Janice and I went for a walk at Glenbow Ranch, and wound up along the frozen Bow River.

⚙️ Work

I had the opportunity to be involved with adjudication for the University of Calgary Teaching Awards. We have some really amazing teachers here. What an honour to be part of that process.

Looking into options for online exam proctoring.

🤔 PhD

Worked out which candidacy plan to use for my program, and made progress in translating themes/topics into questions to guide me as I develop my thesis proposal. Now, to try to find a way of describing 25 years worth of projects in a framework that a) makes sense b) is internally consistent and c) can be used to describe future work… Have a thesis proposal preliminary outline draft to start with.

⚙️ Work

A hectic week - it’s a challenge, keeping so many plates spinning at the same time. I was involved with some learning space design planning for a new building that will start construction soon. It’s great to see what we’ve learned at the TI being applied to new spaces across campus.

🤔 PhD

Some really good discussions with supervisors and other students about revising the plan, and starting prep for candidacy. I’m excited about jumping back in, and hoping I can contribute.

⚙️ Work

• Curriculum Links is really starting to take off. 82 curriculum reviews since 2014. 476 courses mapped in 2019!
• I was interviewed for an article about digital credentials and blockchain, and talked about our work with badges.ucalgary.ca (we aren’t actively building blockchain stuff - there’s no real-world human use for it yet…) (relevant xkcd)
• We had a really good Learning Technologies Advisory Committee meeting - it really feels like this group will be able to make a difference. I talked about the work the Processes WG has been doing to identify opportunities to develop processes to enable and innovation. And I talked gushingly about OpenETC as a model to explore.

Alter, S. (2014). Theory of Workarounds. Communications of the Association for Information Systems, 34, 1041-1066. https://doi.org/10.17705/1CAIS.03455

Abstract

Although mentioned frequently in the organization, management, public administration, and technology literatures, workarounds are understudied and undertheorized. This article provides an integrated theory of workarounds that describes how and why workarounds are created. The theory covers most types of workarounds and most situations in which workarounds occur in operational systems. This theory is based on a broad but useful definition of workaround that clarifies the preconditions for the occurrence of a workaround. The literature review is organized around a diagram that combines the five “voices” in the literature of workarounds. That diagram is modeled after the diagram summarizing Orton and Weick’s [1990] loose coupling theory, which identified and combined five similar voices in the literature about loose coupling. Building on that basis, the theory of workarounds is a process theory driven by the interaction of key factors that determine whether possible workarounds are considered and how they are executed. This theory is useful for classifying workarounds and analyzing how they occur, for understanding compliance and noncompliance to methods and management mandates, for incorporating consideration of possible workarounds into systems analysis and design, and for studying how workarounds and other adaptations sometimes lead to larger planned changes in systems.

I’m off Twitter. Again. For now. It’s just not a healthy place to be. The relentless twitter-ness is just not something I need. I get it - the world is on fire and everything is on fire and nothing matters and we’re all doomed all of the time. It’s just exhausting. I’ll still be posting stuff here on the blog, and following the 350 feeds I subscribe to. RSS is where it’s at. Still. I’m not planning on deleting any accounts or anything. Who knows.

Evan and I headed to Sunshine for a ski day while he’s off between semesters. It didn’t work out awesomely - had to head back to town before noon because he wasn’t feeling well. And got a nice speeding ticket en route. Awesome. Still. Sunrise in the rockies ain’t bad. And I got a few runs in to enjoy the whole having-hemoglobin-again thing.

⚙️ Work

A busy week, with 2 big meetings to get/keep my major projects for 2020 moving. The Learning Technologies Advisory Committee’s Processes Working Group had our first meeting, and we made some real progress in describing what kinds of processes can be used to keep pedagogy as the primary consideration when requesting new online tools.

I’m normal! And I’ve got the data to prove it! After 4 years of low hemoglobin, dropping into the holy crap you should probably fix this range, I’m now 6 months post-treatment and it’s finally climbed back to the normal range. Awesome. I’m hopeful that it’ll keep on creeping up as I continue maintenance for the next year and a half…

The last few years of hemoglobin (moving left-to-right), with the bottom just before treatment started. Finally back in the green!

Some people¹ have asked me how Hugo works for publishing my site. It’s working great for my needs, and although it still needs some command-line work, it’s simple enough to learn it.

We got hit with the longest cold snap in over 40 years, with the temp on Thursday approaching a record set back in 1896.

I got back into skating at the Oval over lunch, after missing almost a month. I need to get more active and am really feeling the lack of cardio since I stopped riding my bike every day. Now that we’re heading into a week of forecasts approaching -30˚C, I need to keep doing this so I have some level of physical activity.

Skating at the Olympic Oval over lunch

I’ve been setting up my website, and had things working pretty much exactly how I want them. But, I’d been struggling with how to properly separate content on the website while combining content in the main site feed. The main reason is to be able to have things like /reflections to separate week-in-review reflection posts without overwhelming the homepage with weekly posts that would make all other content that I post on less than a weekly cadence be lost in the noise.

Work

A quiet week on campus, after the university was closed over the christmas break.

I did some D2L support. I did some work on UCalgaryBlogs and filed a ticket to get the server back online (it had somehow been knocked offline overnight), then updated some plugins/themes. I worked on a document to describe the vulnerabilities for the various learning technologies that we build/support in the TI. ██ █████ ██████████ ███████████ ███ ██████████ ██ ███ █████████ ████████ ███ ██████ ██ ███ ██████ █████.