The digital platform has already strolled seductively onto campus wearing a lanyard. If we want to preserve universities as places where truth and qua...

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The tools are not the problem; their governance is. Plumbing is wonderful; we just do not want it running the city council. Digital platforms carry messages and store work; they should not decide what a good message is or what good work looks like. The difference is subtle in code and obvious in outcome: does the platform report to the curriculum, or does the curriculum adapt to the platform’s reporting features?

and

Use platforms to remove friction in relation to logistics – registration, deadlines, submission – and conserve friction where it produces learning – argument, practice, revision. In this sense, fairness requires difficulty: it gives every student a chance to acquire what cannot be bought as a service.

We offer uniquely designed mismatched socks, designed in Canada and ethically made in Italy. Support our Canadian small business and add a playful touch to your wardrobe. Explore our vibrant collection and find your perfect pair of fun, high-quality socks today.

Claude Code skill that removes signs of AI-generated writing from text - blader/humanizer

A plugin for Claude that uses the wikipedia "smells like AI" page to teach Claude how to generate text that gets around that…

This is a list of writing and formatting conventions typical of AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, with real examples taken from Wikipedia articles and drafts. It is a field guide to help detect undisclosed AI-generated content on Wikipedia: while some of the signs may be broadly applicable, some may not apply in a non-Wikipedia context. Not all text featuring these indicators is AI-generated, as the large language models that power AI chatbots are trained on human writing, including the writing of Wikipedia editors.

This seems problematic - they say that wikipedia submissions that focus on notability and media are obvious signs of AI writing, but wikipedia edits require both notability and references to media…

Talent for Tomorrow provides a framework to guide people-related decisions and actions across the university so they are consistent, intentional, and future-focused.

The Two Loops Theory of organizational change is a model of change that tries to describe nonlinear emergent processes of change within complex organizations. It is a model inspired by looking at the growth and decline cycle of living systems.

Margaret Wheatley & Deborah Frieze from The Berkana Institute first pointed to this model in their paper entitled “Using Emergence to Take Social Innovation to Scale.” Frieze and Wheatley demonstrated a key dynamic at the heart of every organization transformation, how "as one system culminates and starts to collapse, isolated alternatives slowly begin to arise and give way to the new."

This study examined Canadian undergraduates’ perspectives on GenAI as a learning support across three phases of the lecture cycle: before, during, and after class. Using a mixed-format survey (N = 296), we analyzed 118 student-written responses through Mayring’s qualitative content analysis and mapped themes onto Zimmerman’s model of Self-Regulated Learning (SRL). Results indicate that students see GenAI as a versatile cognitive partner—supporting preparation before lectures, engagement and clarification during, and review and assignment help afterward. Students also expressed critical concerns about overreliance, accuracy, academic integrity, and data privacy, which align with vulnerabilities in SRL processes such as self-control, self-evaluation, and help-seeking

Resilience isn't built by avoiding failure.

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Failure is going to happen.
Collapse, however, is optional.

Postsecondary institutions increasingly recognize the importance of designing educational experiences that reflect students' diverse identities and life experiences. As online course enrollment continues to rise, it becomes crucial to address how course design can effectively support this diverse student population. Traditional course designs often fail to accommodate the broad spectrum of student backgrounds, resulting in barriers to success and inclusion. In response to this gap, we propose a framework for online course design that prioritizes inclusivity, flexibility, and ethical considerations. This three-layer framework systematically integrates Universal Design for Learning principles with academic integrity values and Indigenous academic integrity principles, providing educators with practical guidance to create ethical and supportive online learning environments that address learner agency while maintaining academic standards.

Since July 2020, ASU’s University Technology Office has embarked on a journey to become a more agile and antifragile organization. This internal digital transformation has been given the moniker “UTO 2.1” (for 2021!), and together we have shaped the organization into a rapidly reconfigurable and entrepreneurial model that better meets the needs of our community. 

The SAMR model needs a second axis to account for AI’s diverse impacts on learning, emphasizing both positive and negative outcomes.

Since 2016, humanity has added 2.7 billion people to the internet.[2] Nearly three billion new potential readers, learners, contributors. In that same period, our page views declined. Not stagnated. Declined. The world has never been more online, and yet, fewer and fewer people are using our projects.

Many post-secondary institutions have implemented students-as-partners frameworks to redefine traditional educational practices and value students as co-creators of knowledge. The aim of this study was to investigate the degree to which students are working as partners and co-creators of knowledge with faculty and staff, rather than replicating traditional hierarchies. We undertook a multi-methods study consisting of a secondary analysis and a survey of one cohort of the student-as-partners program at McMaster University, as well as qualitative interviews. In the responses, we found that some language practices replicated traditional hierarchies, which was reflected in the degree to which partners contributed intellectually to the work undertaken. However, we also found that meaningful shifts in practices occurred over the course of working collaboratively to foster more equitable partnerships. We found that faculty and staff bore the responsibility of sharing power with student partners, but the blurring of professional and personal boundaries complicated the ethics of partnership.

