I'm looking to add another member to the Learning Technologies Group in the Taylor Institute for Teaching and learning. It's part of a really amazing team, and will involve consulting with instructors, providing advanced technical and pedagogical support for the integration of learning technologies, and the development of resources and programs to support the work of the team.

It's a limited-term position, and we're looking to hire quickly. If you know someone who would be awesome for this, please share the posting with them. If you are someone who would be awesome for this, please apply!

Algorithms, tuned not to help readers but to help advertisers. Intermittent reinforcement tuned to maximize engagement/addiction. This is some scary shit, but it’s the web in 2018. We can do better.

But whereas Twitter sort of stumbled upon addictiveness through the weird 140-character limit, Facebook mixed a new, super-potent active ingredient into their feed called Machine Learning. They basically said, “look, we are not going to show everybody every post,” and they used the new Midas-style power of machine learning and set it in the direction of getting people even more hyper-addicted to the feed. The only thing the ML algorithm was told to care about was addiction, or, as they called it, engagement. They had a big ol’ growth team that was trying different experiments and a raw algorithm that was deciding what to show everybody and the only thing it cared about was getting you to come back constantly.

This is a program we launched in Fall 2017, to coordinate programming offered by the Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning for graduate students who are interested in developing expertise in university teaching and learning.

It's run on the badges.ucalgary.ca platform built by my team (go, team!), as well as D2L courses for online content and discussion. As grad students work through the program, they earn badges for completing a set of workshops or sessions in an area of focus:

We've been learning more about Indigenizing the university, and how we might approach that as an Institute. This article by Gabrielle Lindstrom is a great overview.

Indigenous pedagogy, which refers to a way of teaching using Indigenous educational principles, is grounded in creating, fostering and sustaining good relationships between student and teacher. Teaching moments are found in the human-to-human interactions which are reciprocal — my students understand that I have certain knowledge and experience they can learn from and I understand that I, too, can learn from my students.

For once, I'm not deleting anything. But, I've been struck by how

a) bad algorithmic news feeds are at actually getting what I want and need, and

b) how horribly distracting and time-sucking they are.

Companies - and we're well past the rubicon of DIY internet hippie utopia - it's companies all the way down now - have no reason to make their algorithms work better for me (or other humans). Their algorithms weren't designed for that - their only reason for existing is to generate advertising revenue for the company, and to maximize that at all costs.

The article isn't as hyperbolic as I was braced for, and connects the recent spate of Facebook billionaires lamenting that they just discovered that Facebook may not be the best thing for people or society (but thanks for the $billions).

I'm not about to say that having supercomputers in our pockets, wirelessly connected to the sum of published human knowledge and to every other pocket-supercomputer, is anything but an incredible boon for humanity. But, the way that capitalism and advertising revenue combined with algorithmic distribution to maximize "engagement" and tie into the feedback loop to boost ad revenue and then tweak algorithms and then boost ad revenue etc. etc. ad nauseum? Yeah. That might need a little work.

This won't be a big mopey retrospective, but I thought it would be useful to document some of the major things that happened this year. It's been a doozy. In roughly chronological order…

• My team continued to be awesome. I'm so fortunate to be a part of such a diverse, thoughtful, and insanely productive team.
• The Taylor Institute hosted the 2017 University of Calgary Conference on Post-secondary Learning and Teaching. I hosted the Ignite sessions. It was fun. We'll be doing that again.
• I was co-author of an article about using a humanoid robot to teach people to assemble mechanical gearboxes, published in ACM HAI 2017.
• We launched an OER pilot program at the UofC. 10 small grants were given out, to help 10 instructors find, adapt, adopt, or create open educational resources in their courses. We deliberately selected courses with a broad range of disciplines and levels - everything from large first-year courses all the way up to small senior grad courses. We'll be using what we learn through the pilot to make decisions about how we can support open education (and OERs) more broadly as a university.
• I got some health news.
• We wrapped up the first round of EDU strategic planning process, as documented in the department's ePortfolio.
• I finished the coursework portion of my PhD program with a 4.0 GPA. Go figure. Now for the easy part. Candidacy, research, dissertation and defence. *cough* The coursework was an amazing experience - working on everything from connecting research methods in performing arts to SoTL, to programming a humanoid robot to reproduce a recorded performance, to playing with data and information visualization.
• We're about to launch a new "Learning Technologies Advisory Group", which will make it much easier to make recommendations for how the learning technologies and platforms offered by the UofC can be adapted and enhanced to make the teaching and learning experiences better.
• Probably a bunch of other stuff that I'm forgetting at the moment. It was a big year.

Adapted from the popular Food Network game show, four teams will battle it out, generating innovative learning designs in real time before the audience and a panel of judges. Course by course, teams are "chopped" until one remains. The challenge? Teams have only minutes to plan amazing student learning experiences with a basket of mystery ingredients. Then at the sound of the buzzer, they head to the chopping block to face our panel of expert judges: Leslie Reid (Vice-Provost Teaching and Learning), Nancy Chick (TI Academic Director and University Chair of Teaching and Learning) and Richard Sigurdson (Dean, Faculty of Arts). On the chopping blockEach team is a dynamic combination of University leadership and TI staff. Come cheer them on!

Knowledge shared is knowledge gained. Explore how we teach and how we learn and how we bring teachers and learners together in new and engaging ways.

Source: How we teach and how we learn | Explore passing the torch

This is a cool new website that was just launched by the University of Calgary. It points to several really interesting initiatives and articles by leaders across the university. Definitely worth spending some time reading the full website…

These grants facilitate projects through three structural streams:

• Practice grants: This stream of grants supports our pursuit of professional learning about research-informed teaching and learning. Practice grants are one-year grants, individual or collaborative and can receive funding up to $7,500.
• Lesson study: These grants support team-based studies of a single lesson, carefully developed and studied to promote a significant learning goal. Lesson study grants are one or two year grants for teams of three to six members. Teams can receive funding up to $7,500 per year, to a maximum of $15,000 per year, for the entire team.
• Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: These projects are formal, evidence-based studies to better understand or improve student learning. They can be individual or collaborative and one or two years in duration. Individual projects can receive up to $10,000 per year, to a maximum of $20,000 for two years. Collaborative projects can receive up to $20,000 per year, to a maximum of $40,000 for two years.

Source: 2018 University of Calgary Teaching and Learning Grants call for proposals | UToday | University of Calgary

Canadians are lucky to have the creative contributions of Gord Downie, frontman for the Tragically Hip, who passed away this week at the age of 53. He embodied a beautiful paradox in our conversation about Canadian culture. He wrote poetry about hockey and our complicated history, quoting both news and literature, and singing those poems to diverse audiences in hockey arenas.Where America's poet, Walt Whitman, spoke of "containing multitudes," Downie connected multitudes. Like Downie, the country he loved resists summation. What is Canada? What is Canadian culture? Who is a Canadian?Canadians do not agree on what it means to be Canadian. Our conversations on the subject end with more questions than we had when they began. Two approaches are often used when trying to capture the essence of Canada. The negative, "I don't know what it means to be Canadian, but I am not American," is countered with positive summaries like, "We are a cultural mosaic." Downie's work avoids such shortcuts. And somehow, that works. We like the questions.

A crazy series of interactive visualizations of motion. What if people in a space bend the space time fabric like the traditional visualization of planets in orbit around the sun? How could these visualizations be used to provide feedback on what is happening in a space?

More info at

miguel chevalier weaves ‘onde pixel’ installation through milan’s unicredit pavilion