⚙️ Work

Natasha’s research leave started July 1, and Derritt Mason started as Interim Sr. Director to cover the role for the next year. Lots of meetings to re-introduce ourselves and to talk about our goals for the year.

Izzy led the integration of Entra ID into our Brightspace environment, replacing the ancient CAS authentication. Looks like it worked - everyone now has to login using their IT accounts.

And I’m on vacation now. “Vacation.” Staycation, until July 15. J took next week off as well.

⚙️ Work

• TIDraw.net is gone. I let the domain registration lapse because we weren’t using it in the TI anymore and I didn’t feel like continuing to pay for a domain registration just for something to do. I have the web whiteboard running at https://draw.darcynorman.net and will leave it there.
• The schedule and registration for this year’s Teaching Days went live. Lots of great sessions planned.
• I’m still trying to nudge the formal review of Zoom’s AI Companion feature along the process. Almost 9 months after opening the ticket to start the review…
• [Redacted]

🔗 Links

AI

• Nikhil Suresh @ Ludicity: I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again (via Ben Werdmuller and like half of Mastodon). A mildly NSFW take on machine learning and the hype around it, from a data scientist.

⚙️ Work

• The Learning Technologies Advisory Committee reboot was, I think, successful. Members will be going back to their faculties/units over the summer to find out how student respond systems are used, then reporting back at the first meeting of LTAC in the fall.
• The Brightspace Steering Committee was pretty clear - there is no appetite to license additional stuff, given budgets and increasing licensing fees for the core package. We won’t be going back to the Provost to ask for more. So, looking to ensure we’re getting maximum value out of what we have available in the core package.

🔗 Links

Braaaaaaainnnssss…

• Robert Epstein @ Aeon: The empty brain: Your brain does not process information, retrieve knowledge or store memories. In short: your brain is not a computer. (via Emily Gorcenski)

I joined the Tuesday morning Bow Cycle Club ride - my first BCC ride of the 2024. I’m firmly at the back of the “C” group, but I made it, didn’t die, and will be joining more rides over the summer. This was a shorter ride, but with lots of climbing. Wow, is my cardio garbage. I can work on that.

⚙️ Work

• I took (most of) the week off. Except for coming in on Thursday for…
  • co-facilitating part of the TI Programming Retreat
  • and a couple of meetings.
• And the last coaching session - I’ve got some clear ideas on what I need to focus on now.

🔗 Links

Human-Computer Interaction

• The University of Maryland’s Human-Computer Interaction Lab just held their 41st annual symposium, including an impressive set of Lightning Talks from grad students. Many of the topics are of interest to edtech design. Overviews and abstracts for the talk are included in the program for the symposium. SoTL is nice and all, but HCI is where the fun is. (And they can overlap in pretty much a Venn circle.)

Internet software

• Hotline is still a thing! There is a new build of the client/server software for modern Macs! (via Dustin Mierau). Between this, the resurrection of Archie, and the continuation of Gopher, it’s an old-timey internet resurgence.

AI

I’m off this week, so didn’t spend much time tracking details of the AI announcements this week. Basically, Google decided search engines suck and it’s gone all-in on their AI-generated answers, suggesting that people make pizza with glue, eat at least one rock per day, fight snakes as part of their thesis defense, etc. I’m really hoping the old-timey internet resurgence keeps going, and we wind up with actual search engines again. Kagi’s close - I’m still paying for the pro/premium/whatever subscription - but it’s also deep into Google and Bing indices via their APIs. A separate, non-Evil, non-AI-garbage-generation bona fide search engine is needed.

⚙️ Work

• We planned the evaluation process for the videoconferencing RFP.
• Some strategic planning stuff.
• Slowly chipping away at my annual performance review self reflection, which is taking much longer than usual this year.
• Meetings.
• Moose Hide campaign day, including a lunch ’n learn, smudging, and a walk around part of campus.
• Met with some colleagues from Curtin University to discuss possible collaboration opportunities as part of a global alliance initiative.

🔗 Links

Campus protests

• Robson Fletcher @ CBC News: University of Calgary tolerated protest camps in the past. What made this one different?. Fletcher brings the receipts, with links to relevant UCalgary policies, and UCalgary-hosted photo archives of several previous on-campus protest encampments that did not elicit tear gas and batons.

⚙️ Work

Students set up a protest on campus, expressing concerns about genocide and apartheid in Palestine. I walked around the protest area Thursday afternoon, and everyone seemed to be respectful, orderly, and engaged in activism.¹

DISRUPT SOMETHING. NOT LIKE THAT! YOU’RE DISRUPTING IN AN UNAUTHORIZED MANNER!

A few hours after I took that photo, the protestors were forcibly removed by police. They came back the next day, without tents. I note that our Premier said: “I’m glad the University of Calgary made the decision that they did.” If she’s backing something you’ve done, you’re on the wrong side of history.

I finally, after almost a month off the bike, got back on the fancy indoor bike for an easy-ish ride. I’m hoping my excuses to not ride get less valid, and I’ll be able to get outside on my real bike soon. My cardio is about the worst it’s ever been. I’m in horrible physical shape, and it’s affecting my general wellness.