Imagining SoTL: Selections from the Banff Symposium, an open access publication, stems from the annual Symposium for Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), hosted by Mount Royal University’s Institute for SoTL.

Lessons learned from 14 years of engineering at Google, focusing on what truly matters beyond just writing great code.

They're not bad lessons - and many translate outside of Google to other kinds of work/projects/teams.

Most problems aren’t individual failures, they’re system failures

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The more you pay attention to the broader system, the more obvious these patterns become. You start noticing the upstream decisions behind downstream problems. You recognize the behaviors you used to interpret as performance issues for what they really are: responses to the structure around them. And you gain a whole new set of levers to make the team better that have nothing to do with pushing harder on individuals.

This paper aims to address research gaps around third party data flows in education by investigating governance practices in higher education with respect to learning management system (LMS) ecosystems. The authors answer the following research questions: how are LMS and plugins/learning tools interoperability (LTI) governed at higher education institutions? Who is responsible for data governance activities around LMS? What is the current state of governance over LMS? What is the current state of governance over LMS plugins, LTI, etc.? What governance issues are unresolved in this domain? How are issues of privacy and governance regarding LMS and plugins/LTIs documented or communicated to the public and/or community members?

a segment of a keynote presentation at the 2025 ii'taa'poh'to'p community update

Video of the community session, featuring a keynote by Niigaan Sinclair

A connector for Claude Desktop to read and search an Obsidian vault. - smithery-ai/mcp-obsidian

Think about the essential capacities in your life & work. These can be most anything - the capacity to treat patients, or build houses, or host community talking circles. Now think about the need for that capacity. The number of patients, the people who need housing, the need for holding space.

How do we talk about teaching and learning in higher education, and what it means to be an effective university educator?

The NWT's Aurora College suspended in-person and online classes for the week of January 5-9 after a cyber attack over the holidays. Various systems are down.

People who see themselves as leaders often step into leadership roles — but are they any good at it?

(a reading for our next TI Supervisors meeting)

TestDisk is a free and open source data recovery software tool designed to recover lost partition and unerase deleted files.

works on the command line, and can recover deleted photos from a DJI Neo drone, for example.

Aphantasia as a Missing Design Variable. Or, why I can't use Canvas

This was startling information. He knew, of course, that people talked about “picturing” or “visualizing,” but he had always taken this to be just a metaphorical way of saying “thinking.” Now it appeared that, in some incomprehensible sense, people meant these words literally. And then there was the notion of using those mental images to revisit a memory. It was an astonishing idea. Was it possible that this was a thing that people other than Bywater could do? Bywater had written about it quite casually, as though he took it for granted. Nick asked some people he knew, and all of them seemed to be able to do it.

I can’t visualise anything. My “mind’s eye” is blind. If I want to picture an apple, I can’t. Nor can I evoke the view outside my front door at home in London — I have to open the door and look at it. If I want to calm myself by picturing a favourite view in the Scottish Highlands, where I regularly go on holiday, I cannot.

Only after listening to Curious Cases did I realise I have aphantasia, which is estimated to affect 1 to 5 per cent of the population. Having never questioned whether my brain function was typical or not, it was shocking, at the age of 53, to discover that this substantially different way of interacting with the world applied to me.

A collection of small, low stakes and low effort tools. No logins, no registration, no data collection.

Parachute is a seamless backup utility for iCloud Photos and iCloud Drive. Keep your memories and documents safe by backing them up to your own storage.

TRU’s Learning Technology & Innovation (LT&I) team strives to provide learner-centered, sustainable technology tools and support for TRU’s diverse community. We are dedicated to enhancing the quality and flexibility of education, research, and scholarship through effective and inclusive technological practices.

LLMs and AI are big enough that I can’t be pro or con. I like certain potentials. I could have some real fun with aspects of these massively different technologies. I could also worry about so many things. I think Gardner’s old bag of gold analogy applies in lots of ways. Unfortunately, what we have learned is that if there is a bag of gold, capitalism will sell you plenty of high-priced, addictive, radioactive-lead-asbestos, gold-like™ items created by destroying the most beautiful areas in the world using slave labor. Soon no one will remember what real gold even looks like or that we didn’t have to do it this way or that most of the problems were created by pure greed. The companies will then charge us for rehab.

This pressure is even more pronounced in service-driven work, where being responsive is part of the relationship. When clients depend on you, and you depend on each other, it’s easy for the expectation of availability to grow. While quick back-and-forth exchanges can spark a moment of insight, most ideas need a quieter runway to take shape

How users react to delays in a user interface, whether website or application. The 3 main response time limits are determined by human perceptual abilities.

