⚙️ Work
I didn’t go to D2L’s Fusion this year - we have 2 team members in Toronto for the conference. D2L announced that it has acquired H5P (well, the H5P Group that builds H5P). Hopefully they do a better job of stewarding H5P than Instructure has done with Badgr.
My feedback to D2L for years (we’ve been using Desire2Learn/D2L/Brightspace for over 10 years now) has been various versions of “The built-in content editor in your core product is extremely basic and we need something like H5P or Drupal’s blocks or even Gutenberg built in” and they responded with “ok - here’s Creator+, a new product you can license, for an additional 40% uplift on your annual subscription. It’s kind of like an incomplete and buggy clone of H5P. We think you’ll like it.” and now “We’ve just bought H5P - you should definitely pay the extra 40% to have it integrated in the Creator+ content editor now. Also, we’re apparently not going to be doing anything about the content editor in our core product.”
Good times. We’ve made it super clear that we won’t be adding anything onto our campus license, which has grown significantly in cost every year since we’ve adopted it (despite university budgets not increasing), and will continue to grow significantly in cost each year until the end of our current licensing term. If it’s not in Core, it doesn’t exist for us. So, no Creator+ (with H5P, so no integrated H5P), no Lumi AI (which also appears to be part of Creator+), no Performance+, no Achievement+, etc etc. Focus on the core product and not on pushing partners to upsell and uplift and grow their license in order to access modern functionality.
🔗 Links
AI
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UCalgary’s AI Standards are set to go online. My contributions have been mostly “so, have you consulted with VPTL and VPLCR on this?”1
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Obsidian Smart Second Brain plugin - I’m trying this plugin that uses Ollama’s locally-running LLM to index your personal vault. No OpenAI/etc integration needed, just LLM running securely on my own laptop. The initial indexing of my ~4000 notes took about 30 minutes. And then I tried it for maybe 10 minutes before deleting it all because I don’t need to ask a chatbot about my notes…
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Sam Leith @ The Guardian: ‘People say my book gave them a panic attack’: When We Cease to Understand the World author Benjamín Labatut (via Howard Rheingold)
The rise of AI is Von Neumann’s legacy, and Labatut isn’t at all persuaded by the argument that it’s just “spicy autocomplete”. “When you have a mathematical system that can run language, you have the two most powerful things we have developed as a species working together: mathematics and language,” he says. “I think that we are absolutely on the verge of something, if not past the verge. I think that the first AI catastrophe, because of the way things are going, massive corporations racing to the bottom, is probably inevitable.”
Fonts
Embiggening enrolment
- University of Guelph - Office of Teaching & Learning: College-Specific Workshops on Scaling Courses for Increasing Student Enrollment. Some good ideas for how to support this kind of initiative, and may be a good model to follow given our mandate to increase enrolment by 10K students in the next couple of years…
🍿 Watching
- ★★★★☆ Prey (2022). I think this might be the best Predator film. Amber Midthunder was amazing. And it was filmed on Stoney Nakoda land west of Calgary, which was easily recognizable before checking IMDB.
- ★★★★☆ The Bear (Season 3). I’d probably have given the season 3 stars - it went a little overboard with the anxiety and stress ala season 2’s Seven Fishes - but Jamie Lee Curtis was just outstanding in her bottle episode, and Ayo Edebiri is amazing. The Funeral episode was probably some of the most authentic conversation I’ve seen in a show. Real people (including like a dozen real chefs playing themselves) having what felt like real conversations, and talking over each other as people do.
📚 Reading
Still working on The Plains of Passage.
🧺 Other
I was in vacation mode for the week. Which I decided to spend by having a follow-up medical consult on Monday, which resulted in an “emergency” procedure scheduled for Wednesday. Kidney stones are fun. Lasers and robots and baskets, and it looks like they got both of the stones. Now, I’m possibly off the bike for a bit to recover - there’s a ureteral stent2 in there and I’m not supposed to jostle it too much. Once I remove it, I’ll be back to normal activity.
🗓️ Focus for next week
- I’ll be back in the office after taking a week off, before being out of the office for most of the following week for SCUP.