Work

It was a tough week - 7 high-profile layoffs over in IT. One of them was my partner for the Blackboard-D2L migration. The project would have failed miserably without her guidance from the IT side. She'll be missed by many. Four of the layoffs were IT Partners - the team I was in for 3 years back when I did my tour of duty in IT. I know a lot of people, myself included, who were shocked by many of the names on the list.

I was asked what we needed to buy for instructors to explore integrating technology into their courses. Although we have many 3D printers on campus, I wanted one set up in the Educational Development Unit so that instructors could come and experiment with it in a safe place on neutral territory. I also wanted to expose people to an emerging technology so they would be able to incorporate it into their evolving understanding of literacy and of the types of things that are now possible. Simply having a 3D printer in the Unit would help even through simple exposure and osmosis. And, once people start to try things, there would be opportunities for cross-pollination and discussion beyond the simple technology. I also wanted to try something that wasn’t just replicating what was being done elsewhere on campus - we have some absolutely fantastic Maker spaces provided by our libraries, and several departments and faculties provide labs for student project development.

It seems like a small, unimportant thing, but the D2L homepage is probably the single most important web page for students. While they occasionally use the university website, and periodically use the my.ucalgary.ca portal (to sign up for courses and pay fees), D2L is where they spend a substantial chunk of their time as they work through their courses and programs. We'd launched D2L with a news-centric homepage, so that we could easily push notifications and support resources during the transition from Blackboard. It worked well for that, but became a dumping ground for accretion - links added, blurbs added, until it was a wall of text that everyone basically ignored.

I was at InfoComm 2015 this week, touring some vendors that have been recommended by our AV consultants for the Taylor Institute construction project, The Sextant Group. This was my first time at InfoComm, and I was kind of stunned at the sheer size of the trade show - and at how many similar products exist, with variations and overalaps. It's rare to see a product that is truly unique - and from what I saw, it comes down mostly to the overall experience and how people are able to actually use the tools, rather than the feature-list checkboxes. No surprise there. Sometimes, having the most features is not a good thing. It's having the right features (and not having the others). Here are my rough-ish notes about some of the vendors and products that we visited.

Long(ish) post, more after the break…

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Dee Fink, giving the opening keynote presentation at the 2015 University of Calgary Conference on Postsecondary Learning and Teaching. The theme of the 2015 conference is Design for Learning: Fostering Deep Learning, Engagement and Critical Thinking.

We hadn’t planned to record the keynote, but Dee asked us if we would, so we set something up that morning. The video is usable, but we’ll be producing higher quality recordings for future events…

This has been a project within the Technology Integration Group for the last several months - redesigning the elearn.ucalgary.ca support website so that it can be more useful to instructors and students who are integrating technology into their teaching and learning. The previous site was nearly a decade old, and had been designed by accretion - full of links, documents, links to documents, etc… but difficult to actually find things that are important. So, the redesign.

Work

It was a pretty epic week - we had our 2nd annual University of Calgary Teaching Awards ceremony on Tuesday - lots of really amazing instructors doing interesting things on campus. We’ll be looking for ways to showcase their (and others’) work over the coming year.

• refining the EDU’s strategic planning document - it’s coming along really nicely, but we need to figure out how to condense some of it without losing the meat.
• participated in a workshop on Public Pedagogy and Popular Culture in the Classroom - interesting discussion of the role of pop culture as more than just sprinkling superficial interestingness in a course - pop culture is pervasive and we are continuously learning and shaping our perception of the world through our interactions with it.
• finished the annual reviews for the team. best team ever. most of them.
• started reviewing the RFP responses for providing the AV equipment for the new Taylor Institute building. And realizing just how broken the RFP review process is, with checkboxes in spreadsheets rating administrative details rather than the actual qualities of the responses.
• Met with some folks who are interested in adopting badges.ucalgary.ca at a faculty level - lots of interesting ideas, and we will be working to enhance the campus badges platform before the fall semester (it’s currently being used in a small-scale pilot, but it looks like adoption is going to increase rather dramatically soon.¹
• provincial budget season. Alberta budget delivers lower than anticipated cuts to universities. Hooray for lower-than-anticipated cuts!

