2024 Week 31

⚙️ Work

It’s AUGUST already? I think this may have been the last slow-ish week in the office. August ramps up to prep for the fall semester, but July actually felt like a slowdown, which was nice. But it’s over.

The TI and Libraries collaborated to host an open “Conversations about AI” session. Several instructors participated, discussing AI ethics, designing courses and assessments, and ways to ethically use AI. It was an excellent discussion, and I think there was a start of a campus community around the topic. There is a second session scheduled for mid-August.

🔗 Links

Webstuff

  • Jan Ulnas: The Web We’ve (Never) Lost (via Alan Levine). A web version of a talk given at a PragueJS meetup.

    He suggests 3 things we can do to bring back the web:

    So, here’s what I want you to do:

    1. Click around and find out. (READ: RSS 4Life!)
    2. Start curating stuff into a list. (CURATE: publish lists of stuff, like this weekly thing.)
    3. Create your homepage. (CREATE: Make some art, dammit! Blog or something.)

  • Tim Bray: Invisible Attackers. Mastodon is amazing, but it also makes it easy to hide general crappiness because of the way posts and responses may (or may not) be visible on different servers. Someone may be under active attack by racists and nazis, and people may not even be able to see those posts in order to help. One possibility is actively defederating from servers known to harbour racists and nazis. That feels like using a sledgehammer to solve the problem, but it’s a big problem and maybe sledgehammers are the only tool available for now.

Leadership

  • Robert Winter: Is it time to abandon 1-on-1s? No. It isn’t. He uses statements from the CEO of the most overvalued company on earth, who wields insane (both explicit and implicit) power over his staff, and who can therefore do things that wouldn’t be appropriate anywhere else.

This is fine.jpg

  • Robson Fletcher: We’re now up to 100 smoky hours in Calgary so far this summer

    With the shocking chart of smoky hours per year. Everyone’s been saying “I don’t remember it being this smoky when I was a kid” and they’re 100% correct. Unless you were born in maybe 2015, it’s never been this smoky.

    Robson Fletcher’s YYC Smoky Hours chart Robson Fletcher’s Smoky Hours chart

  • Simon Lee, Hayley Fowler, & Paul Davies @ Ars Technica & The Conversation: The climate is changing so fast that we haven’t seen how bad extreme weather could get

    Startling recent examples include the extreme heatwave in the Pacific Northwest of North America in 2021, in which temperatures exceeded the previous Canadian record maximum by 4.6° C. Another is the occurrence of 40° C in the UK in summer 2022, which exceeded the previous UK record maximum set only three years earlier by 1.6° C. This is part of the reason why the true impact of a fixed amount of global warming is only evident after several decades, but of course—since the climate is changing rapidly—we cannot use this method anymore.

    Buckle up. We’re just getting started with this climate change stuff…

  • Melissa Eddy @ NYTimes: Germans Combat Climate Change From Their Balconies (free share link).

    A small and easy step to help reduce demand for power generation. Cheap solar panels (article says they’re $217 USD each!) that are just slapped on balconies, fences, etc. and plugged in to feed the grid? This sounds amazing! I’d love a few of these to hang on the back deck!

AI Stuff

The Literature

5 articles from the latest issue of TechTrends:

  1. Rahmadi, I.F. (2024). Research on Digital Transformation in Higher Education: Present Concerns and Future Endeavours. TechTrends 68, 647–660. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11528-024-00971-0
  2. Francom, G.M., Luckett , M. & Spearman, S.M. (2024). Perceptions of Teaching and Social Presence Between Face-to-Face, Web Conferencing, and Mozilla Hubs Learning Modes. TechTrends 68, 672–681. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11528-024-00969-8
  3. Fabian, K., Smith, S. & Taylor-Smith, E. (2024). Being in Two Places at the Same Time: a Future for Hybrid Learning Based on Student Preferences. TechTrends 68, 693–704. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11528-024-00974-x
  4. Ingram, K., Oyarzun, B., Maxwell, D. et al. (2024). The Difference a Three-Minute Video Makes: Presence(s), Satisfaction, and Instructor-Confidence in Post-Pandemic Online Teacher Education. TechTrends 68, 723–733. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11528-024-00979-6
  5. Choi, G.W., Kim, S.H., Lee, D. et al. (2024). Utilizing Generative AI for Instructional Design: Exploring Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. TechTrends 68, 832–844. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11528-024-00967-w

