I’ve been using a Surface Pro 3 as my mobile tablet-shaped device for 3 (non-consecutive) weeks. If I’m going to be able to work with instructors who use various bits of tech, I need to be able to speak from experience. That means I need to use more than just Apple devices - so, my time with a Surface. Also, I used an Android phone (Nexus 5) as my phone-shaped-device while traveling to DC last year for Open Ed 2014.¹

Work

• Lots of meetings and manager stuff.
• Nancy Chick appointed Taylor Institute's first academic director. Awesome! Can't wait for her to get moved in.

Read

• George Veletsianos: Open practices in the absence of institutional policies
• Ben Stern: Four Smart Tips for Instructional Tech Specialists
• Maryellen Weimer: Group Work: What Do Students Want from Their Teammates?
• Head et al: Lifelong learning in the digital age: A content analysis of recent research on participation
• Daniel Christian: Will micro-credentialing be an example of the use of big data in education and training? (maybe?)
• Scott Haselwood: Six Ingredients for Sweetening your Flipped Classroom Recipe - another list blog post. ugh. but some interesting bits in it regardless.
• John Gruber: Dazzling Results
  

  conventional disruption theory does not apply to consumer-driven markets in which outstanding design and integration (as opposed to modularity) can drive demand.

  Read More

Work

• The EDU had the second retreat to work on vision/mission/strategy for the unit. Lots of great ideas on how we can have high impact across campus.
• Launch of the UofC Badges platform for use in a pilot project for professional development programs in the EDU. (I have a profile on the platform, but haven't hooked up a Mozilla Backpack yet)
• an update on the pilot/relaunch of the UofC elearning support site
• Werklund School of Education's IDEAS Conference is coming up, April 30-May 1, 2015.
• Cumming School of Medicine's Health and Medical Education Scholarship Symposium is coming up, Feb. 17, 2015.

Read

• Karen Walrond on the necessity of practice
• UofC researcher Margaret Clarke, on the growing number of autism cases
• via Ars Technica, the Crash Override Network to provide community support for anti-harassment online.
• Gardner Campbell writes about Sweet Spots and pulls together some interesting reading on the topic.
• Louise Katz on the commodification of creativity in higher education
• Gardner Campbell on the relationship between play and practice
• Ben Thompson on the end of trickle-down technology (reminded me of my technology adopters curve )
• Giulia Forsythe: should faculty provide students with lecture notes? - sounds great, but does it turn teaching into a content production mill? are there better ways to record and/or share notes for a class, than having the instructor produce the canonical and static set of notes for students?
• Mike Caulfield: Rethinking wiki lifecycle: sites as bounded conversations. Federated Wiki feels right, but I'm still not sure I totally get it.
• Audrey Watters: a hippocratic oath for ed-tech - what would this look like? I love the idea, but because of the individualized nature of the field, I think we all need to craft our own code of ethics.
• Scott McLeod: avoiding worst-case technology scenarios through mindfulness (linking to an article by Mike Crowley
• Tom Woodward: It could be beautiful: aspirational vs. operational edtech
• Cole Camplese: teaching (and learning)
• Irfaan Sorathia on online tools for making affinity diagrams
• Mike Caulfield: "Users" - false hierarchies of creators and the impact of creatorism
  

  To coders, people who don't code are not makers. But we keep punching all the way down. Published writers kick bloggers. Bloggers see themselves as creating on a level that readers don't. It's not just about your job title, it's about your internal taxonomy.

  Read More

Work

• planning what the EDU needs to find out regarding physical learning spaces across campus - formal, informal, f2f, blended, online. We need to build an inventory of what we have, how it’s used, what people would like to do, and where gaps exist. Then, we can smush that together with scholarship of teaching and learning, institutional priorities, funding, etc… to help plan things.
• starting to plan a campus engagement regarding lecture capture - I hate the phrase lecture capture, so I’ll eventually be calling it something else. Lecture Capture implies that all an instructor (it’s always an Instructor) needs to do is press “record” (or, better yet, have it automatically scheduled so they don’t even have to do that), and they are magically innovating and engaging as online rock stars. No. That’s uninteresting. It’s part of it - the ability to record classroom presentations can be useful, but I’d rather frame the whole thing as a media production platform that lets anyone (instructors, students, staff, others) record, publish and share their stuff without needing multi-thousand-dollar appliances or high end equipment. We’ll be working with people across campus to find out how to do that.
• I’m trying to find out if students use the D2L “Content Browser” widget, which is handy, but doesn’t show all content so things get lost (if a prof posts a syllabus to the Overview section, which seems like the best place to do that, the widget can’t display it, and students then think the prof hasn’t posted the syllabus at all. Hilarity ensues.) D2L: the Content Browser widget in 10.3.x needs some serious love. It’s incomplete and therefore confusing or worse.
• Still working with Dublabs on the next version of the D2L mobile app. It’s getting closer, but isn’t quite where it needs to be in order to replace the version that’s live now. Currently, the new version of the app can’t display content in a course. Which is kind of important.
• Thanks to Tim Owens, I’m playing around with Sandstorm.io - this has HUGE potential to let folks spin up tools as needed to support teaching and learning (and other important stuff). Jim Groom writes about it. Unfortunately, our campus runs an older version of Linux, so we can’t readily deploy it ourselves. Looking into better options for my group to be able to spin stuff up without hitting that obstacle.

