🔗 Links

Leadership

Luis Velasquez @ HBR Review: When You’re Told You’re Not Strategic Enough

I haven’t been told this, but #3 definitely resonates:

3. Shorter-term issues take precedence.

The immediate pressures and urgencies of the day-to-day business sometimes overshadow the need for communicating about long-term planning. Leaders often prioritize execution and operational work over strategic reflection and communication, making it harder to articulate the bigger picture. As one stakeholder told me about Jason, “He appears too busy, always in execution mode.” Additionally, uncertainty and pressure can make leaders hesitant to articulate plans that aren’t fully concrete, and their stakeholders may be unable to connect the dots between the strategy and what’s happening on the ground, causing misunderstanding and misalignment.

Edtech

Online Quizzes: Best Practices - from Izzy and the team, with info on how to set up quizzes in D2l, and connections to academic integrity resources.

AI

Josh Nudell @ Noodlings: Hey ChatGPT: Where’s the Line?

I have been clear about my position on AI in higher education since December 2022. In the two years since I have only become more convinced that LLMs are antithetical to the purpose of an education because using them effectively requires the practitioner to have the necessary skills already but using them inhibits the development of those skills. This has always been an issue to some extent, but LLMs supercharge the problem because they are marketed as a magic shortcut.
University of Regina: Should You Use Generative AI in Coursework? (PDF file shared on Dropbox?) (via Alec Couros on LinkedIn)

I dropped in on a panel discussion on generative AI in our English Department this week. 4 panelists, representing the full spectrum from “Co-Intelligence Is The Way” through to “We Are Literally Killing Ourselves”. There was some good discussion on the ways that genAI can be used, and how it also just doesn’t (can’t?) get the deeper ways of engaging with text. LLMs are great at summarizing, but can’t do close reading, which is a completely different process than summarization.

🍿 Watching

★★★★☆ Slow Horses (AppleTV, Season 4). Started strong, kept getting stronger, ended even strongerer. Looking forward to season 5.
MIT Department of Physics: Visualizing the Nucleus (via Jason Kottke)

Looking into atomic nuclei to visualize quantum-level interactions. Amazing.

📚 Reading

★★☆☆☆ Who Moved My Cheese? Spencer Johnson. 1998.

More of a pamphlet than a book. More of a parable than a leadership book. But it has pictures of cheese. Some good points on planning for and adapting to change, but they could have been made in 5 bullet points on a single page.

🧺 Other

I finally got back on my (indoor) bike, after another month hiatus. It was an easy-ish endurance (well, “endurance”, at 28 minutes…) ride in Banff. Felt good, but I’m finding it super hard to get back into the routine.

🗓️ Focus for next week

All-day sessions to plan if/how/when/where MS Copilot could be rolled out.
Academic Generative AI Working Group.
Team meeting, TI supervisors meeting.
First meeting of the UCalgary Microcredentials Framework Systems & Processes Working Group.