Work

• extremely short work week, due to travel for Open Ed etc…
• Open Education 2014 was pretty amazing. The conference has changed pretty drastically over the years as it's gotten bigger. That's a good thing - but the vibe has definitely shifted from a fringe/evangelist gathering to a full-on Real Conference. Still lots of butts-in-seats, but lots of amazing stories and projects being shared.

• Reclaim Your Domain: UMW Hackathon - including some early work on a documentary project to capture the current edtech scene and frame it in ways other than the standard Silicon Valley VC Solutioneering narrative. More to come on that soon…
• visiting the amazing new Digital Convergence Center at UMW - an inspiring facility, but it's the team here that makes it so amazing. Can't wait to see what kinds of stuff they do together. Lots of interesting ideas that might be repurposed into a new Institute for Teaching and Learning cough
• Speaking of which, the crane was removed from the Taylor Institute construction site. Progress! Still a year away, but we're getting closer…

It's going to take a long, long time for me to work through all of my notes, photos, videos, etc… from this week. Wow.

The work-log format wasn't working, and was missing huge chunks of stuff through the week. So, being more fully inspired by Audrey Watters' and Clint Lalonde's week-in-review styles…

Work

• started placing orders for items to add to the fledgeling "technology lending library" that will be managed/provided by my group in the Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning. So far, it's a very small library, but I'll be adding things to it as I'm able, and offering it all out for instructors to explore/experiment/use. So far, we've got a Swivl robot camera mount, a couple of iPod Touches for recording video, a GoPro HERO4 Silver for HD video and wifi goodness, and some microphones. I'll be adding iPads and a MS Surface Pro 3 tablet in the next couple of weeks. More to come… I need to figure out a good process for making sure people can sign the stuff out and actually use it, and track what they do with it so we know what's needed…
• tweaking our D2L environment so faculties can ramp up their use of ePortfolios, now that email addresses aren't considered Super Secret Private Information after the switch to O365 and everyone activating their @ucalgary.ca addresses.
• I was volunteered to a new General Faculties Council subcommittee on learning spaces - the Campus and Facilities Development Subcommittee (CFDS). This should be a great group to be working with, and we're being asked to look at physical learning spaces across the university.
• working on a regular report to our Teaching and Learning Committee on the state of learning technologies at the UofC, and tracking our implementation of the Strategic Framework for Learning Technologies. I'll miss the TLC meeting next week because I'll be dodging bulletsattending Open Education in DC.

Read

• Explorable Explanations - essay on post-static-text modern ebook-type-thing, by Bret Victor
• HuffPo article on "hottest ed tech" (which seems rather similar to our own list of stuff to explore)
• UToday article about augmented reality in education, with 3D brains popping off the printed page.
• Another UToday article, about flipped classrooms, featuring Alice Woolley from Law.
• more on banning personal devices in class, and still not getting that this is about power and control more than it is about technology.
• I found my next bike.
• EdTech Magazine article on using Oculus Rift VR headsets to give tours of learning spaces. Yup. We'll be playing with that. Previsualizing renovations and new spaces? You bet. And some other ideas I'm working on…
• Stephen Downes linked to the Mozilla Badges wiki - lots of info and links there.
• 20 Linux system monitoring tools every sysadmin should know - could come in handy, when trying to figure out why a server is suddenly acting funky for no apparent reason cough.
• they landed a robot on a freaking comet
• a great presentation on Badges from an anonymous person from UC Davis
• sustainable technology via biodegradable materials?
• Amazon selling student work without consent? Unpossible! But check out the last paragraph - that's basically my take on TurnItIn and its ilk - it's not OK to force students to upload their work to a third party so it can be sold back to them (and others). It's the same model as academic journals taking the work of researchers, and then selling it back to them. But people don't see the problem there, either…
  

  "I am also concerned by the fact that some institutions are requiring that dissertations be run through a check against the Turnitin database before submission," Stommel wrote. "This creates a culture of suspicion around student work that I find directly hostile to the enterprise of education.... Ultimately, I'm not opposed to people choosing to sell their dissertations, but I am opposed to institutions requiring graduate students to upload their dissertations to corporate platforms like Proquest and Turnitin."

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• The EDU folks all met with the director of the Centre for Teaching and Learning at our Qatar campus (she was in town for the week, working out of our offices). We figured out lots of ways that we can collaborate.
• starting to order items to add to the “tech lending library” fleet, as well as stuff we can use to make videos etc…
• reverted the elearn.ucalgary.ca site to the old broken Drupal version because it was too jarring having some stuff in the awesome new WordPress knowledgebase, and other stuff in the old site. When we’ve had a chance to move all content to the new site, I’ll just throw the switch and be done with it all at once.
• started rebuilding the UofC D2L mobile apps in the DubLabs application framework¹. They’ll do the first build of the app (just working on CAS authentication now), and then I can take it from there. Should be a better mobile app that’s more than just a webkit wrapper. Hopefully.
• again, more stuff that needs more time to grow before it can be blogged.

UCalgary made the national news, with this segment titled “Calgary professor bans modern technology in his classroom”¹.

I really don’t know what to say about this. My gut reaction is something like “if they’re tuning out and checking Facebook in class, that’s data about how the class is going, and banning technology would just hide the symptom rather than actually fixing anything.”

