At the COHERE 2019 conference, the informal theme this morning was on modularizing and disaggregating¹ - breaking out of the traditional 4-year degree program, breaking away from the semester-long course, enabling access to content and resources and people outside of the traditional contexts. Dr. Reid opened the conference with a description of this shift, and in reframing how we as an institution think about online experiences - that they aren’t “less than” traditional face-to-face experiences. They can be liberating, enabling, enhancing, amplifying. Dr. Karen Willcox gave the opening keynote, describing projects she’s worked on through MIT in an effort to make sense of the complexities of programs and courses through mapping the curriculum. This is something we have a lot of experience with at the University of Calgary, having built a pretty powerful curriculum mapping application that is already being used across the university. Her application of network graph visualization looks like it provides an interesting interface to exploring the curriculum data once it’s been collected.

I’ve been playing some casual games as part of the Apple Arcade, and have really been enjoying Hexaflip by Rogue Games. One part Q-Bert, one part Marble Madness, one part platform runner.

It’s a deceptively simple game - there are only two “controls” - tap left and tap right. No forward or backward. No jump. Just left and right, always moving forward. Some of the tiles can change your direction, so you have to plan accordingly. It gets complicated quickly.

The fourth and final part of the Reclaiming Educational Technology series, recorded at the University of Mary Washington after Open Education 2014.

This segment features commentary from:

• Audrey Watters - HackEducation.com
• Ben Werdmuller - Cofounder, Known
• Erin Richey - Cofounder, Known

Recorded at the University of Mary Washington after Open Education 2014, this episode features commentary from:

• Audrey Watters - HackEducation.com
• Tim Owens - UMW (now Reclaim Hosting)
• Ben Werdmuller - Cofounder, Known
• Jim Groom - UMW (now Reclaim Hosting)

This one’s a gem. Well, they all are, but this interview is especially relevant for me because at the time of the interview UMW’s DTLT had just moved into their shiny new digs - and the Taylor Institute at UCalgary was still under construction. There were a LOT of parallels between DTLT and what was becoming the TI at UCalgary. The tension between “Innovation” and “Enterprise” colours all of our work, and it was great to hear from these amazing people about their work and experiences in the field.

Reclaiming Edtech Part 2:  Fostering a culture of innovation, featuring commentary from:

• Martha Burtis - UMW (now Open CoLab at Plymouth State University)
• Tim Owens - UMW (now Reclaim Hosting)
• Jim Groom - UMW (now Reclaim Hosting)

It’s time to re-reboot the podcast, starting by resurrecting the audio from the Reclaiming Educational Technology interviews that were recorded during a hackathon event hosted at the University of Mary Washington after Open Education 2014.

I keep coming back to these episodes, even 5 years later, as they are full of amazing insights by incredibly passionate and interesting people. I’ll be posting the audio from all 4 episodes shortly…

This episode features:

• Audrey Watters - HackEducation.com
• Kin Lane - APIEvangelist.com
• Martha Burtis - University of Mary Washington (but now at the Open CoLab at Plymouth State University)

After quickly (and I mean QUICKLY - it took less than half an hour’s worth of fiddling around with code while sitting on the couch watching garbage TV) building a way for people to markup chunks of text using the TIDraw.net -powered digital whiteboards, I wanted to test it in action. It’s one thing to try it on my laptop or iPad, but digital ink is a different experience on a 50" display. The classrooms have been so busy this semester, I didn’t get a chance to try it until this morning.

We hosted a “TI Instructors Gathering” this morning, where we invite folks who are teaching in the Taylor Institute to come together to share their experiences and we can learn from them about how they use the spaces and technologies. This gathering was predominantly Languages profs - french/spanish/russian/french - and we got to talking about how they’d like to be able to have their students break into groups and use the “Collaboration Carts” to mark up passages of text. That’s not a thing that’s readily done - there are web-based text annotation tools, but not ones that are based on ink. Having students sketch on text is a useful activity, pedagogically, and so I got to thinking…

Robert Kelly has been hosting his Design Thinking course in the TI for the past several years.

I was away over the summer, so missed the latest instance of the course. Giant lobsters! Thankfully, they documented the course and published a video of the shenanigans.

It’s a bit of a challenge when the course is going on, because it’s so profoundly unconventional. Classroom? Classrooms? Nah. Buildings! But - it’s been amazing to see what the participants do, how they work together, and what they build.

The plan for my PhD is taking a bit of a different tack, to take advantage of an incredible opportunity that will remain cryptically-alluded-to for now. I need to go deep on video game design, and I’ll be approaching things from a teachy-learny perspective so ideally I need to spend some quality time with key video games that are exemplars of experiential learning. I’m thinking it doesn’t need to be full-on Oregon Trail you-have-died-of-dysentery, but should include games that pioneered approaches to teach in some way. Things like the deceleration curve path in Forza Motorsport 5 et al. that guides you through difficult turns on a track, or the time-rewind-retry thing in Braid that lets you iterate on a plan until you solve it, or the try-stuff-until-you-figure-it-out exploration of Portal.

I took photos throughout my chemo/immunotherapy treatment, to document my reactions and the view from the poison room. Photos generates a decent slideshow (complete with Generic Copyright-takedown-avoiding Sountrack #1) ¹

Jeff Huang compiled a very long list of “Best Paper Award” winning papers in various computer science disciplines. Lots of interesting papers in there… Awesome.