I had an impromptu chat with a dear friend who I respect for his thoughtfulness and approach to the work¹. After the initial “boy, is the nature of our work ever different from back in the olden days when we actually got to build stuff!”, and “it seems like the bulk of our work now is just profoundly unbloggable for all kinds of reasons…”, we eventually got to “so… what kinds of things are you paying attention to?” That’s a big question, worth articulating and sharing.

In August of 2025², anyway. these are the things I’m watching/trying/exploring. Not necessarily adopting or supporting yet, but taking a closer look at.

Practice - Pedagogies/Approaches/Ways-of-working

• UCalgary’s Experiential Learning Framework (specifically, the updated PDF with the Continuum of Experiential Learning Activities on page 7-8) - this “continuum” approach is outstanding and would serve as a model for other aspects of teaching and learning. We’re looking for ways to support experiential learning across UCalgary, including potentially developing some AI-powered software for advisors to use…
• UCalgary’s ii’taa’poh’to’p Indigenous strategy is outstanding, and is being integrated into how we work. (also, the story of how the strategy was developed and brought to life is shared in this excellent book: The Story of ii’ taa’poh’to’p: University of Calgary’s Journey Towards an Indigenous Strategy authored by the “Grandparents of ii’taa’poh’to’p”)
• Digital Transformation - trying to get my head around that whole concept, in a way that isn’t code for “do more with less” or “it’s all about tech- just do tech harder!”. Dx is organizational transformation, cultural transformation, pedagogical transformation, etc. This is the theme of next year’s UCalgary Conference on Post-secondary Learning & Teaching³, which I will have the honour of co-chairing. So I kind of need to dig into this more…
• Ethical Leadership - specifically, the “Framework” “Core Values Assessment”
• 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership - we read this in our TI Leadership team, and will be working through the book as part of our newly-reformed LTDT Leadership team over the next few months.

Tech - Platforms/Applications/Tools

Content authoring

• Brightspace Creator+ - we’re evaluating it for possible addition to our campus license. It now includes the full H5P, as well as some AI tools (that we can’t evaluate for reasons)
• H5P - built into UCalgaryBlogs - we’re looking at ramping that up for use across campus (especially if the Creator+ evaluation winds up with us not adopting that tool - but, interesting, since D2L acquired the H5P organization…)

Team Formation and Peer Feedback

This is something of a gap in our tools. We have previously built our own Peer Feedback Tool, but that’s long gone.

• ITP Metrics - We have an excellent research lab on campus, and I would love to find a way to bake their software into Brightspace so it could be made available in all courses.
• Feedback Fruits - an interesting peer feedback platform we’re looking at (and waiting for institutional machinery to catch up before being able to do anything with it)

Classroom engagement

Not a great name for this category. Student Response Systems. Things that let you ask questions during a class/workshop/presentation. We have Top Hat as a campus platform, but sometimes need a tool with more flexibility (and ability to use without requiring a login). Other tools we’re looking at include:

• Mentimeter - licensed at a small scale, for use in TI programming
• WooClap - dumb, dumb name. Interesting software - we haven’t licensed it, but it’s something to watch.

AI

Microsoft Copilot⁴ is our officially-approved campus AI platform, but it is… rudimentary and limited. Other AI tools I’m looking at include:

• AI Applications that I actually use in practice

  • Claude - I’ve personally paid for a Claude Pro license for almost a year. It’s been extremely useful for tasks that benefit from RAG, and the text it creates is surprisingly effective. Especially, using it to convert pages of a paper notebook, whiteboards, post-its into markdown-formatted text. Amazing. I don’t use the Claude Code thing (yet?), but I use Claude a lot for summarizing and I have been seriously impressed by the Research mode.
  • ChatGPT - limited use because OpenAI is problematic, and the image generation is a distraction. I mostly use ChatGPT to make goofy images to share.

• AI for Teaching & Learning

  • SMARTIE - purpose-built course design tools by Soroush Sabbaghan
  • AI Teaching Assistant Pro (by Contact North - also see Tony Bates’ reviews of the 8 tools, eg. Faculty Assistant)

• Hosted AI Platforms to build stuff on

  • Azure AI and AI Foundry - possibly as a platform to build AI applications on, as part of our campus MS environment. It’s marketed as an easy AI development/deployment platform, but holy does it look like a complex beast that has the added benefits of further entrenching one vendor while also being rather expensive…
  • AnythingLLM - Docker containers for hosting any LLM. Might scale to something like a mini-campus AI service without needing Azure/AWS etc on the back end? If I had access to some server capacity, I’d try deploying this to see what might be possible.

• Local LLM platforms

  • Ollama - for running “open” LLMs locally on my macbook air.
  • Ollamac - an app that provides an interface on top of Ollama’s server. This is how I usually play around with local LLMs⁵.
  • Msty - an all-in-one local LLM interface that can do some RAG. I’ve played with the RAG, but honestly it’s just too slow to use. The RAG in Claude is outstanding, and this… isn’t.
  • Sidekick - an all-in-one local LLM interface that can do some RAG - looks interesting, but I haven’t tried it yet.

I think some of those local LLM tools can also take advantage of higher-end hardware like insane graphics cards and AI accelerators.

Anyway. Some of the stuff I’m tracking at the moment. YMMV. IANAL. etc.