Work

Mostly uneventful, but lots of things going on simultaneously. Still working on the Learning Technologies Coaches plan, and am writing job profiles for some new positions. We had an EDU post-conference debrief, to share what we learned at Infocomm/Brightspace Fusion/STLHE, and I’m still thinking about Welby Altidor’s closing keynote at Fusion - some really interesting ideas about collaboration and creativity, and I’m hoping to bake some of that into the formal structure of the EDU and of my group through carefully writing and revising all of our job profiles (including the new ones).

Brendan Burchard’s D.U.M.B. goals, on trying not to get buried and lost in busy task-completion. He seems to be of the Tony Robbins / TED school, but, still, there’s something to this.

Alec asked how people manage and publish photos, which got me thinking about how I do it. I use a mix of old school offline management via Aperture on my home laptop as the central hub (which makes me nervous now that Aperture is Dead App Walking). I publish photos first to my own website, and then republish to other platforms automatically. If the third party stuff goes away (or I decide they're evil enough to cut ties with), I lose nothing.

The SSL certificate I'd been using for this site had been about to expire, so I tried yanking it so I could replace it with something powered by Let's Encrypt (which is backed by the EFF, Mozilla, Automattic, etc…). But, Let's Encrypt doesn't launch until the fall, so the timing wasn't right. In the meantime, some browsers were throwing fits as some of the parts of my site were still trying to load via secure HTTPS connections, while others weren't. Chaos and hilarity ensued. So, I just threw some money at the problem to get a shiny new certificate from SSL2Buy to get the site back on the air. I'd been trying to set up a free certificate through StartSSL, but that just didn't work (and Firefox still freaked out with the free certificate).

Work

Spent much of the week digging out of the hole caused by being out of the office for 10 days. Emails, voicemails, etc. Mostly caught up now. We're planning the D2L upgrade from 10.3 to 10.4-or-10.5, which will kick in on August 24. It should be a smooth process, with D2L doing the heavy lifting, but we need to build the plan for what we need to test on our end, and to figure out what new features will be switched on. Looking forward to running current D2L versions - 10.3 is 2 years old, and many of the improvements we've seen at Fusion for the last couple of years have been unavailable to us.

It seems like a small, unimportant thing, but the D2L homepage is probably the single most important web page for students. While they occasionally use the university website, and periodically use the my.ucalgary.ca portal (to sign up for courses and pay fees), D2L is where they spend a substantial chunk of their time as they work through their courses and programs. We'd launched D2L with a news-centric homepage, so that we could easily push notifications and support resources during the transition from Blackboard. It worked well for that, but became a dumping ground for accretion - links added, blurbs added, until it was a wall of text that everyone basically ignored.

I filed a request under the Access to Information Act, for “All Information Available” - mostly, I was curious to see if my fraternization with Open Content Hippies or Open Source Radicals had placed me on any lists. I’d followed a link on Facebook (which I can’t find now, yay for no searchability in FB-land) with the link to the Government of Canada web page with the request process and form, and a note suggesting that the form would be disappearing soon.

Work

Still on the road - attended and presented at D2L Fusion this week. It was really great to see team members presenting about what we’ve done at UCalgary to finish successfully migrating from Bb to D2L. I’m still going through my notes from the conference, and may post something after I get back into the office. Lots of interesting stuff. Lots of stuff we were able to learn as a result of being able to meet with several people in the company¹.

Work

A quick post, as I'm holed up in Orlando with the family, currently in between InfoComm 2015 and D2L Fusion 2015 conferences. I'm here for 10 days, rather than commuting back to Calgary and then returning after the weekend. It's apparently a bit of a heat wave. Awesome. 100ËšF and 200% humidity. And crowds. But, this isn't a bad office view:

Read

• Audrey Watters - 'Ed-Tech': Not an Etymology
• Michael Feldstein - The EDUCAUSE NGDLE and an API of One's Own
• David Hedley - Highlights of Convocation Week 2015
• Mike Caulfield - LEGOs
• Jon K. - Why Are Systems Administrators for the LMS Such Dicks?
• Campus Technology - Updated D2L Analytics Suite Captures Data From Apps, Content Publishers, LMSes and More
• TE Edwards - 3D Systems Now Offers iSense 3D Scanner for iPhone 6
• Andrea Kingwell - Peer Review Episode 39: Teaching and learning with Leslie Reid
• John Gruber - DuckDuckGo Search Growth
• EDUCAUSE ELI Whitepaper: The next generation digital learning environment

Other

Taking advantage of the break between conferences to do touristy Disney-type-things with the family.

I was at InfoComm 2015 this week, touring some vendors that have been recommended by our AV consultants for the Taylor Institute construction project, The Sextant Group. This was my first time at InfoComm, and I was kind of stunned at the sheer size of the trade show - and at how many similar products exist, with variations and overalaps. It's rare to see a product that is truly unique - and from what I saw, it comes down mostly to the overall experience and how people are able to actually use the tools, rather than the feature-list checkboxes. No surprise there. Sometimes, having the most features is not a good thing. It's having the right features (and not having the others). Here are my rough-ish notes about some of the vendors and products that we visited.

Long(ish) post, more after the break…

Work

• We met with some of the folks in Campus Planning, to coordinate our summer research/documentation projects. I think we'll have a really interesting and useful description of how instructors and students use (and would like to use) our learning spaces.
• Met with our D2L account team, and we decided to stop using the LOR tool within D2L. We've tried to get adoption for the tool for almost 2 years now, and haven't had success. It's time to stop licensing that tool. We're also objectively examining several of the other extra tools licensed in our environment, and may opt out of some more by the end of summer. These are taxpayer dollars, and we need to make sure we're using what we pay for, and getting the most value out of each dollar spent on these tools.
• We had a retirement party for our awesome-and-irreplaceable program administrator, who is leaving the university at the end of the month. We're all going to miss MJ terribly, but are also pretty excited for her to be able to move on to the next set of adventures.
• More prep for our upcoming D2L Fusion sessions. Hopefully, we'll be able to share some of our experiences and tips in adopting a new LMS and migrating an entire campus. Also, we'll be able to showcase the Student Signup Manager tool in the developer lab.
• I was preparing for our D2L Fusion presentation and realized I lost a bunch of files from my dropbox folder. Thankfully, I had Time Machine backup on my home computer was able to go back to last year to recover the files I've been living with for the last two years. This file was going to be the background/context of our presentation, and I only had one print copy left and couldn't find the electronic copy. Yikes. PSA: Back your stuff up, even if it's in The Cloud.

On Campus

• Cumming School of Medicine: Cards - Endlessly Replayable Patient Cards - Interesting medical clinical patient scenario generator produced by our faculty of medicine.
• Haboun Bair: The Impact of Reflection and Where to Store the Pieces? - on a learner-centric eportfolio to document learning and reflections
• David Hedley: MoleScope skin cancer app developed for smartphones in Vancouver
• My niece graduated with a BA in Sociology. I went to her convocation - the first time I'd been to one as an attendee, not wearing the goofy gown and hat. It was surprisingly interesting. So good, seeing the university community come together to celebrate.

I’m working on a way to automate a bunch of this weekly review post - pulling in starred items from Fever, bookmarks saved to my Scuttle install, and maybe some faved tweets¹. Not quite there yet, though. I’m hoping to use some time this week to work on crafting something that smushes this stuff together and generates Markdown code for the Read section below.

Work

Lots of miscellaneous stuff - working on the EDU IT Plan, trying to get video hosting as a service on campus, and putting together the skeleton of the new EDU department portfolio website.