2024 Week 11

⚙️ Work

• From the “do stuff until someone says no” school, I took a shot at rewriting big chunks of the draft genAI operating standard document, including renaming it. I think it’s better, and will be more useful to our community. I wonder how many of my edits will survive to the final version of the document… I mean… If I get edit privileges on a document, I should contribute as fully as possible¹. I used to look at these things as “how can I edit this without getting fired?”²³⁴ and now I’m looking at them as “they gave me edit privs for a reason, so I shouldn’t hold back.” Regardless, it’s off to Legal now…
• Scholarship of Teaching & Learning at UCalgary - Campus Survey. “This survey aims to increase understanding of teaching and learning scholarship, research, and inquiry at the University of Calgary.” Part of the UCalgary SoTL “Yellow Cubes” project.
• Brian installed a fancy new MIDI adapter for the piano in the TI, so it’s gone from us having to put the cover on the piano so it doesn’t disrupt classes to leaving it open and available for anyone to play.
• In a governance meeting discussing how we can improve a policy, I wound up being the one who spoke up to mention that the main paragraph of the item being discussed has only one sentence that doesn’t have wiggle-words in it, and that might possibly be part of the reason it’s being inconsistently interpreted. For some reason. Maybe. It’s easy to sit back and think “surely, someone will speak up to mention the obvious thing. Surely the long list of people who are smarter than me have seen this and commented on it already.” And then nobody does and maybe it’s going to get through the discussion with nobody saying “hey - there’s an elephant in the room. Right there. In the middle.”⁵
• We had a good and important team discussion about how we would like to plan and implement our programming. I had recently kind of blown it big time with how I communicated some planned changes, and this was part of working out of that. The team is amazing, and I’m grateful that we can have these kinds of open discussions without tension or blame.
• An RFP for a major campus platform was delayed. Again. Now the main demos/evaluations land on the week I had been hoping to head to the Okanagan for a week on the bike⁶. It’s frustrating, as all I can do is say “hey - there’s a contract renewal coming up in [ 1 year | 6 months | 3 months | 1 month ]” and hope that the people who own the contracts do something in time. Which means that something that was originally going to get posted in November now goes out in March, and my own plans get blown away as a result. Cool.

🔗 Links

Documents, data, webstuff

• Anil Dash: Make better documents. He’s really concerned with formatting (stop adding borders to tables! etc.) but that’s just cosmetics - the design of a document is more about the flow, intention, and clarity. Cosmetics follow that. You can have a beautiful document that says nothing, or a deep article that looks like garbage.

• Sean McManus @ BBC Technology: Your personal data all over the web - is there a better way?. Info about Solid and work by Tim Berners-Lee (and others, but saying the name Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Inventor of the World Wide Web makes people pay attention to this).

  OpenID was supposed to tackle this problem almost 20 years ago, and got basically nowhere⁷. OpenID is still going, and says they have over a billion accounts, from notable companies such as MySpace, Sears, and LiveJournal. Hopefully Solid has more of an impact.⁸ (via ACM TechNews)

• Steph Ango @ Obsidian Blog: Announcing JSON Canvas: an open file format for infinite canvas data. Obsidian added a “Canvas” feature, and has worked to release its design as an open file format. It doesn’t include everything yet, but a common .canvas file format for Obsidian, Miro, Excalidraw, Omnigraffle, etc. to use to share content? Amazing.

• RSS Please - A self-contained command line tool to generate an RSS feed from a web page that doesn’t already have RSS. You can configure it to look for HTML elements - “generate an RSS feed that includes items for every H3 on the page at this URL…”. Runs on Linux, macOS, Windows, BSD.

• Gallery of 404 page designs. (via Grant Potter). I need to finish designing one for this web thing.

• via Elen LeFoll: genAI is widespread in academic publishing. They did a simple search on Google Scholar, looking for telltale signatures of AI-generated dreck, and came up with some obvious garbage that has been published.

  Looking closer at the journals (or “journals”) publishing these, I was shocked - SHOCKED - to see that they were published by the predatory “open” “journal” platform Open Journal Systems. This is the “service” run by the douchebag grifter that launched a Twitter campaign against me a few years ago⁹ because I had the gall to describe his predatory “journal” platform as being predatory.

  His predatory “journal” platform runs an instance of the legitimate (and important) Open Journal Systems software maintained by SFU’s Public Knowledge Project. He has also been a pain in their ass¹⁰, causing endless problems for years¹¹. I am shocked that he uses generative AI (and/or enables others to do same) to create and publish fake/fraudulent “journal” articles. Well, not that shocked.

Leadership, communication, etc.

• Liz Fosslein @ HBR: How Leaders Miscommunicate When Tensions Are High. Lots of great lessons in this article, and many things I’m continuing to work on.

