I’m posting this a bit earlier than usual because I’ll be travelling when I usually post these things on Saturday.
⚙️ Work
- Course Outline Landing Page - Lorelei worked on this last week, and it’s going to be handy for instructors who are putting their course outlines together. It includes a section on guidance re: generative AI, and some templates to use as starting points. (The templates are temporarily pointing to documents in Lorelei’s OneDrive folder so they can be updated quickly, but will be moved to more public/stable locations asap)
- Conversations About Artificial Intelligence and Your Courses - 2 sessions coming up (July 31 and August 14), led by LTDT members.
Join us for an engaging 90-minute session hosted by the Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning in partnership with the Taylor Family Digital Library. This Q&A style conversation is designed for university instructors who are curious about integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) into their teaching practices. Whether you’re a novice or have some experience with AI, this session is the perfect opportunity to explore its potential and the variety of supports available on campus.
- Airlines, banks, health care disrupted in global IT outage - Our campus online learning platforms seem to be OK. We got a confirmation email from one vendor (which was nice) but for some reason it was formatted like a ransom note? Anyway, I’m travelling to a conference on Saturday. Hopefully.
🔗 Links
Higher Education
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Information and Communications Technology Council: Charting the Course: The Future of Higher Education in Canada.
I participated in one of their roundtable sessions last year (hosted at Platform Calgary), which was focused on innovation in higher education (including AI, experiential learning, etc.). It’s an interesting report, and will be of some use for sure, but I’m not sure I see the conversations that I was part of reflected in it. Which, I get it. 6 sessions held in 6 different cities, with 120 participants representing 69 different organizations (including 21 universities, 13 colleges, 5 tech schools, etc.). But it makes me wonder what else was left out, and why/how/who decided what made it into the report.
Enshittification
- Andrew Nikiforuk @ The Tyee: The Enshittification of Everything - Cory Doctorow’s new word for 2024 is going mainstream.
AI
- Simon Willison: Imitation Intelligence: My Keynote for PyCon US 2024 (via Erik Likness & Stephen Downes). An interesting overview of his keynote - and some useful examples that show genAI is imitating intelligence without actually demonstrating intelligence.
- Amplify GenAI - an Open Source generative AI platform that lets you run LLMs on campus server infrastructure without having to pre-pay for a full campus license for something like MS Copilot or ChatGPT etc. (via Tom Woodward)
- Higher Education Strategy Associates: AI-Cademy Canada Summit for Post-Secondary Education - Scheduled for March 6-7, 2025 in Calgary. It ain’t cheap ($975 early bird pricing opens in September) but could be useful. I’ve pre-signed up, and IT will be sending someone as well.
Leadership
- Colette Chelf @ Online Learning Consortium: Servant Leader or Micromanager?
- Robert Winter: The Trouble With Busyness. I’ve definitely been guilty of “micro-boxing” my time in an attempt to get things done. I need to shift to blocking of longer blocks to do deeper things than just managing email.
Cancer
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Beth Mole @ Ars Technica: Genetic cloaking of healthy cells opens door to universal blood cancer therapy.
This looks like a pretty amazing advancement. They take stem cells, run them through CRISPR to change a couple of bases to modify the marker protein presented on the surface of almost all types of blood cells, then reintroduce these modified stem cells (likely after radiation to kill the rest of your stem cells and bone marrow - fun!) so they eventually replace all of your blood cells with ones that can’t be “seen” by an immunotherapy treatment. Cancer cells don’t get the new masking protein, so keep on being stupid cancer cells with the old and known marker protein. Immunotherapy kills everything with the known marker, and the newly-masked normal blood cells are unscathed. Seems like a bit of a risky thing - nuke anything with the normal marker and hope everything we care about keeping shows the modified marker protein instead - but apparently it works.
Webtools
- Paywall bypass bookmerklets
- Robb Knight: EchoFeed Automatically Publishes Feeds to Open Social Protocols (via Nick Heer). I’ve been using MastoFeed to send my RSS feeds to Mastodon and it’s been working well, but it’s good to have a backup plan.
📚 Reading
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★★★☆☆ The Plains of Passage. (Earth’s Children series, Book 4 of 6).
Ayla and Jondalar travel west(ish). They meet up with Jondalar’s extended family by the river, then travel north and encounter a clan taken out of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome for some reason. And some other unlikely coincidences.
And, started The Shelters of Stone (book 5 of 6). I’m not quite hate-reading the series at this point, but am kinda still going because I can’t stop a series in the middle…
🧺 Other
I finally got my Archives page working the way I want, with a javascript filter by content type. I had it almost working before, but it wouldn’t hide the h2 headers for dates that didn’t have visible content listed after filtering for a content type. I’d tried a bunch of things, and wound up using ChatGPT to get it going. It was a simple thing but I’d been messing up just enough for it not to work. 10 minutes of back-and-forth with ChatGPT (and some manual tweaking to finish it off) and it’s working perfectly.
🗓️ Focus for next week
- Travel for SCUP
- Then, catching up after I return