⚙️ Work

• Our D2L reps came to campus for a visit with our team, to help plan ways to improve the experience for instructors and students. Lots of ideas, and we’ve got several things to start working on. They hosted a social thing for Calgary higher education customers (UCalgary, MRU, SAIT, BVC) downtown at what used to be Melrose on the Red Mile™. It’s been… a long time since I’d been down in that area.
• Working with an associate dean to help navigate the supply chain process as they finalize a license for a new campus platform. Now, to figure out what the support expectations are for that platform, and what role our team in the TI will have (and what resources may be needed in order to do that).
• The 2024 University of Calgary Teaching and Learning Grants awards were announced this week. Over $1m, for 36 projects across the university. What an amazing list of projects!
• A new guide from our Taylor Institute Teaching Academy: Students as Partners in Higher Education
• Recruitment for an acting/interim sr. director is ongoing, with a request going out to associate deans. They’re looking for someone with specific experience to fill the role for a year¹.

📚 Reading

I need to get back into reading - I’ve kind of not been feeling like reading outside of work for awhile now. So, fiction. Maybe some sci-fi, ideally “hard” sci-fi? I picked up Farside by Ben Bova - a Hugo award nominee, and I’d read a bunch of his stuff years ago, so figured it was worth a shot. The first chapter is a strong candidate for /r/MenWritingWomen, and I almost stopped because of that. Ugh, especially for a book written in 2013 and not 1953. This review by “Michelle” on GoodReads sums it up nicely:

⚙️ Work

• Still sick. Not wanting to be “that guy that keeps coughing and blowing his nose in the office”, I took some sick time and worked from home. I’m not contagious anymore, and need to be in the office next week. Hopefully my respiratory system cooperates.
• While preparing for our conference presentation, we collected some links to a couple of videos to support the description of the course. Jana (one of the students in the course) had published one of her video game demos as a video on YouTube - it’s a remarkable example of using video games to foster reflection on architecture, experience, and teaching & learning.
• The 2024 University of Calgary Conference on Post-secondary Learning & Teaching. It’s always an excellent conference. I had to skip the pre-conference day because I didn’t want to make anyone sick, but the 2 days of the actual conference were online so I was able to participate fully.
• Our presentation went well, but we got the last slot on the last day of the conference. Friday afternoons are tricky, as everyone starts disappearing. Not a huge turnout as a result, but it was recorded and we’ve already gotten feedback from someone who watched the recording that afternoon. I will try to write up a blog post version of the presentation at some point.

🔗 Links

Sonification

• Hold the line. The sonification starts at around the 11:00 mark in the podcast episode. That’s a lot of Zippo lighters, and it sounds like the soundtrack from a Christopher Nolan movie combined with something out of HBO’s Chernobyl. (via Jason Kottke and Grant Potter)

⚙️ Work

• Meetings. Finance. GFC TLC.
• Learning Technologies & Design Team meeting - the focus was a “listening tour” by Natasha and Sue to visit with the team to learn about what we’re working on, what’s working, what could be improved, etc. It was a really good discussion, and I’m honoured to be part of such a passionate, engaged, and creative team.
• The April Learning Technology Advisory Committee went pretty well. I had to start the meeting without my co-chair because she was double-booked, but we got off to a good start beginning with introductions for new members (including Izzy’s first meeting as part of LTAC!). We discussed Gradescope, and how to support the request to add it as a campus platform, which led to some great discussions about the nature of our tools, what we value, the power of defaults and design, and how we might address opacity in LLMs used by vendors. And then we had a great discussion - world cafe style - about how we as a committee can best do our work.
• I wasn’t feeling great about how the LTAC meeting had gone. I want to make sure that members feel their time is well spent, and that everyone feels as though it’s useful. And then I was meeting with one of the committee members that afternoon, and said that I didn’t think the meeting went as it could have. To which, she said that LTAC is the only committee that she finds valuable, that she looks forward to the meetings, and that this morning’s discussion was exactly what she needed for her work. So, there’s that.
• And then I took an actual sick day. There’s a cold going around campus, and it finally caught up to me. I was going to work from home - Zoom and Teams meetings - but J asked me what I would say to a team member that continued to work while they’re sick. Right. So. Sick day. Which means I missed 3 important meetings on Thursday, and spent much of it on the couch watching Dune Part 2. Then, Friday on the couch, then J almost calling an ambulance Friday night. So, Saturday back on the couch. This is the worst “cold” I’ve had in a long, long time.

🔗 Links

Webstuff

• Mozilla Developer Network Web Docs: CSS Layout Cookbook - give examples of how to build some common things in CSS, and has some handy CSS tools. Somehow, I hadn’t seen this before.
• Kagi Small Web and their description. A bit like a streamlined StumbleUpon interface, for reading new content from blogs and newsletters. I’ve added my site - but had to clone a Git repository to edit the text file with all of the RSS feeds so I could append mine, and then submit a pull request. Not a very user-friendly interface, which means it will skew strongly to the geeks. But I’ve added Kagi Small Web to my bookmarks bar so I can just click it to get a random site whenever. I’ve been pleasantly surprised to see how many people are doing the weekly post format. I’ve clicked “Next Post” maybe 50 times in a row on a couple of occasions, just happy that the “small web” still exists, and that it thrives outside of my own bubble.

Obsidian

• Steph Ango shared Obsidian their vault with templates and dataviews, including a link to a Github repository for it. (Steph knows a few things about Obsidian, being the CEO and all…)

Hooray for AI!

• Molly White: AI isn’t useless, but is it worth it? (via Ben Werdmuller)