August?!? WHAT?

Bookmarks: Week of Jul 27 - Aug 2, 2026

Generated on August 2, 2026

Everything is Lonely - by JA Westenberg - WESTENBERG

joanwestenberg.com

Social media and doom scrolling are bad, sure, but we’ve designed ourselves into loneliness.

Bring Back the Cringe and Reconnect

Selected text

We’re building cities optimized for a Nash equilibrium of privacy. Every individual is either consciously or subconsciously minimizing their exposure to strangers and chance encounters; micro-apartments and co-living spaces are nominally designed to be millennial-friendly communes, but in practice they’re little more than hyper-efficient storage units for isolated individuals who sleep and work in safely demarcated boxes.

The aggregate result is a worsening social desert.

#person:JoanWestenberg #socialmedia #socialpresence #community

How I Grow an Engineer Into a Manager

poletto.dev

Promoting your best engineer into management as a reward is how you lose a great engineer and gain a struggling manager in one move.

#leadership #management

GitHub - mason517/personal-db: A personal data lake that ingests your entire digital life (iMessages, email, writing, notes) into a local SQLite database and lets you query it with AI. Runs 100% on your machine. Never touches the cloud. · GitHub

github.com

A personal data lake that ingests your entire digital life (iMessages, email, writing, notes) into a local SQLite database and lets you query it with AI. Runs 100% on your machine. Never touches the cloud. - mason517/personal-db

something like this could be amazing - like Spotlight that actually works? - to index all of the files and data that I have. Not sure what the UI is on top of the index though…

#software #database

ScreenWall | Reuse old phones as synced displays

screenwall.app

Turn old phones, tablets, and spare displays into synced widgets, dashboards, signage, and ambient screen setups with ScreenWall.

#via:KagiSmallWeb #software

TI Resource Navigator

m365.cloud.microsoft

A prototype MS Copilot Agent that uses the TI’s resource library and some good prompting to help instructors design courses etc.

#UCalgary #AI #LTDT #project #Copilot #TaylorInstitute

Talent for Tomorrow: UCalgary People Plan 2026-2028

ucalgary.ca

Talent for Tomorrow, UCalgary’s first institution-wide People Plan (2026–2028), sets out how People and Culture will support faculty, staff, and leaders in delivering Ahead of Tomorrow. Three objectives (a high-performing People and Culture function, an empowered work environment, and enabling university transformation and growth) break down into nine priorities: service model clarity, HR business partner capacity, surge capacity, streamlined HR processes, MaPS salary framework renewal, mandatory people leader orientation, recruitment support, professional development, and performance enablement. A three-phase roadmap runs Capability (2026), Competency (2027), Continuity (2028), front-loading the function’s own foundations. Signed by the full executive leadership team, it frames People and Culture as the first of several administrative functions to be reworked.

#UCalgary #HR #professionaldevelopment #via:StephanieSenakovicz

Professional Development Hub

ucalgary.ca

The Professional Development Hub at the University of Calgary provides a comprehensive ecosystem for faculty and staff to enhance their skills, shape their careers, and elevate their professional impact. The platform organizes learning opportunities through the UCalgary Continuous Learning Model, which integrates formal training, peer collaboration, and self-directed resources. Employees can access dedicated support for leadership development, onboarding, and teaching or research enhancement. The hub also facilitates career pathing through tools like Individual Development Plans, coaching, and mentoring programs. Beyond core professional skills, the site offers information on tuition support and practical workplace effectiveness. Users can browse an events calendar for workshops ranging from academic exhibitions to sexual and gender-based violence response training. The university emphasizes that learning is an ongoing, daily process that extends into real-world application. New employees are welcomed through interactive sessions designed to familiarize them with the institution’s values and community. Multiple departments and faculties manage these diverse resources to ensure tailored growth opportunities for all roles. Ultimately, the hub fosters a culture of continuous reflection and development to strengthen the university as a whole.

#UCalgary #HR #professionaldevelopment #via:StephanieSenakovicz

Brightspace | Vanderbilt University

vanderbilt.edu

Vanderbilt’s Brightspace support website

#Vanderbilt #Brightspace #support

What is the New Content Experience? | Brightspace | Vanderbilt University

vanderbilt.edu

Brightspace Content is Getting UpgradedBeginning with the Fall 2027 semester, Brightspace courses will begin using the New Content Experience by default. Additionally, Instructors now have the ability to enable or disable the New Content Experience in their own courses

#Vanderbilt #Brightspace #newcontentexperience

Pedagogical Engagement Myths

allthingspedagogical.blogspot.com

This week’s blog, the third in a series about embodiment, the senses, and accessible pedagogy, is going to focus on engagement and the many …

A good reminder that “engagement” doesn’t mean “camera on” or “clicked on a thing to display some hidden text”. In Stephen’s link to this post, he mentions backchannels. I still have the framed print speaker’s gift from our BCEdOnline 2006 keynote as a reminder of that backchannel session.

(the blogger is just “Ann” so I’m not going to add a Person tag)

#engagement #via:StephenDownes

Announcing Bonfire for communities: groups and tools to organise together

bonfirenetworks.org

Groups and topics, community rules and decision-making, events, organisation profiles, federated comments, custom themes: built with the communities who needed them, ready to use as-is, or to shape into a flavour of your community’s own.

Looks similar to some of the ideas we kicked around when we tried to set up Social Learning as a platform…

#via:StephenDownes #community #software

Datatype — variable font that turns text into charts

franktisellano.github.io

An OpenType variable font that turns simple text expressions into inline charts. No JavaScript, no images — just type.

#infovis #font #via:JasonKottke

How to Make Something People (Actually) Give a Shit About

joanwestenberg.com

5 Rules for Creating Work That Leaves a Mark

this is good advice.

#person:JAWestenberg

D2L Fusion Conference Notes 2026

onedtech.philhillaa.com

While we were starting to see coherence last year, this year the thread was unmistakable. D2L now describes its product strategy in four pillars—generative AI transforming teaching and learning, high-quality content creation (native tools along with Creator+, H5P, and the new CreateSpace), product-market fit for employee and compliance training, and continuous reinvestment in core Brightspace—with trust positioned as the foundation underneath. The real strategy is in how the first two pillars combine: D2L is going after scaling engaging course content as its sweet spot, with AI as the accelerant rather than the headline. The implied customer is one that skews towards coordinated course design and top-down decision-making—institutions and systems that deliberately are looking to scale course redesigns and impact—more than laissez-faire institutions. The development investment lines up with the strategy, and my conclusion coming out of conference season is that D2L currently has the most strategic product and services plan of the major LMS vendors, period.

#via:YakutGazi #D2L #Brightspace #Lumi #strategy