Work

Another super-busy week, with not much that would be interesting to anyone who isn’t me. But:

• Worked with my fantastic team to start planning our presentations for D2L Fusion next month in Orlando.
• Worked with my fantastic (and growing for the summer) team to plan the summer learning technology and spaces research agenda. I think we’ve got a really solid plan, and will be starting focus groups and interviews with instructors and students asap to find out what their needs are
• Met with folks from the Taylor Institute building project, to find out how we can best fit the new Faculty Design Studio into the new digs. We’ve reserved one of the new project workrooms for it, and will need to tweak the furniture plan to accommodate things like giant 4K displays, scanners of various flavours, video cameras, etc…
• The Provost team had a town hall gathering - lots of interesting things going on in the larger team (with props from the Vice Provost Teaching and Learning for the great conference we held recently). Also, the campus dining centre makes some great pizza.
• Almost forgot! We finally unboxed our new 3D printer/scanner - an XYZPrinting DaVinci All In One 1.0. Very cool rig. We did a quick test print, then tried scanning something small. Then, we spent a few hours recalibrating the printing bed. Doh. We’ll figure that part out.

New forms of online education like MOOCs lost both forms of primacy at once. By making them free, students had few incentives to not quit any time the course materials got boring or difficult. Without a physical presence, there weren't the social peer effects of friends encouraging us to attend our classes on time, or shaming us about our poor performance.

These products often tried to emulate the feel of a course by forcing students to take them concurrently. The effect of that model, which Coursera particularly prioritized, appears on the surface to have been unsuccessful, while also reducing the convenience that should be the hallmark of online education.

The Copyright Board painstakingly reviewed copy after copy to ensure that they were all fairly compensated. As had been readily apparent for years, the problem facing Access Copyright is not that copies are not valued, but rather that its licence is not valuable. The Board's analysis makes it clear that the licence only applies in a tiny number of circumstances given a reasonable reading of fair dealing, insubstantial copying, alternative licensing, and a repertoire that has limits. It is a big loss for Access Copyright that foreshadows an even bigger loss when the education issues are resolved.

Work

A short week, with Victoria Day and an added vacation day to make an extra-long long weekend. Still, a busy week with lots of little things like working on Pearson integration with D2L in a couple of places, working with D2L to see what options are available for a better mobile experience, and some work on our EDU strategic plan - more on that soon.

Read

• via Bryan Alexander: A powerful donor versus academic freedom - at least this isn't a Queen Sacrifice. Yet.
• Jim Groom: We're Only #HumanMOOC - I think the MOOC label is distracting here - this is some interesting stuff, which will be missed or overlooked or absorbed into the collective of MIT/Harvard/Silicon Valley Innovations because it's described as MOOC.
• via CBC News: Canada's internet performance on trial with public's help. I ran it a few times from home, and got some pretty underwhelming results. I ran it again from campus, and recorded the fastest real-world internet speeds in the city (both downloading and uploading). The CIRA servers are kind of overloaded, so it may take a few times to get an empty slot to test.
• Harold Jarche - social learning is personal - sounds like a really interesting workshop!
• Dave Winer: Something doesn't smell right about the rush to "deprecate" HTTP. Yeah. Planning to stop supporting the protocol that 99% of the web uses is probably not ideal, even if they have the highest ideological reasons for pushing HTTPS support. Breaking everything isn't the way to fix it - people will just switch browsers.
• Dean Shareski: Looking Back: The Value of the Archive
• Audrey Watters: Ed-Tech and the Californian Ideology:

We tend not to see education technology as ideological. (No doubt, we largely fail to scrutinize the ideology of education as well.) We do not recognize the ways in which education technology can, as Selwyn notes, "accommodate all these agendas (from the countercultural to the commercial) with little sense of incompatibility or conflict." How does a push for "self-directed learning" feed a libertarian anti-institutionalism? How does the mantra "everyone needs to learn to code" serve the interests of global capitalism? How much of the "Maker Movement" is venture-backed consumerism? What does it say that this profitable version of "making" dovetails so neatly with some visions of progressive education?

Dee Fink, giving the opening keynote presentation at the 2015 University of Calgary Conference on Postsecondary Learning and Teaching. The theme of the 2015 conference is Design for Learning: Fostering Deep Learning, Engagement and Critical Thinking.

We hadn’t planned to record the keynote, but Dee asked us if we would, so we set something up that morning. The video is usable, but we’ll be producing higher quality recordings for future events…

Work

We hosted the 3rd annual University of Calgary Conference on Postsecondary Learning and Teaching. It keeps getting bigger and better each year, and I think we’re really starting to get a vibrant community around teaching and learning on our campus(es).