And one in Higher Education:

Komljenovic, J., Sellar, S. & Birch, K. (2024). Turning universities into data-driven organisations: seven dimensions of change. Higher Education, 88 (1). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-024-01277-z

The authors analyzed 3 years worth of data and interviews with higher ed, edtech vendors, and edtech investors. They did thematic analysis of the data, and identified 7 dimensions of change:

  1. Aspirational
  2. Technological
  3. Legal
  4. Commercial
  5. Organisational
  6. Ideological
  7. Existential

Which is a pretty good list of dimensions of change. I can see how each of those are interconnected at my university…

PIAs

  • Cory Doctorow @ Pluralistic: Why is this Canadian university scared of you seeing its Privacy Impact Assessment? (via Grant Potter).

    Ian Linkletter, who was sued by the dumbass CEO of Proctorio because Ian shared public URLs to some videos that Proctorio had published to Youtube (which is a pretty public repository of videos and not intended as a secure vault for trade secrets) and had made public (but unlisted, but Google indexes those so they are NOT private, or secure, or confidential). Anyway. Ian is now collecting PIAs (Privacy Impact Assessments) for edtech as reviewed by BC universities. Langara got upset because he published a PIA for their adoption of Office 365, that was released via a FOIP request. Cory asked if anyone who was familiar with edtech and PIAs could take a look at Langara’s PIA and see if there’s anything worth suing over. I took a look, and my IANAL-but-do-this-as-part-of-my-job notes were:

    It’s basically “O365 is a thing that exists and we are using it at Langara. Here is a summary of info based on public documents published on the web, publicly.”

    The only things I saw that might be questionable to share were:

    • domain names for 2 test servers. this shouldn’t be a problem, but hooray for security through obscurity?
    • AD info for “Bianca Mejia" - hopefully that’s a fake account and not a real student
    • email addresses for the consultants who wrote the PIA. Shouldn’t be a problem, but who knows?

    And, maybe the Langara logo is the copyright claim? Which, probably not valid?

Grief

  • Mathi Gwithyas: On Grief - on how he started practicing handwriting in order to help recover from a stroke - well, not “recover”, as much as “recover a piece of my former self”.

I’ve noticed my handwriting has gotten horrible over the last couple of years of exclusively taking notes in Obsidian. It’s not that my handwriting was ever good, but at least it was fluid and legible. Now it’s scrawl.

When dad’s dementia got bad and he lost his speech through aphasia, all he had to communicate with was writing bits of sentences on whatever paper was available. He couldn’t use his iPad anymore. Couldn’t type. REFUSED to use the apps with big buttons and icons that could help him communicate - because he was embarrassed about needing to use something like that. All he had was handwriting. He always had good penmanship, but hadn’t practiced it as he got old. And then, when he lost that too, he was locked in without any way to communicate. That’s fucking horrifying. So, maybe I’ll start writing things out with pen and paper again?

🍿 Watching

  • ★★★☆☆ Star Trek Beyond (Disney+). I’d tried to watch this back in 2017 using vr goggles and had to turn it off because it was a very unpleasant experience. I never got around to finishing it, but it was on. Much better on a 65” screen than on crappy android vr goggles. Entertaining, but just a dumb action flick.
  • ★★★★☆ Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (Disney+). A technical masterpiece, without looking like one. Almost every frame had CGI. Some entire scenes had to be entirely computer generated. And it all looked - and felt - real (aside from maybe - maybe - some of the fire on the CG torches? What an incredibly minor nit to pick). The plot had some pretty predictable parts, but it was a nice way to look forward from what Caesar started.

🧺 Other

I got my lab tests done before my annual check-in at TBCC. I got some of the results back already, but some of the more obscure protein tests aren’t displayed in the provincial health portal. It looks like I’m still in “remission”, but will know for sure next week.

🗓️ Focus for next week

Looking at my calendar, there are 3 meetings with “AI” in the title. And some team meetings. And a campus visit by one of our D2L reps to talk about some strategy stuff.

Last updated: August 3, 2024