Read

• Jane Hart: The difference between social learning and social collaboration
• Stacy Greathouse: The Best Post Wiki: A Tool for Promoting Collaborative Learning and Higher-Order Thinking - interesting team-based approach to using wikis to enable ongoing collaboration in a course.
• WNYC: Being 12 - the year everything changes - having a 12-year-old at home, this is rather relevant…
• Bryan Jackson: The Quantified Self - on personal activity metrics as motivation to keep moving, and other things. I’ve been using that kind of personal data (and now fitbit and healthkit) to try to keep myself moving for a few years now. It works, mostly. But it also puts a lot of pressure to beat personal bests, etc, and I think that’s one of the things that led to me messing up my knee and foot. Also, getting old may have had something to do with that.
• Phil Hill: How Much Do College Students Actually Pay For Textbooks? - whatever the market will bear. One of the more important things we can do is support the meaningful development and adoption of open resources so students don’t have to bankrupt themselves to buy the latest edition of a corporate textbook. It’s a racket, and we can break it.
• Jim Groom: UMW Domains Data through Spring 2015 - some seriously impressive adoption of UMW Domains by undergrads at the University of Mary Washington.
• Quartz: Catholic priests are stirring up an epidemic of yogaphobia - we hit this a few years ago in The Boy™’s previous school. As chair of the school council, we brought in a yoga instructor to supplement phys ed activities. So kids could learn to bend and pretend to be trees and dinosaurs. But some parents freaked out because EVIL! SATAN! MUSLIM!² “If he empties his mind, SATAN WILL ENTER!” and the like. Insanity. It’d be nice if this kind of nonsense could be left out of public education. And yet, here we are again. Anyway.
• UV Letters: Not Invented Here - on the striking similarities between university missions and strategies. Isomorphism.

Other

I took a day off, to burn off vacation time that keeps building up. Finally went out on a decent bike ride to Cochrane and back. Ouch. I am so horribly out of shape. Lots of work to do.

Work

• boxes are still arriving for the Faculty Design Studio and Technology Lending Library. We need to get it all sorted, set up, and configured before we can open things up. Need to set up an inventory tracking system for the lending library items, so they don’t walk away without a trace. Once things are ready, both projects will have a home on the about-to-be-relaunched elearn.ucalgary.ca website
• annual review season. basically, best. job. ever. and with such an amazing team, too.
• continuing work on some classroom redesign projects - can’t wait to see these learning spaces take shape. We’ll have a lot of work to do as a unit to support instructors as they shift to more active learning strategies, and that’s going to be a lot of fun.
• shot another Instructor Intro Video™ - this one was completely different from any of the others I’ve done before. The instructor wanted to try something different, and read a storybook to share and model for her education students who are heading out to do their practicums. practica. whatever. The goal of these videos is to do fast intros for instructors, ideally in their offices/classrooms/wherever, rather than having a High Production Value™ professional marketing video. Seems to be working well so far.
• met with our privacy, copyright, and com/media folks to try to figure out the process for documenting consent to record and broadcast various types of sessions on campus - everything from public events such as convocation, to registrar classes, to workshops. Each has different requirements from policy standpoint, and it’s confusing about what’s needed in order to record them. Hopefully some clarification coming soon on the relevant websites.

Read

• Audrey Watters: (Why) Does Your Education Website Collect Information about Visitors? - we all need to think seriously about what we track, why we track it, what happens to that data, and who has access to it. And, when that data needs to be shredded. This stuff becomes Big Data Permanent Records for students if we’re not careful.
• Jared Stein: Why I Only Read Half the Things I’d Like To (and Remember Less than Half of Those I Do) - info vs. knowledge, in an info-glut world.
• Tony Bates: Rethinking learning spaces in a digital age: an example from Singapore
• Chris Nelson: Gaming reaches into far corners of academic world as U of C builds huge collection - on Dylan Tetrault and the awesome video games collection at UCalgary.
• SFU’s EdMedia Studio is open - sounds similar to what we’re planning with the Faculty Design Studio. Convergent evolution.

Lots of other stuff to read. Not sure if this part is worth doing a recap. There’s the “Shared Items” from my FeverËš RSS reader, and links.darcynorman.net for other stuff. Holy. This part takes forever to put together. May need to figure out a way to streamline this.

Work

More focus on learning spaces, both for the new Taylor Institute building, and for a classroom renovation in Haskayne. Lots of interesting options for flexible use of space. We are looking at using hardware as the core platform within a space, with software adding the actual interaction stuff - that model makes it much easier to switch things around, without having to have monolithic devices and appliances that try to do everything. Small pieces, loosely joined.

Work

• This week was largely about committees for adjudicating the University of Calgary Teaching Awards - I sat on 4 committees this year, with 3 of them convening this week. Yikes. Lots of incredible stuff being done on campus. I was especially impressed by how all of the student (undergrad and grad) reps handled the process - complete pros in every sense. Love it.¹
• Produced another “intro to my course” video, for Ellen Perrault, in Social Work - these are intended to be short, informal videos that put a face to online instructors.
• Went to a talk by Kevin Kee (from Brock), about the “200 million email problem” - turns out, it wasn’t about my inbox. Learned about the rapidly-increasing-by-orders-of-magnitude problem in digital humanities, as everything has become (is becoming) digital, and how important it is to shift from reading everything and summarizing, to filtering, prioritizing, aggregating, and building tools and networks to make sense of things that can’t possibly be understood by brute-force reading it all. Kee outlined some of the changes to research, writing, publishing and communicating scholarly works.
• The first meeting of the EDU Book Club - we’re reading Fink’s book Creating Significant Learning Experiences. I only had time to get through the first 16 pages before the meeting, but it’s already got me thinking about some tangential things.
• We picked up an iPhone 6 Plus to use as a test device, so Kevin can test the stuff he builds on the bigger screen. I’ll be using it as my phone, as well. First reactions: holy. it’s big. Also, that’s kind of great. I take back all of the snarky comments I’ve made to people with giantphones (Brad and Jason - you guys were right). And, this thing is probably the best camera I’ve ever used. As NK would say: aMAZing!