Also, the prof still uses her own tech in every class, with laptop and projector etc… fired up. So, it’s not about technology on its own.

elearn.ucalgary.ca rebuild

The elearn.ucalgary.ca elearning support website accreted content over the years. It was long overdue for a major overhaul in order to make it useful to people who are looking for info. While that info was in the previos website, it had grown difficult to find stuff because the site had become a dumping ground of content - to the point that the elearning support folks couldn't find stuff on it, and didn't know what was there. It needed to be rebuilt to reflect how people look for support, and to make sure we keep it active and current. We had known it was needed for a long time, but didn't have the time until after the D2L migration was complete. It's complete now.

Badging

We're working on a couple of badging-related projects in the EDU. Kevin's looking into Mozilla's Open Badges platform/framework, and we're exploring what it means for a department/faculty/university to issue (and accept) badges as microcredentials. Lots of really great discussions on this. Looking forward to seeing what we come up with!

Committees and Reports and Bears Oh My!

Yeah. Making sausage. Mmm. Sausage.

Learning Object Repository

Seriously. I'm having flashbacks. But, we have faculties who need to be able to share files within the context of their online courses, and public websites aren't appropriate. So, LOR in D2L is being spun up. Thankfully, this time around, it's just a bunch of checkboxes instead of having to build a platform and implement IMS LOM and other fun bits. I've enabled a University-wide repository, where anyone can push content to share with the whole campus. We're also working with the faculty of Veterinary Medicine, to figure out a good way for their folks to share learning resources across courses in the program.

When we work with instructors, there are 3 general groupings, in terms of their comfort level and technology integration and innovation in their courses.

Reluctant

There is a small group that doesn't use much technology, doesn't integrate much in their teaching, and don't pursue any strategies that would be considered "innovative." From the outside, this group is often labelled as Luddites or dismissed as being laggards, but that is definitely not always the case. There are important innovations happening in this group, but they may not be visible to outsiders because they aren't using the shared language of silicon valley innovation. Not every innovation requires high technology, or even technology at all. We can learn much from the Reluctant adopters, because many of them are reluctant to adopt mainstream technology because it doesn't do what they need.

The Colesâ„¢ Notesâ„¢ version: a super-short week that felt like a super-long one.

Thanksgiving. And 45.

Thanksgiving on Monday. And I turned 45 on Tuesday, and I took the day off because why not. We had a quiet family extra-long-weekend, and spent some time out in the Elbow Falls area. Wow, did the 2013 flood ever rampage that area.

Open Education

Picked up the plane ticket. Assuming air travel is still a thing next month, I'll be in DC for Open Ed, and then Fredericksburg for the Reclaim thing on the weekend. Totally looking forward to both, and to reconnecting with the Open Ed crowd. It's been far too long.

A busy but quiet week.

Learning Outcomes in D2L

Working with the Schulich School of Engineering to figure out how to map the CEAB Graduate Attributes and supporting outcomes into D2L, so they can report back through the accrediting process about their curriculum and the students’ overall competency at The Attributes. Lots of struggling on my part, trying to work through the D2L documentation to figure out how to model the outcomes hierarchy, and then to figure out what kind of reporting and rollups can be generated. Hopefully, we’ll figure this out in time for them to use it for their faculty accreditation process.

I picked up a Swivl robot camera mount to kick off our “tech lending library” here in the EDU. It’s a pretty interesting piece of kit that will let anyone record a session without having to spend $100K retrofitting a classroom with PTZ cameras and switching boards. Slap this thing onto a desk or tripod, drop your iPhone (or iPad, or Android device) into the slot, plug the microphone cable into the mic jack on your device, and hit record. Done. It now automatically tracks the lanyard, which also has a built-in microphone that sends decent audio to the recording device. Nice.

Designing Libraries for the 21st Century

I attended the 3rd annual Designing Libraries for the 21st Century conference on campus. Library-design-folks from around North America (and Australia and the UK) came together to talk about what future libraries need to be. It was my first library conference, and I was struck by 3 things:

1. What an amazing, open, inviting group of people. It didn't matter who you were, or where you were from, people actively welcomed everyone in conversation.
2. Librarians are really thinking critically about what a "library" means, and coming at it from how to best support the activities of the people. Books? Necessary but not sufficient. They're doing some amazing design work on how to deconstruct and redesign library spaces.
3. They sure do like to sit and listen to people talk. The presentations were good, but many could have been ably replaced by MP3 files.

I have 10 pages of notes from this, and it's triggered and reinforced some plans I'm working on for our group in the EDU. Faculty Makerspaces? Hell yeah. Collaboration with the TFDL (and other library) folks? You bet. Technology lending fleet? Yup (already have some cool things to loan out for experimentation by profs). Field trips and site visits? Yeah! And more to come, once plans are worked out a bit more.

I'm taking a page from Clint Lalonde's book - he's been writing "week in review" posts for awhile, and it's been really interesting to see what he's up to. And of course there's the weekly recaps by Audrey Watters! I don't think I'll be able to recall that level of detail, but having some kind of record of at least the bigger things each week will be helpful to me. So…