
🗓️ Focus for next week
- 1:1 meetings with several team members
- Learning Spaces stuff™
- Celebration of Teaching award ceremony
- TI lunch potluck
- hopefully at least a couple lunchtime skates at the Oval