Read

• Tony Bates: Identifying the unique educational characteristics of a medium for online learning
• via Jason Kottke: 80s tech and Back to the Future - got me thinking about the interaction patterns of technology and implications for course design and student centrism. 80s tech was linear - you dropped in a cassette, and pressed play. you could scrub forward or backward, but the recording was fixed. 00s tech is nonlinear - anyone (not just teachers or producers) can assemble references to any number of things of various formats, which can be accessed in any order or reassembled. What does that do to how we think of media and learning?
• Audrey Watters: Openness and Ownership: Who Owns School Work? - this is something we think about a lot, when instructors ask us about a campus anti-plagiarism tool. We don’t have one, largely because the entire concept is based on violating students’ ownership of their work, which is counter to what we are about as an institution of higher learning (and counter to what they’re asking for regarding anti-plagiarism, ironically).
• Jon Kruithof: Publisher integrations with D2L - I spent some time working with D2L and Pearson to get their stuff integrated over the last couple of weeks. Yeah.
• Isabelle Barrette-Ng does some really great work with her large classes at UCalgary
• Cyclelicious: Fast after 50 - I’m neither a racer nor over 50, but some good tips on not letting age kick you in the ass. As it is currently doing. I need to work on that… Also, I need to pick up a copy of this book.
• via Stephen Downes, BCCampus: Building better curriculum through Universal Design for Learning - we’re focusing more on space design (physical/blended/online, so UDL is an interesting/important framework to approach that
• via Jason Kottke: DFW’s 2005 Kenyon College commencement speech. Watch it. A few times. I hadn’t read the speech, or seen this video interpretation of it, but have been trying to push myself to think more positively about people and situations, rather than just being about ME ME ME I AM THE CENTRE OF THE UNIVERSE. As it is easy to do. Have a nice day.
• Audrey Watters: What do we mean by Open Education?
• Tony Bates: Seeking the unique pedagogical characteristics of audio
• My Uni Trade - UofC students got fed up with the crappy return on their textbooks when the resell them through the bookstore. So they built a website to do it better. Awesome. Now, if only they didn’t have to spend a couple thousand on books each year in the first place…
• New York Times: Silicon Valley Turns Its Eye to Education. The article suggests that education is the last field to realize that the internet exists. Which is total BS, because the internet was invented by education. Do these writers have no knowledge of history beyond the last week or so?
• via Daniel Christensen: iBeacon in education case study by Stephen Perse Foundation
• We don’t need no stinkin’ badges: the impact of reward features and feeling rewarded in educational games (Elsevier paywall warning. Awesome.) (Does every badge-related article or presentation really need to reference this?)
• UFV Cascade: Sociology department head Martha Dow breaks tradition with student-centred learning contracts - interesting approach to have students design their own assessment strategy.
• A better way to tie shoelaces. Life altering. Works like a charm. I’ve been doing a simplified version of this (doing a single loop, skipping step 6) for a week and haven’t had to re-tie once.

Other

Not a lot. It’s been a busy week. Got out skiing with Evan to Nakiska, for Ski Day #9 of the season (so far). Super windy day. Super crowded. But we had a blast. (see the DFW commencement video - thinking differently about crowds and obstacles really does help).