On March 27, 1964, a converted liberty ship named the SS Chena brought a shipment of supplies to the port of Valdez, Alaska. Valdez, which I need you to know is pronounced “valDEEZ,” sits at the end of a fjord—a narrow inlet carved by a glacier.

But the use of fonts on that article is bad enough to make me question the judgment of the author more generally…

3 live cameras at UCalgary's Rothney Astrophysical Observatory south of Calgary

Knock Knock is a suite of tools used to test and evaluate any device that connects to the internet. Knock Knock is designed to start simple, and support deeper analysis as needed.

A tool for visualizing monthly subscription costs.

Lunch skates

A counter-argument to recent but common claims

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In short, we believe the LMS is not dead or even dying; it is as crucial as ever, even if the product category needs to improve and better serve colleges and universities

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a set of digital tools that can perform functions traditionally limited to human capability, for example, reviewing, summarizing, translating, and composing. In the last few years, there has been widespread discussion and experimentation for its application in education. Consequently, a contentious ethical debate has arisen around its appropriateness for educational functions and how such functionality may be ethically applied. Some argue that the ethical use of artificial intelligence in education can be defined through the use of a set of commonly held principles, such as sustainability, accountability, and fairness. This article challenges that presumption. A list of nine such principles is offered. Each principle is considered in detail and analysed to identify underlying assumptions, points of conflict, and other ethical considerations. It is argued that much of what is offered as a set of ethical considerations reflects, in fact, a political argument and perspective. There is thus no set of ethical principles that can be regarded as a consensus opinion on the ethics of the use of artificial intelligence in education.

the only web-visible version of this is the PDF that was attached to the GFC meeting that approved the framework.

A new free e-course on climate change impacts and solutions in Southern Alberta. Discover videos, tools and resources on climate action.

I’ve started using the term HTML tools to refer to HTML applications that I’ve been building which combine HTML, JavaScript, and CSS in a single file and use them to provide useful functionality. I have built over 150 of these in the past two years, almost all of them written by LLMs. This article presents a collection of useful patterns I’ve discovered along the way.

Olares One is a local desktop AI powerhouse designed for uncompromising AI performance. It features an NVIDIA 5090 Mobile GPU, an Intel Core U9 275HX processor, and 96GB of RAM, offering one-click app development and enterprise-grade security. The device runs on an open-source, multi-layered OS that allows users to reclaim their data and provides a streamlined, familiar desktop experience. Olares One aims to empower users to own their AI infrastructure, eliminating monthly fees associated with cloud-based AI services. It supports running Windows applications and Steam games, and offers "anywhere access" through Olares ID. The project is currently crowdfunding on Kickstarter, having already surpassed its initial goal significantly. The campaign emphasizes the device's power, security, and cost-effectiveness compared to renting AI services. Olares One is positioned as a solution for users seeking to unleash their AI creativity and productivity locally and privately. The project highlights its "industrial-grade AI agent infrastructure" and provides detailed specifications, including what's in the box and after-sales support. The team acknowledges the risks and challenges inherent in crowdfunding but expresses confidence in their production experience.

A realtime acoustic bird classification system for the Raspberry Pi 5, 4B 3B+ 0W2 and more. Built on the TFLite version of BirdNET. - Nachtzuster/BirdNET-Pi

Several interesting-sounding articles that I won't have time to read. Course design, games, AI-in-course-design-games, etc.

FIIO’s new sub brand —— SNOWSKY The brand is focused on being youthful, fashionable, unique and fun, while also bringing the traditional FIIO hallmarks of quality and great user experience. RETRO NANO, SNOWSKY’s debut product, is inspired by vintage tape recorders but also packs much modern tech. It is not just an eye-catching Bluetooth DAC and amp - it is a musical device toy that you can explore and relive the music of any era. The ECHO MINI is not only the return of FIIO’s pure music player but also SNOWSKY’s first music player. From industrial to UI designs, it brings us fun and great playability. Plus the classical button operation, we can once experience the familiar notes of the past.

We’re excited to announce the general availability of immersive events in Teams! This milestone brings 3D event experiences natively into Teams, making it...

Thankfully, this advanced avatar technology doesn't include digital feet…

well, this is a fun announcement. Disney just partnered with OpenAI. "Partnered." So that Disney characters such as The Mouse, MCU superheroes/villains, etc. can be included in OpenAI's Sora video slop generator. Fun! Who needs actors anyway?

As part of this new, three-year licensing agreement, Sora will be able to generate short, user-prompted social videos that can be viewed and shared by fans, drawing from a set of more than 200 animated, masked and creature characters from Disney, Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars, including costumes, props, vehicles, and iconic environments. In addition, ChatGPT Images will be able to turn a few words by the user into fully generated images in seconds, drawing from the same intellectual property.

It says, also, that "The agreement does not include any talent likenesses or voices", so, thankfully, nobody will think to recreate any of those through creative prompting or whatever.