Dee Fink was our keynote speaker, talking about how thoughtful course design can meaningfully improve learning (and teaching). Lots of great points, largely in line with what we’ve been doing at the Educational Development (and Teaching and Learning Centre before that) for years. We’re definitely on the right track.

Another big week.

Work

• We had our third EDU strategic planning repeat, to focus on how to build an assessment plan for the department. As always, what an amazing group of people. Trust the process. Trust the people. The strategic plan document will be published this summer, and we'll be keeping it as a living document with portfolio to support it.

• Final preparations for our 2015 University of Calgary Post-secondary Conference on Learning and Teaching, which takes place next week (!!!). The schedule for the conference looks strong, and I had to make some seriously hard decisions about which sessions to fit into my schedule (thanks to the awesome app, that was a pretty seamless process).
• 2 new additions to the Technology Integration Group (and EDU) for the summer - we were able to secure funding to hire a grad student and undergrad student as research assistants to explore and document learning technologies and spaces over the summer. They've already started, and we're all pretty excited to see what they come up with, and what we all learn this summer. We'll be figuring out the plan sometime after the conference ends next week.
• We gave a presentation/demo of the Student Signup Manager at the 2015 D2L Ignite regional conference at SAIT. It was the first off-campus demo of the tool, and it was very well received. Even more importantly, I think we had a great discussion as members of the Calgary D2L community about how to better form a developer community in the region. Almost every post-secondary institution in the city uses D2L, as well as both school boards and many private schools. We need to work together more.

Work

What a week!

• I met with a prof who wants to build animations and simulations to help students explore cellular biology in context. Lots of great ideas. I had some flashbacks to 1993, when I was building a Hypercard stack to do this (but, with 1-bit graphics, and tiny non-Retina screens)
• The app for our 2015 Postsecondary Conference on Learning and Teaching went live - for iOS and Android. It’s the first app built by the EDU to be released, and it’s going to come in really handy for people coming to the conference. Lots of ideas for future apps to support the activities of the EDU, and other fun projects…
• We visited the TFDL Visualization Studio - the largest high resolution screen in Canada. It’s about 35 million pixels, spread over 16 feet of wall. Amazing.

This has been a project within the Technology Integration Group for the last several months - redesigning the elearn.ucalgary.ca support website so that it can be more useful to instructors and students who are integrating technology into their teaching and learning. The previous site was nearly a decade old, and had been designed by accretion - full of links, documents, links to documents, etc… but difficult to actually find things that are important. So, the redesign.

Social learning was one the major bets we made at HBX. It also yielded some of our most profound learnings. When students asked a question on the platform, we resisted the urge to jump in, instead leaving it to peers to do so. When students struggled with a concept, we resisted (even more) the urge to jump in and correct the group, but relied on peers to do so. The results were remarkable (and somewhat humbling if you're an expert): in more than 90% of cases, questions were precisely and accurately answered by the peer group. One of our HBX CORe students had previously been the head teaching assistant (TA) for one of the most popular MOOCs (massive open online courses). He noted that a typical approach to intervention in online courses was to amass larger numbers of TAs, so that some "expert" was ready to intervene quickly on any question as it arose. One unintended consequence? "Soon, everyone expected the TA's to answer questions. No one took it upon themselves to do so."

Absolutely fantastic video project by a UCalgary business student. I love that a student can produce something like this as a personal/indie/small-scale project. Fast, cheap, out of control!

Work

• Budget announcements on campus. Hooray for cuts. Our province has squandered billions of dollars in oil revenues, and we’re still cutting education.
• Updated ucalgaryblogs to WordPress 4.2. One-click updates are nice. I wish we could keep all of our campus elearning kit updated so efficiently…
• Thanks to a donation from our Students Union, we set up a campus license to Magna Publications for all instructors and grad students (and we could probably set up access for undergrads as well, if they want it). Boatloads of PD videos and resources, and a bunch of key newsletter/publications (and archives).
• I’m planning on hiring 2 students in the next week to work on projects for the summer - primarily to help with collecting data about learning technologies and spaces - to help build a clearer picture of what we currently do on campus.
• We used 4 Swivl robot camera mounts to record mini-lessons as part of our Instructional Skills Workshop. It worked great - much less intrusive than the bulky video carts we had been using, and the auto-tracking rotating camera mount makes it so much more useful (and the audio from the wireless remote is much better, too). We basically slap a Swivl on a tripod, drop an iPod Touch into the cradle to act as HD video recorder, and then upload the files to a password-protected album on our Vimeo account for access by the participants.¹