Work

This is an important project, led by my team in the Taylor Institute (go, Ykje and Samara!). We're all looking forward to seeing what the grant recipients come up with this year.

OER grants fall under two streams: "adopt and adapt" and "create." The former category consists of projects in which grant-holders redevelop existing materials for their OERs, whereas the latter involves the inception of an OER from the foundation up.

Read More

I'm hoping to add a grad or senior undergrad student to the Learning Technologies Group. This position will work closely with other members of the team, and will get to work directly with instructors who are teaching face-to-face, blended, or online courses as they integrate various learning technologies. Like consulting and collaborating with instructors who are doing cool things in their courses? Like working with people from all 13 faculties and with people in key departments across campus (including, of course, the Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning, Information Technologies, and Libraries and Cultural Resources)?

Open Classroom Week is one of the programs that have grown over the last few years - instructors volunteer to open their classrooms to other instructors to come and observe how they teach, so they can see different kinds of learning activities and teaching strategies in practice.

As its name suggests, Open Classroom Week (OCW) is all about openness. By allowing instructors to observe and be observed by one another in active classroom environments, this event presents participants with the opportunity to engage with, and learn from, one another's classroom strategies, disciplinary specialties and technological teaching applications. At the end of Open Classroom Week, both observed instructors and observers gather for a themed conversation that encourages reflection and cross-faculty insight.

Read More

I'm taking a graduate computer science course on information visualization. It's going to be an incredible experience, exploring how to make sense of data sets and use spatial/symbolic/textural/other means to represent various aspects of the data.

A huge part of the course is going to be keeping a daily "visual journal" of things we see, as they relate to information and visualization and design. Sounds something like a photoblog. So, I volunteered to set up a class blog for us all to post stuff together, to see what happens. Of course, I'm using UCalgaryBlogs. WordPress is pretty good for this kind of thing. I'm using the Baskerville theme because it's nicely visual - almost pinterest-y. And, a few plugins:

We threw the switch this morning, launching the OER pilot program. It's a small-scale initiative, intended to support the integration of open textbooks into 10 courses within the 2017/2018 academic year. There are two branches - faculty advocacy, and project implementation. The implementation is being let by my team at the Taylor Institute, working with the University of Calgary's OER Faculty Advocate and his team.

We'll be hiring a graduate student to act as a research assistant for the program, who will help coordinate the various projects - hopefully 10 concurrent projects with instructors working with up to 20 undergraduate students to identify good candidate resources for use in a course, which will be reviewed by a graduate student (and the instructor) before being integrated into the course.

The Taylor Institute’s AV systems were designed to be incredibly flexible, able to adapt to changing requirements between (or even during) classes. That meant shifting from hardwired analog systems to fully digital media management to allow for software-controlled mixing and switching of signals.

What people assume, when they walk into a classroom, is something basically like this:

You show up, plug your laptop in, and it sends stuff to the projector. And other stuff to the speakers. Simple.

Dr. Märtensson's research formed much of the foundation of the plan for the Taylor Institute. Specifically, the macro/meso/micro layers within an organization, and working with each layer in various ways to draw people into the community. Her keynote at the 2017 University of Calgary Conference on Post-secondary Learning and Teaching was great, and nicely connected many of the threads of the conference.

This video is a great intro to our new College of Discovery, Creativity, and Innovation (CDCI), within the Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning. The Global Challenges course that was offered this year was an incredible and inspiring experience, where first-year students came together in an interdisciplinary research context to explore what it would take to feed 9 billion people.

We tried something new (for us) this year, and had an Ignite session during the Taylor Institute's annual conference. It was a risk, as we had never hosted that format before, and none of the 6 presenters (for 5 presentations) had ever done an Ignite. Nevertheless, we persisted.

I got talked into being the (humble) host for the event, introducing the format and acting as emcee between presenters. Each presenter provided their slides earlier in the week, so I had time to smush them all into one master presentation file and apply the automatic slide progression for their decks.

We've been in the Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning's new building for almost a year now, and it's time to step back and reflect on what we've learned through that first year.

The building itself is a marvel of architecture, design and technology. We're extremely fortunate to be able to go to work there every day. It's been a constant source of inspiration - not the building, but the amazing things that instructors, students and staff are doing within it, together, on a regular basis.

Our annual conference is coming up quickly - the call for proposals is open now (closing Feb 3, 2017 - less than a month away!). This is one of the things I'm most proud about. This conference has grown from a small, mostly-internal thing, to an incredible and deep conference with an amazing community vibe. It's now drawing participants and presenters from across Canada, and has a surprising number of international participants as well. This has become my one must-go-to event each year (which is handy, considering I work in the building and help to organize and run it) - and I would easily rank it as one of the top conference experiences I've ever had.

This is cool. Karen is teaching one of her Victorian literature classes in the Taylor Institute, and redesigned the course to take advantage of the flexible space and collaborative technologies. Awesome. I can't wait to hear more about how it goes (as well as learning from the 20 other instructors and ~2000 students working in the TI this semester, and even more queued up for W2017!)

This semester I decided to do something a little different. I have the privilege of teaching my Victorian literature class in one of the fancy new classrooms at the Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning at the University of Calgary. My 40-person class has six big touch screens, and as a result we've been able to do a lot of hands-on work in small groups leading into discussions with the whole class.

Read More