Work

• Still working with DubLabs to get our updated D2L mobile app working with UofC CAS authentication etc…. This has taken a long time. Hoping the end result is worth it - we have a working mobile app (built with the original D2L-built Campus Life platform), but that product was phased out by D2L¹, to be replaced by the DubLabs-powered service. Seriously unimpressed by how this transition has been communicated and handled.
• Did the first “intro to my course” video, which will eventually be used as a way for (primarily online) instructors to put brief “Hi! This is me, and here’s some stuff that’s going to be awesome in my course/research/etc…”. The first video was mostly to do a full cycle of planning/shooting/editing/publishing, and it worked out pretty well. I’d do a few things differently, mostly in composing the framing of the shot (I’d tilt the camera down a bit more next time, for less dead space above the instructor, and be more mindful of lines in the background).
• Edited and posted Reclaiming Educational Technology: Higher Ed and Startup Cultures - all 4 videos are available, and now I need to work on a super-cut edit that pulls the bits of all topics together.
  Worked with Pearson to integrate their stuff into our D2L environment. And, on the same day, consulted with an instructor who is putting together an OER grant. I’m hoping that balanced things out enough…

Read

• Natasha got a paper published - Exploring the context of Canadian graduate student teaching certificates in university teaching | Kenny | Canadian Journal of Higher Education

  Read More

Work

This was the first time in a few years where I actually took time off during the christmas break. Last year, it was in the height of LMS implementation and transition. The year before that, writing up the LMS RFP report. The year before that, another Big Important Report™ that I don’t think was actually read. Anyway. Took 2 weeks off over Christmas, and did almost no official work. Wow.

Episode 2 of Reclaiming Educational Technology, focusing on the DTLT unit at the University of Mary Washington, and how they are able to successfully foster a culture of innovation.

Reclaiming Educational Technology - fostering a culture of innovation from UCalgary Taylor Institute on Vimeo.

Work

Kevin did a soft-launch of the UCalgaryBadges platform, using Mozilla Backpack as the badge framework. But, it's down at the moment (keep reading re: campus network overhaul).

Not much else - was only in the office on Monday, then off work until January 5. And, with campus networks down for a comprehensive overhaul, I can't even open my calendar to see what I did that day. Also, no support requests, because all campus systems are down (including elearning platforms and email - so, nothing to break, and no way to complain about it. aaaaah…)

Work

• had several meetings with instructors and dean-type-people in different faculties this week. Lots of interesting ideas for projects, and more interestingly, lots of interest in building up communities and communities-of-practice around many topics - including learning technologies, development, learning spaces, content creation, etc… Great stuff. Can’t wait to help support those communities (and more)!
• Met with a prof who has taught herself how to produce screencasts to create videos for use in her courses. Love it. Gave her some (very minor) tips, and set her up with a better mic and webcam to use. Can’t wait to see what she comes up with.
• getting lots of interest on campus, from people who are putting together proposals to present at the 2015 University of Calgary Conference on Learning and Teaching - which is shaping up to be a really fantastic event (again).
• mid-year reviews with my team. so good. best team ever.
• visited the video game collection at the TFDL to. um. research the history of interaction design. with the team. cough So good. Fired up an Intellivision, slid in the plastic controller sheets, and fired up Skiing.

intelligent television from D’Arcy Norman on Vimeo.

Work

• learning spaces - my group is going to be focusing on the design of learning spaces starting in the new year - especially on how physical and digital learning spaces overlap, and how design can help to shape engaging learning experiences.
• paperwork. the absolute worst part of my job is reconciling the damned AMEX statement each month. I'm getting better at it, so it's slightly less painful now. Might be worse, if vendors actually took AMEX…
• the office non-denominational winter-solstice tree-shaped social artifact is up and decorated.
• cleaned out a storage room to use for the "technology lending library" - starting to collect a few different bits of tech that instructors can borrow to experiment with. Swivls, microphones, cameras, etc…
• got a Canon HF G30 compact video camera, to use with some projects. Holy. What a fantastic little camera. 20x optical zoom (and 400x digital zoom! I haven't tried that yet). f/1.8 lens. Wifi control and streaming. Crazy.
• moved into the new iMac 5K as my main work computer. Wow. So many pixels. But they're too small to actually see… Already starting to crunch away at the Reclaim Hackathon interviews to get a second and third episode up soon. Ish.