Read

• Quartz: The architectural theory that’s killing personal space at the office - we’re moving to a much more open/communal environment in The New Building™ - less personal space for many (including myself, as I’ll lose an actual office), but I’m looking forward to having everyone sharing space (with enough other spaces in the building for alone-time when needed).
• Audrey continues her guide to GitHub and Jekyll (I haven’t had a chance to catch up, though…)
• a systematic analysis of downtown donair vendors. for science. time to plan a field trip.
• Dr. Barclay is still working on bats and windfarms - back in the day, a friend of mine worked in his lab, and said that it’s not contact with the blades as much as the drastic changes in air pressure that kind of make the little critters explode. yikes. still working on that.
• MediaCore raised some cash.
• Audrey Watters: How Steve Jobs Brought the AppleII to the classroom - on how policy and lobbying does more to spread tech in education than tech or educators do.
• The Conversation: The words that make a successful grant application - developing and understanding new and novel systems.
• Mount Royal University’s updated strategic plan
• Jon Kruithof shares some code he uses to hack data reports in D2L
• Derek Bruff posted an interesting article and presentation on learning spaces at Vanderbilt.
• Campus Technology: How course web design impacts student engagement

Other

• Spock rode a bicycle
• We’re trying a “screen” purge at home. No screens, except for school and work stuff (and we slipped and had a movie night last night). I’m surprising loving it. We went about 3 days with total screen blackout at home, and I was really surprised at how quiet it was at home, and at how much more we all talked. OK - after hitting Publish, this laptop gets put away again.

Only 1 ski day this week - I took Wednesday off to head back out to Nakiska. The silver chair was out of order, and the other side of the mountain was split up by race training and fences running across it. Some actual powder, but not many ways to actually get to it. Still, not a bad way to spend a morning.

As an institution, we design learning spaces and select learning technologies, and implement them in ways to make them available to enable and enhance student learning. But, the design decisions made in the development, selection, and implementation of these resources shape what is perceived to be possible. The resources may not be technically restrictive to specific usage patterns and pedagogies, but through design decisions there are paths of least resistance that will naturally be found.

Work

• helping to refine the technology/space plan for the new building. learning lots about the intersection between space and technology - blog post on that brewing. hopefully, time to write it next week.
• head down reading nominations for this year’s University of Calgary Teaching Awards - I get to sit on 3 committees, so there’s lots of reading involved. lots of amazing work on campus.
• piloted the use of Swivl robot camera mounts to record lessons as part of the Instructional Skills Workshop. Previously, they’d used huge, cumbersome, complicated video recording carts. Now, they use an iPod Touch to record good quality video, on an automated robot tracking camera mount. Worked great, and we learned a few things to improve the process.
• working on plans to spin up a new Faculty Design Studio in the office - a place where instructors can come to make stuff to use in their courses. Still early days - haven’t even placed the orders for stuff yet (that’s the plan for the next few days) - can’t wait to get this set up and let people book it to make great stuff to support student learning.
• I’m borrowing a Dell Latitude 7000 2-in-1 tablet/laptop, as a possible alternative to Surface Pro 3. It’s supported by IT, which means it should Just Work™. Early reactions, with about an hour of play time, is that it’s a total turd. Crappy as a laptop. Crappy as a tablet. But combined? Crappy 2-in-1. With Windows 8 Enterprise, so much of the touch-enabled stuff from Pro was turned off by default. I’ll put some more time into trying to convince it to suck less. So far, not impressed. Hard to tell, right?
• my team went on a tour of learning spaces on campus, led by the director of Campus Planning. Saw some horrible and embarrassing spaces, and some absolutely amazing and inspiring ones. We don’t often get into some of these spaces, because there are classes using them (hence the tour during Reading Week). So, the tour was extremely helpful, as we’re working to come up with plans to improve learning spaces across all campuses.

Read

• The Online Photographer: How to improve your photography - practice.
• Michael Feldstein - Wanted - a theory of change

If there is a way forward, that is it. We need to try things together and see how they work. We need to apply our theories and find out what breaks (and what works better than we could have possibly imagined). We need to see if what works for us will also work for others. Anyone who does that in education is a hero of mine.

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