Zeglin, G., Walsman, A., Herlant, L., Zheng, Z., Guo, Y., Koval, M. C., et al. (2014). HERB’s Sure Thing: A rapid drama system for rehearsing and performing live robot theater (pp. 129–136). Presented at the 2014 IEEE Workshop on Advanced Robotics and its Social Impacts (ARSO), IEEE. http://doi.org/10.1109/ARSO.2014.7020993

Notes: Video of the play at

p.129: Theatrical drama involving robot and human actors provides an opportunity to explore techniques for seamless physical and verbal collaboration. — Highlighted Feb 5, 2017

The muslim ban executive order was a wakeup call. It's now a different world, and we need to take the time to think through what the implications are.

Personally, I'd probably be largely unaffected. I'm a middle-aged white male with no visible signs of dissent. Well. I have a beard. But I could probably continue travelling to the US without much trouble.

But. I work with people who would be directly challenged by this. And there are students in the computer science lab I'm part of who would be forbidden from entering the US. Which is ridiculous. But it's a serious problem - academia is strongly based on the conference model - travel to a place, present your research and make connections with other people doing similar research. It's how things are done.

I've been thinking about doing this since the last US election. And now, with the words and actions of the Trump administration, I'm just not comfortable leaving my web presence on US servers.

The decision to move my stuff back onto Canadian servers was easy - just a simple exercise in logic. The hard part is leaving what has been the best web hosting company - the best online community supporter - I've ever had the pleasure of being a member of. ReclaimHosting (nee Hippie Hosting Co-op) is the best web hosting provider I've ever come into contact with. Great company. Even better people. A pleasure to work with on any level.

Work

UCalgaryBlogs was knocked offline for almost 24 hours because IT's new security stuff suspected it was compromised - it saw me uploading a .zip file via the admin interface, while the server was also under the constant vulnerability probing by Russian script kiddies. It did the math and freaked out. Hilarity ensued. Sigh. Nothing was compromised, and the server was behaving normally.

We hired a second Learning Technologies Coach within the Taylor Institute - the coaches work as informal consultants for instructors, to help brainstorm and plan integration of technologies (from stuff-on-wheels up to wireless collaboration). I am humbled by the strength of applicants we get - our students are absolutely amazing, with such depth of experience already. I was such a slacker as an undergrad.

Work

I did the second orientation to ePortfolios for our new UNIV201 Global Challenges course. First-year students, making connections in an interdisciplinary context. They've been asked to document their learning, and to showcase their projects for each other, and our ePortfolio platform is pretty much perfect for that. I was surprised, again, that none of the students had edited a web page outside of Facebook. A handful had heard of wordpress, but nobody had every used it. So many things I have taken for granted, absorbed by the modern social web. This is going to take a long time to repair. We've lost a lot as a society when our brightest minds have no personal knowledge of publishing and sharing knowledge beyond Facebook posts.

Work

The first week of the W2017 semester went off without any major crises. MUCH smoother than the F2016 semester start (which is fair, since that was the first full-scale semester we’ve hosted in the TI). I’m constantly amazed at the diversity of courses (and instructors and students) who are working in the TI - every course is different, from almost every faculty on campus. Every class session is different - with instructors and students moving furniture into different layouts regularly, and using the tech in new ways.

Work

The first week back after Christmas break - simultaneously slow and quiet, and intensely busy and productive.

TI Learning Spaces

We’re working on improving the tech in the active learning studios in the TI - the biggest visible change is the addition of power bars (3 AC plugs and 3 USB plugs) on each station, so students don’t have to engage in creative engineering to access the plugs in the floor boxes.

Our annual conference is coming up quickly - the call for proposals is open now (closing Feb 3, 2017 - less than a month away!). This is one of the things I'm most proud about. This conference has grown from a small, mostly-internal thing, to an incredible and deep conference with an amazing community vibe. It's now drawing participants and presenters from across Canada, and has a surprising number of international participants as well. This has become my one must-go-to event each year (which is handy, considering I work in the building and help to organize and run it) - and I would easily rank it as one of the top conference experiences I've ever had.

I just pulled together photos from each day of 2016 - and realized I've been shooting at least one photo per day for a decade now. I didn't think I'd be able to keep doing it, but now can't imagine not doing it.

The latest gallery has 366 photos, due to the leap year. My photos have gone through artsy phases, and have pretty much settled into an informal documentary style. Lots of repeating shots over the years. Lots of progress shots - of people and places. This was the year of building the Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning, installing a bunch of tech, and moving in. So, lots of photos of that.

Work

Nothing. The university was closed for the break. IT even thoughtfully shut down campus websites for a network upgrade.

PhD

I poked around with some Python tutorials to prep for the course I'm taking next semester - I'll spend 4 months programming robots to do interesting things, while hopefully obeying at least 1 of Asimov's 3 Laws…

Read

Some of the python code I cobbled together automatically pulls "starred" items from NewsBlur, links saved to my Scuttle server, and stories I've recommended on Medium. So…

One of the things I'd come to depend on when using FeverËš was a hand-rolled PHP utility script (cleverly called "Readinator") that grabbed all feed items that I'd starred in FeverËš in the last week and generated a list in Markdown syntax for easy copy/paste into my Week in Reviewâ„¢ posts (it also pulls links that I've added to my Scuttle bookmark server in the last week as well). After moving to Newsblur, my utility script obviously became less useful. Sadface.

Audrey Watters' third annual edtech book publishing spree brings us The Curse of the Monsters of Education Technology - a compilation of her keynote addresses from 2016. As with the previous two, it will be a must-read. Given how dark and dismal 2016 was, even/especially in edtech…

Once again, I spent much of 2016 on the road, traveling and speaking extensively about education technology's histories, ideologies, and mythologies. The Curse of the Monsters of Education Technology is a collection of about a dozen of those talks on topics ranging from pigeons to predicting the future.