Read

• Support Hack Education - Audrey is one of the most important, authentic, critical voices in education (and ed tech). She does it without the support and safety net of a corporation or institution, and needs our support to keep going. Well worth it.
• Top Ed-Tech Trends 2014 - speaking of Audrey, here's her killer roundup of 2014 in edtech. Holy. I haven't had a chance to do more than skim the articles. I will be going back to read every word.
• thanks to a tip from @DrGarcia, I started reading C. Strange's Educating by Design. 1 chapter in, and it's already given me a lot to think about.
• Malcolm Gladwell is a hack. But you already knew that.
• Hiring a tutor may have short-term gains, but long-term losses. Teach a fish to read, and it something something for a bicycle.
• Instructional Design in the VUCA World (via Stephen Downes). It has a pretty diagram.
• Toys are more gendered now than they were 50 years ago. At least they make pink toy crossbows to to even things up. cough
• template for transformation to blended learning - via Ray Henderson. It's a bit over simplified, but could come in handy.
• Steve Wheeler on flipping classrooms
• Ruben Puentedura's presentation on an integrated approach to technology in education

Other

• the skiing line of the year - no. way. in. hell. I'm getting into skiing, and I admire the lines and skill of these people. But nope.
• took The Boyâ„¢ out to Nakiska again today. What an absolutely amazing day. He's getting stronger and more confident. So amazing to see him get better every time we go out.

Work

• I posted the first episode of what will become a series, pulling from the footage recorded during the Open Ed Reclaim hackathon at UMW. More to come, ASAP.
• plans for the 2015 Design for Learning conference are shaping up nicely. Nearly ready for submissions. This is the key teaching-and-learning event at UCalgary, and it’s going to be another great one.
• quick chat with Brian at TRU about their initial plans for an LMS migration. Just when I thought I was done talking about LMS migrations…
• Spent much of the week debugging slow performance on our application and database servers. Still have no real solid evidence on what’s bringing the servers to their knees, but I sure am enjoying the constant stream of Pingdom “YOUR SITE IS DOWN” notices, and gentle nudges from our IT Operator account that the server is down. The servers hosted by IT. cough Anyway. Using Apache scalp to mine the apache logs, and MySQLTuner.pl to try to figure out WTF is going on. No luck yet.
• Spent the week trying to use a Surface Pro 3 as my mobile device. I tried first last weekend, and after a few hours rage-restored-to-factory-condition and put it back in my backpack. Some people love it. I don’t. I initially thought of it as a big-ass, expensive iPad. It failed miserably at that. Then, I thought of it as a more expensive MacBook Air, but crippled by Windows 8. Yeah. That basically sums it up. So, now it goes into the tech lending library for people to experiment with, and I happily go back to my iPad for mobile stuff, and MBA for desktop/less-mobile stuff.

Read

• UofC Law prof embraces innovative teaching methods
• Tannis Morgan’s notes from her Open Education session on shifting an institution toward Open
• Tony Bates compares/contrasts the Toronto School and Alberta School perspectives on online colloborative learning
• First Monday - the function of buzzwords
• First Monday - is “quitting online stuff” a thing?
• STEM teaching and learning community at UCalgary
• The Conversation - office design should focus on people, not just the work they do
• McGill teaching and learning blog - how to find free, interactive resources for your courses
• Hack Education - Audrey takes on buzzwords
• The Conversation - how to spot a scary mole
• Tony Bates - ed tech hasn’t really changed things in 30 years
• Stephen Downes posted notes from an ePortfolios and Badges workshop at Open Educa Berlin
• Jane Hart on technology training vs. changing training
• a truly annoying rant by an opinionated burnout teacher/network-administrator, condescending to everyone who hasn’t had the urge to compile their own kernel in the last week. This is exactly the wrong attitude for anyone remotely responsible for providing support. Or, you know, interacting with humans.

Other

not much. aside from taking Friday off to go skiing with The Boy™ at Nakiska. Still pretty barren on the slopes, but we still had a blast!

Work

• Final preparation for launching the Curriculum Alignment Tool to support curriculum review on campus.
• Started logging and working with the interview footage from the Reclaim Hackathon interviews. Lots of work left, but it's started.
• Had my mid-year review. Huh. I might actually be good at this stuff after all. Having a blast, for sure.

Read

• Patrick Finn appeared in the latest episode of the UofC's Peer Review podcast
• John Gruber on Paul Ford on why HTML5's official status is important to humans.
• Fitness tracking data being used in court. A Calgary lawyer is using data from Fitbit to try to show that his client was actually injured. How long before this stuff gets used badly? Insurance companies using it to downgrade customers or refuse payment. etc…
• Debugging slow MySQL servers: check for fragmentation, run MySQLTuner.pl
• McMaster's Learning Portfolio project sounds interesting.

Travel

• returned from Fredericksburg on Monday. Car, train, train, plane, (de-icing), plane, car, home. Whew.
• hoping to get out to Nakisha on the weekend for the first ski day, if it's not -5000ËšC or anything crazy like that…