We’ve been using Zoom at scale since March, and have learned how to use it well for everything from 1:1 meetings up to classes of 500+ students. Since we launched in March 2020, to prepare for the COVID Rapid Pivot to Remote Teaching™, we’ve hosted 304,776 meetings in our campus Zoom environment. We’ve held 379 webinars. We’ve created over 4 TB of recordings.

In that time, we’ve realized there are a few features that would make life simpler for instructors, especially in these large-enrolment classes.

The UCalgary Department of Computer Science has been publishing a great podcast series called What the Tech? It’s intended as a way to share some of the work being done by faculty members and grad students, and covers a pretty wide range of topics. I was asked to be on the show to talk about learning technologies, innovation, and some of the things I’m going to be working on for my PhD research.

The University of Calgary has been developing a strategy, ii’ taa’poh’to’p, to help guide the university toward reconciliation. This is incredibly important and we are all working to understand and to learn. One of the first steps involves acknowledging that indigenous peoples have been living on this land long before european settlers arrived. We make the territorial acknowledgement in ceremonies and large gatherings - but now that we are all participating from our own homes it has become more important for us all to acknowledge the First Nations, and the treaty that we are all part of.

On Friday, I finished my PhD candidacy exams with an oral exam of my thesis proposal. It was an incredible discussion, with a group of people who I admire as much for their approach to their work as for the work itself. Each committee member was recruited because they are the best person at our university in their respective field. I mean, to the point that if I blew it, I’d been half-joking about having to quit my day job because I work regularly with many of them in other committees and projects. An amazing committee, and they gave me valuable feedback and guidance to refine the thesis plan and get to work.

I’d explored podcasting several years ago - looking at educational uses of podcasts and making my first attempt back in 2004 when the term was first coined - but, everything about “podcasting” has changed since then, and the term has become a genericized label for “I want to share some media”. We’ve been getting requests from instructors who are interested in using podcasts (or “podcasts”) in their courses - whether as part of the instructional materials, or for students to produce media as part of their learning. So. Here are some current resources and links. I’ll update this page with any suggestions.

I’ve been working on my thesis proposal, preparing for candidacy this summer. This explains why I’ve been pretty much silent here on the blog, and why I’ve been trying to reduce my social media time¹.

Much of my research will be on using the lens of video games as a way of describing classroom teaching - in fancy-talk, developing a model that adapts research methods developed for the formal analysis of video games to the description and analysis of teaching and classroom activities. I’ll be sharing much more about that over the next year as I get into data collection and writing the dissertation…

⚙️ Work

• Virtual Simulations Working Group - lots of cool online experiential learning work happing across the university. Gearing up to support more of it for fall.
• Annual performance review. It was a good year, despite being away for 5 months of it. Lots of work to do, and the nature of my role continues to shift.
• Game Lab. It’s now part of my day job. Awesome!
• Learning Technologies Advisory Committee - wrapping up the inaugural year of that meeting, as co-chair. What a great group!
• “so… people are going to need to record or stream stuff from classrooms in the fall. how many classrooms are set up for that?” cough

🤔 PhD

• Game Lab! Work and PhD lives colliding. It’s a thing now, and we’re planning on ramping it up asap.
• Thesis proposal is nearly done! It’s shaping up really nicely, and I’m aiming to complete candidacy in August.

📚 Reading

• Finished KSR’s Red Moon.
• Started re-reading The Exanse series. Leviathan Wakes.

🧺 Other

• Went for a bike ride to Cochrane and back on Friday morning. Busy highway, but a good ride. It’s a solid training route, uphill and into the wind for the first half, flying back to the city for the last half. Short enough to fit it in, but long enough to be worth it.

Janice and I went for a walk this morning, along Twelve Mile Coulee and down to the local golf course, before stopping at the local pub for lunch on the patio. Almost felt normal. Ish. Weird. And, hey! look at this! things are normal enough that I’m using the headings in the reflection post template again…

⚙️ Work

Meetings. lots of meetings. and we’re going to be planning a slower/broader engagement process to figure out what to do about online exam proctoring. also, looking to create D2L courses for W2021 semester as early as sometime in July, which would be great to give instructors more time to develop those courses.

I’ve been using DuckDuckGo’s site-specific search as a way to make this site searchable, after moving from WordPress to Hugo. Since static websites don’t have a database, searching is more difficult so I’d let that go and had just used an embedded search form that fired off a DuckDuckGo query.

Which worked. Mostly. But it also got results from other subdomains at *.darcynorman.net, and didn’t sort them too well. So it was not as useful as the WordPress Relevanssi search plugin had been.

I officially took the week off. Which was weird, since I basically spent it sitting at my desk staring at my computer. My goal was to get through a first draft of my thesis proposal - I didn’t quite get there, but made some serious progress. I’m writing it as a website, not a word .doc, and that’s working well so far. I’ve integrated Hypothes.is for annotation, and Disqus for comments.

With some momentum going, I’m aiming to have candidacy wrapped up by the end of summer. Which, is, like, coming up really fast…

Our team relaunched the elearn.ucalgary.ca support website. This is great work!

Projects I’ve been working on since COVID hit:

• Zoom implementation/launch/adjustment
• CSM and contract stuff with our various edtech vendors
• Online exam proctoring selection/planning/implementation
• Leganto digital library reserve readings launch
• Consultation/support for instructors now teaching remotely
• “why can’t d2l have a feature like this other tool that I can’t possibly teach my course without!” consultations
• In spare time, being a manager of a team. This role is being sorely neglected. Thankfully, I have an awesome team that can function effectively without needing me involved in every detail.

But. I’ve been told to start burning my 7+ weeks of accrued vacation time, so I’m officially out of the office until June 8. Aside from the 7 meetings that I can’t avoid because that would blow project timelines.

I finally, finally went into the office to grab my iMac to use at home. If I’m going to be working from home for weeks/months to come, I need a larger screen. 27" is about right. Why on earth didn’t I do this 2 months ago? It’s a 5 year old computer, but the larger screen has already made my eyes hurt less.

Lots of talk about the budget. Lots of anxiety and questions. No answers yet, but we know the university will be facing yet another budget cut. This is exactly what our provincial government claims they were elected for, so it’s not a surprise.