Asides

Now that I’m back on the photo-a-day 365photos bandwagon again (thanks to a nudge from Alan), I realize those daily photos are cluttering up the main RSS feed for this site. 365 photo posts in a year, maybe half a dozen blog posts? Not a great signal:noise ratio. So… I’m removing photos from the main RSS feed for now. If, for some reason, you want to follow the photos via RSS, there’s a direct RSS feed for them. Read More

Kara Loy and Rachel Huh just published this module on Critical Reflection (with design by Jessica Snow and Alix Redmond from our comms team)

Natasha Kenny and Gavan Watson just published a couple of great posts on active learning classroom spaces: Gavan Watson: Guiding the planning, design and use of active learning classrooms (part 1) Natasha Kenny: Five approaches to guide the planning, design, and use of active learning classroom spaces (part 2) The 5 approaches: Collaboration Community Flexibility Transparency Access Both posts are chock full of linky goodness. And, I’m glad they’re both blogging. Read More

Going through feeds in NetNewsWire resulted in a few open tabs for deeper reading today. ars Drama in iRacing as IndyCar champ wrecks F1 star on purpose - crazy. no live sports, so race teams are competing in iRacing to keep in practice. And, without the expense of blowing up a multimillion dollar car in a road rage incident, things are going off the rails. Nine years ago, SpaceX called its shot on capturing the flag - Musk is a wreckless fratboy douchebag, but I hope SpaceX pulls this off. Read More

In our Learning Technologies Advisory Committee Processes Working Group meeting this week, we were discussing how instructors access new tools, or enable existing tools. Much of the discussion was about communication, rather than the processes directly - instructors aren’t aware of the tools that are available, or what they can be used for, so they ask for new tools. We have several applications available as the core online learning platforms at UCalgary: Read More

Keegan Long-Wheeler posted a tweet yesterday, and it got a lot of interesting responses: 🧐I'm searching for examples of PD programs/sites aimed at "teaching instructors about online learning." (Any focus: pedagogy, visual design, etc.) 🧐 ❓Know any good examples? Your links are much appreciated! ❤️#SquadGoalsNetwork #Pedagome #onlinelearning #CanvasLMS @OLCToday — Keegan🦔Long-Wheeler (@KeeganSLW) January 27, 2020 Some of the links provided in response: Websites / Guides SUNY: Teaching Online website Charles Sturt University: Strategies website Portland Community College: Instructional Best Practices Portland Community College: Tutorials and technical support Florida International University: Teaching Online Guide Georgian College Center for Teaching and Learning: Online workshops and modules University College London ABC LD Toolkit Australasian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education: Special Interest Groups Cathy Moore Yale University’s Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning: Teaching Online at Yale Courses Northwestern University: Visual Design in Canvas course Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts: Online Teaching Certification (OTC) Online Network of Educators @ONE’s Course List Open (text)books Matt Crosslin et al. Read More

Shoshana Zuboff, in the New York Times: We thought that we search Google, but now we understand that Google searches us. We assumed that we use social media to connect, but we learned that connection is how social media uses us. We barely questioned why our new TV or mattress had a privacy policy , but we’ve begun to understand that “privacy” policies are actually surveillance policies. and Surveillance capitalists are fast because they seek neither genuine consent nor consensus. Read More

Trying a photo publishing workflow to Hugo using iOS Shortcuts app. It’s almost working, but still a little funky. I still can’t get it to save the Hugo file as a .md file rather than .txt, so I’ll need to rename the file before publishing. But, still. Handy. This Shortcut currently lets me pick a photo from Photos, resizes it to 750px wide for use on my blog, saves it where I tell it (but this could be done better…) then asks me for a title and description before generating a Hugo file entry with proper frontmatter. Read More

Brenna’s Digital Detox post about algorithms got me thinking about where algorithms and opaque magic bits of code intermediate what I see online. It’s definitely less than it has been, since unplugging from Facebook and reducing my Google exposure. But, still. These are the ones I’m aware of… (I’ll update this as I think of stuff and/or realize something’s managed by The Algorithm™) Algorithmic stuff Amazon - searches and listings are based on what they think I’ll buy. Read More

John Gruber: I really feel as a culture we are barely coming to grips with the power of YouTube, Facebook, and to some degree, Twitter, as means of spreading mass-market disinformation. The pre-internet era of TV, print, and radio was far from a panacea. But it just wasn’t feasible in those days for a disinformation campaign — whether from crackpots who believe the nonsense, corporate industry groups, or foreign governments — to get in front of the eyes of millions of people. Read More