Video games, pedagogy, etc.

• Schmidt, M., Earnshaw, Y., Jahnke, I. et al. (2024). Entangled eclecticism: a sociotechnical-pedagogical systems theory approach to learning experience design. Education Tech Research Dev. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-024-10353-1

  It emphasizes the significance of considering the sociocultural, technological, and pedagogical dimensions of learning as a cohesive, interconnected ecology to design effective learning experiences.

  Sounds kind of like something I’d write about…

• Madigan, J. (2020). The Engagement Game: Why Your Workplace Culture Should Look More Like A Video Game.

  Well, that’s interesting. My dissertation was titled “The Teaching Game”, and produced a framework to integrate HCI and SoTL to help design and understand teaching and learning. Madigan uses video game design concepts to describe workplace engagement. I had no idea this book even existed, despite writing my dissertation at the time it was published. I’ve added this to my to-read list, and also to my “there are no original ideas left” pile. Sigh… (via The Video Game Library’s mastodon account)

Let’s not call it AI

• Liu, J. & Jagadish, H.V. (2024). Institutional Efforts to Help Academic Researchers Implement Generative AI in Research. Harvard Data Science Review. https://doi.org/10.1162/99608f92.2c8e7e81 (via Paul Pival & Scott Leslie) I’ve shared this with the AI operating standard leads.
• Zach Seward - All the news that’s fit to print. A good overview of ethical ways to use genAI in journalism, and many of these would translate into teaching-and-learning and research contexts. (via Ben Werdmuller and Grant Potter)
• MS: AI for educators. “Explore the many ways to enhance teaching and learning with AI-powered tools in Microsoft Edge browser, Word, PowerPoint, Minecraft, and more.”

‘Berta

• Naheed Nenshi: I’m running to be Leader of the Alberta NDP and your next Premier and Former Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi announces bid for Alberta NDP leadership. Awesome. Sign me up. Literally. I signed up for an Alberta NDP membership so I can vote for party leadership. I don’t often join political parties - I vote with my vote - but Alberta is so messed up right now that this is pretty important.

  In an interview with CBC News on Monday, Nenshi said he was entering the race based on his concerns that the governing United Conservative Party is “not only incompetent, but they’re actually immoral and they’re dangerous.”

  But, the danger is the UCP’s whole point. “Run it like a business!” “Family values!” “Oil sands or bust!” and general “anti-wokeness” resulting in setting the province back decades at a time when we just can’t afford that. Speaking of which…

• Bob Weber @ CBC News: Alberta government releases no-go zone map for renewable power projects.

  We learned more about the province’s moratorium on clean-energy projects. Good news! It’s not a moratorium at all - they are only forbidding clean energy projects in areas where there might be wind or sunlight, or where people might see them. WHEW! Of course, oil pumps, pipelines, etc. are still encouraged in these areas because they are beautiful and beloved and Jesus loves them. Thankfully, our “pristine viewscapes” have been protected, along with our “family values” and whatever fresh oppositional bullshit the UCP drums up so they can say NO to whatever, but with a smile and waving a flag.

  Just a warning - I’m going to embed a photo I took on Maui back in 2007. It includes the ghastly clean-energy project that completely destroyed their “pristine viewscape”:

Wind farm on Maui, as seen from Kihei in 2007. Ewwwwww! GROSS!!! Why didn’t they think of the pristine viewscapes???

🍿 Watching

• ★★★★★ Airplane! It’s a big building with patients, but that’s not important right now.
• ★★★★☆ Masters of the Air (AppleTV+). Series/season finale. Oof. Let’s not do that again. (As we’re already doing that again…)

🧺 Other

• My back popped out again Monday morning, as I was getting ready to go to campus. Awesome timing. Hoping it doesn’t take 5 months to resolve this time… But it meant that I had to miss out on the last week of the lunchtime skating at the Oval for the season.

• I decided to switch the theme of this website, from the excellent (but feeling-dated) BeautifulHugo (plus a bunch of customizations) to the excellent PaperMod (so far, almost stock, with some additions).

  My tweaks to BeautifulHugo had gotten to the point that it was an unwieldy hacked-together mess that kind of did what I wanted, but kept getting more complex underneath. So, time for a fresh start. PaperMod has more robust light/dark modes, a cleaner design, and a better search tool. I need to figure out how to redo the menu structure etc¹², but it’s good enough to go live now… Build time has gone up from ~8 seconds to ~30 seconds. Not the end of the world, and likely related to the different JSON search index generation.

• I headed to the Saddledome with my BiL to watch the Flames play Las Vegas. Row 5. Amazing. They broke a losing streak, against the reigning champs. Who knew?

🗓️ Focus for next week

• prep for annual review season.
• shockingly, several meetings (although fewer than usual).
• penultimate session with my coach.