Nope. Week 2 of dissercation.
Having varying levels of success at focussing on writing. But I have the design study pretty well planned out, and ethics application review in progress…
Portillo, A. L., Hogg, R., Poznanski, S. M., Rojas, E. A., Cashell, N. J., Hammill, J. A., … & Ashkar, A. A. (2021). Expanded human NK cells armed with CAR uncouple potent anti-tumor activity from off-tumor toxicity against solid tumors. Iscience, 102619.
Week 26. Half way through 2021 already. Somebody slow this ride down a little…
And new cases of COVID are at the lowest level in just over a year. Wow.
Natasha, Patrick and I worked on a chapter for a nursing textbook last year (wait. it was in late 2019…), and just got word that it’s going to be available shortly. Chapter 7, Updating Traditional Classrooms, builds on much of what we learned after opening the Taylor Institute. Textbook publishing takes a lonnnnnnng time…
I’ve been kind of struggling to keep on top of all of the things I need to do, and am trying a jump into using the Reminders app. A week in, and holy moly is it making a huge difference. I’m feeling more productive, even if it’s only seeing how things fit together. With the added bonus of being able to click “done” every now and then. One of the challenges of my role is that things kind of continue in an apparently-ongoing basis, and everything kind of smushes together in my head into one all-encompassing metaproject. Being able to break things back down into tangible bits is something that might help me to see forests and trees without getting lost…
There’s a bit of a common pattern for designing new and innovative online learning environments1, to make it game-like. Or, most often, to look game-like. Which often means “make it look kind of retro-y and vintage-y so I can pretend it’s something kind of sort of like a game and hey presto we’re innovating already!”
Most recently, Google hosted their annual I/O conference in a video game environment. Or, more accurately, in an online conference platform that kinda-sorta looks like a video game, despite not actually being a game in any meaningful sense of the word, aside from instilling a fun sense of “hey everyone we’re totally inside a video game together isn’t this awesome and isn’t I/O innovative and aren’t we just so danged cool for being inside a video game together?”
The Taylor Institute’s 2020 Report to Community was released (PDF version, for when the URL gets recycled for the 2021 report…). It’s one for the ages, including information about our work to help support The Big COVID Pivot™. Incredible work. I mean. Wow. What an amazing team!
TI 2020 Report to Community: Responding to a global health emergency
TI 2020 Report to Community: Learning Technologies Advisory Committee and Pedagogical Innovation
215 unmarked graves of children found at a residential school in Kamloops. 51 were documented in the official reports from the school. That means 164 children died without even being recorded. For someone to be buried without acknowledgement in a hidden and unmarked grave just reeks of contempt for human life. TRC estimates over 4,000 children died at residential schools. I hope the horrific truth of what happened comes to light. The last school closed in 1996. The nearest residential school closed in 1969. This is recent1. The trauma will take generations to heal, if that’s even possible.
This year’s University of Calgary Teaching and Learning Grants were announced. What an amazing list of projects!
I finished a mockup for a new tools mini-site for elearn.ucalgary.ca - I’ll be presenting it to a group next week for feedback, and then will hopefully start implementing it this summer.
Made some progress on chapter 6, and started planning the “design study” component that will make up chapter 7. I’ll need to map that project out quickly, so I can get ethics approval and then get started collecting that data this summer. Or early fall, depending on how quickly I can write up the ethics proposal, and how quickly the CFREB wheels turn over the summer…
We’re planning some tech upgrades in the TI classrooms, to support both lecture capture and inclusion of remote participants. Something like this auto-tracking camera from 1 Beyond1 should help with better lecture capture. We have one of these installed in Studio F and plan to add them to the downstairs studios this summer (as upgrades to replace the Vaddio cameras that were originally installed).
We’re also looking at picking up the Zoom/neat Board as a prototype to try bringing remote students into class via Zoom. It also has a native whiteboard app that should be a much better user experience than running TIDraw on the collaboration cart displays2.
This is cool. Mohammad Moshirpour (from the Schulich School of Engineering) was just awarded a 2021 D2L Innovation Award, by STLHE.
President McCauley published the latest draft of UCalgary’s Growth Through Focus strategy. A good chunk of it relates directory to the work of the TI.
Had a great discussion with Ehud about my plans for chapters 6 and 7. Time to step away from playing with the transcripts and just write and write and write. And then revise.
So… nobody reads blogs anymore. RSS is dead. There are maybe 3 people that I know who read this, in addition to myself. Why do I keep posting these? Because it helps me to document what I’m working on, and to think out loud a little. I refer to these weekly things pretty often, mining them for links or articles etc. And this format is much more useful to me than 250 characters of noise on social media.
It hasn’t been officially announced on campus yet, but the Students Union is providing $500K to support a bunch of Open Education Resources development grants over the next 5 years. This builds on what we learned in the OER Pilot that my team led a couple of years ago.
I attended a virtual screening of the excellent documentary film Coded Bias, by Shalini Kantayya. UCalgary’s TALON Teaching and Learning Online Network hosted a panel discussion, which was a great (but waaaay too brief) discussion of algorithmic bias and surveillance. Hopefully, there’s a possibility to do a sequel or part 2 that focusses on the relationship between algorithms, surveillance, and education… (also, Maha Bali attended the panel from Cairo)
We’re getting ready for our annual conference, only a couple of weeks away. I’ll be moderating a couple of sessions, which should be fun.
I’m hiring! We’re looking to add a Learning Technologies Specialist to the team, with a focus on program innovation.
The iLab hosted a seminar by Nicolai Marquadt on designing interfaces for cross-device interaction, and sketching, for the iLab. It was the first iLab meeting I’ve been able to attend in over a year…