I’ve been playing video games since I started typing them into our Vic=20, from the pages of Compute! Magazine. ASCII-art games, in glorious 22-column resolution. Amazing. Console gaming for me started with Intellivision in 1980. One of my favorite games was Skiing, which was an incredible and exciting ski simulator.

It seemed more awesome at the time. Honest.

Edward Tufte gave a keynote at Microsoft's Machine Learning and Data Science Summit back in September. He talks about data complexity, and the dangers of overfitting results to models.

English class, studying a play from a manuscript source document.

17th century theatre + literature

took 10 years of work to prepare an interpretation of the manuscript to mount a performance

• Manuscript converted to actor’s script
• background – all info as context – period info…
• production
• analysis of space

Dramaturg – text/production experts to support director

Designers – set, costumes, props, sound, lighting, music composition, fighting/action, choreography…

Maquette – scale model of stage to refine plans. How could this be used for learning?

Following the research statement formula described in A Manual for Writers – Chicago Style…

I am working on developing methods to fully document a performance in 3D and augmented by multiple streams of data because I want to find out how to make sense of complex interactions between participants and their environment so that others can use the technique to facilitate meaningful reflection of their practices of teaching and learning.

Connecting some ideas and prototypes…

Imagine, being able to capture a session in 3D (well, 4D), like this:

with maybe some 360˚ video, like this: (google chrome plays the video in immersive mode)

mix it with data from other sensors, audio, video, photos, media…

and play it back like this:

(3D playback was prototyped in Unity, using prototype primitives and stock models – but imagine that with fully modelled, lit, textured environments)

I hadn't planned on writing anything here about this, but enough people have asked me variations of "OMG ARE YOU OK?" that it's worth saying something. On October 7, I deleted my twitter and Facebook accounts. It's not a nihilistic dramatic cry for help. I am fine. Doing great, actually.

It was directly triggered by US election fatigue (and I'm horrified, watching the results starting to trickle in as I write this. How on earth is this even remotely close?). I just got tired of the constant drain, the constant snark, updates, trash talk, and general toxicity of the whole process. For a country that likes to think of themselves as the paragon of democracy, it's truly shocking just how dysfunctional, distracting, divisive and corrosive their process is. It's going to take a decade to depolarize and repair after this madness ends.

In increasing order of fidelity:

1. Diagram / sketch / blueprint
2. Photographs (2D or 360˚ eg Bubbli)
3. Video (HD via camcorder or lecture capture, or 360˚ eg. Allie)
4. 3D mockup – manually modelled and animated
   1. simplified / abstract
   2. artifacts added from prototypes
   3. realistic
5. 3D capture. How?
6. 4D capture of multiple data streams. Really how? (approaching the “sculptural message” of the performance…)

Start with a small space, eg. TI Studio B, or smaller? Try recording using each of the 6 methods for comparison.

This is cool. Karen is teaching one of her Victorian literature classes in the Taylor Institute, and redesigned the course to take advantage of the flexible space and collaborative technologies. Awesome. I can't wait to hear more about how it goes (as well as learning from the 20 other instructors and ~2000 students working in the TI this semester, and even more queued up for W2017!)

This semester I decided to do something a little different. I have the privilege of teaching my Victorian literature class in one of the fancy new classrooms at the Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning at the University of Calgary. My 40-person class has six big touch screens, and as a result we've been able to do a lot of hands-on work in small groups leading into discussions with the whole class.

This is cool. CAM(era)-(COMM)unity. A project by the Graduate Students' Association here at UCalgary. Not just a "create a profile and post a photo" site - but a physical token that must be passed from grad student to grad student to unlock a login to the site. An interesting way to get students to meet each other, and also to share information about themselves and their research.

omnimedia recorded data processed through relevant frameworks and perspectives, rather than pre-filtering what is recorded based on these.

Could interpret through lenses of:

• Scenography
• Action research
• Communities of inquiry
• Classroom community
• Practice research
• Interaction
• Activity theory
• Grounded theory
• Sociology – group
• Anthropology
• Scholarship of teaching and learning
• Performance – actions
• Human computer interaction

Need to look at the environment as a dynamic system.

1. FRAMEWORK – what framework(s) am I using?
2. ASSUMPTIONS – what fundamental, implicit and explicit assumptions am I making? How do they shape everything else?
3. IMPORTANCE OF DESCRIPTIVE FIELD NOTES?

Am I overemphasizing the importance of this? What use is the data? How does it connect with commentary from researchers? Instructors? Students? WHAT DOES IT ADD TO THE STORY OF THE CASE STUDY?

4. How to promote/foster commentary from researchers/instructors/students? And how to enable connection with the raw digital field notes data?
5. How to code/interpret/analyze the combined data?
6. How to incorporate other artifacts/documents from the class/session?