Work

• We had a "D2L CA" meeting - these typically draw a dozen or so people from various faculties, who work with administering courses in D2L. We had 38 people turn up. That's the biggest turnout ever for a session like this. We're going to need a bigger boat. Lots of great idea sharing, and we're going to be trying out some new stuff to make people's lives easier. At least wrt D2L.
• UCalgaryStrong festival - this was the first time the festival was held, on the last day of classes as part of the BSD wrapup celebration. What a great community event. The campus really is feeling like a community, rather than just a bunch of buildings.
• We've been using a Vimeo account to host videos, which has mostly worked out well. Except it's hard to share access to let instructors upload, without giving them the keys to the kingdom. Oh. And there's another good reason why we should be running our own campus media hosting platform. Really hoping we can get something up and running soon so we can start using it in the F2015 semester. It's getting more urgent every day.
• We set up a greenscreen DIY studio for people to use - it's early days, and so far only a single Hello World demo video has been shot in it. cough
• Playing with a Crestron HD lecture capture thing. Looks interesting. Early tests seem to have downsampled video from the main content feed, so we're going to have to mess around with config settings to see if someone borked a setting. Looks promising, though.
• The Faculty Design Studio is slowly coming together. It keeps getting put onto the backburner, but it's going to be fun seeing what instructors come up with over the summer.

A recent joint announcement from two of the pillars of the open education community, McGraw-Hill and Microsoft, threatened to breathe new life into the concept of "learning objects". David Wiley responds with a refresher on the concept of the Reusability Paradox - basically, if something is super-useful in your context, it's likely not very useful in someone else's. That's where the concept of Learning Objectsâ„¢ falls apart.

The Reusability Paradox typically leads designers of learning objects to attempt to "strike a balance" between effectiveness and reusability. This generally results in materials that are neither particularly effective NOR particularly reusable across contexts.

Work

• we met to start planning the LEED education program to support the new Taylor Institute Building. Some interesting ideas, and we're hoping to not do "LEED education" as a separate thing, but as a layer of context in the various resources to tell people about the Institute.
• I was invited to participate in a Dragon's Den style panel, as part of Dr. Reid's ASHA 421 course - what a fantastic experience. 3rd- and 4th-year Science and Arts students collaborating in strong interdisciplinary teams to come up with prototypes for inventions. Although I (almost) have the hairline for it, my Kevin O'Leary impression didn't work out. Thankfully.
• [redacted]
• we met with the Associate Deans to brainstorm how we can best implement some of the items in our Strategic Framework for Learning Technologies. Again, lots of great ideas, and lots of plans shaping up quickly as a result. This is going to be a fun year!
• gave a tour to a colleague visiting from the UofA. I take some things for granted, so it was eye opening to hear about how things are done elsewhere. With our team working so well together, and with the plans we're making for the next few years, I can't imagine working anywhere else.
• Eight Canada Research Chairs announced - including Sheelagh Carpendale, who is doing some interesting work in collaborative visualization.
• we picked up a campus license for the Magna Commons set of online resources. It's deployed in our "D2L Self-directed Training" course (which needs a better name) so all instructors have access to it now. Next, to make sure all instructors know it's there (along with the other resources gathered for them in that D2L course site)..

Read

• Michael Ullyot: Language Use and Cognition: Shakespeare's Gradatio in Context - and, his ENGL 205 students are absolutely rocking UCalgaryBlogs. I haven't seen a class this engaged and active. It looks like the class is 1 part Shakespeare, 1 part community, and 1 part DS106 media playtime. So good.
• via Stephen Downes - Michael Oman-Reagan: Your Nostalgia Isn't Helping Me Learn - nostalgia is nice because it's comfortable. that doesn't mean The Old Ways are better than The New Ones. We need to think critically about this stuff, and not just react to "but things were perfect when I was young. they just need to do it THAT way, and it'll be better again!"
• Tom Woodward: From "On the Internet" towards "Of the Internet" - being online isn't the same thing as being online.
• CBC: How Western Canada glaciers will melt away. I proposed to Janice on the Columbia Icefield almost 25 years ago. We went back in 2010, and it was amazing how far back the ice had melted. Crazy.
• Tony Bates: Teaching in a Digital Age - the best overview of educational technology integration I've seen. Fantastic work by Dr. Bates.
• Donald Clark: Sir Ken Robinson: ‘Creative' with the truth?. I think Robinson is a pop culture hack, spewing feel-good truthiness akin to Malcolm Gladwell. Uncritical sound byte regurgitation, rather than deep thinking. But it sounds like deep thinking, so it gets cited. A lot.
• via BoingBoing: Using Oculus Rift to sculpt virtual creatures - this is amazing. with some haptic feedback, this kind of visualization would be useful for interacting with and manipulating datasets, too.
• Student ingenuity on display at Schulich's Capstone Design Fair - these capstone design projects always blow me away.
• Tim Klapdor: Innovation and the Novelty Factory - innovation is more than just "HEY! SHINY!" and Tim nicely fleshes out Horace Dediu's taxonomy
• via Chris Lott: Paparazzi - a utility for making complete screenshots of long pages. Haven't tried it yet, but it looks useful.
• via Stephen Downes: Allison Littlejohn: Driving Disruptive Innovation: developing agile and responsive module production - how to design courses (and other things) in a more organic and iterative manner, rather than by top-down rigid waterfall design.

Other

• Kind of digging the Surface laptop thing now. I never thought I'd actually say that out loud. If this thing ran a better operating system, it'd be almost perfect.
• Spring finally hit Calgary. Holy blue skies. We made it.
• my stupid thumbs are recovering after stupid me wasn't paying attention and wiped out on the ski hill last weekend. explaining the thumb brace never gets old.

Work

• Met with a research group who are looking to set up a "what if?" collaborative scenario brainstorming space – we talked about what they wanted to do, and realized there are a lot of parallels with what we're trying to do with active learning classrooms. We'll be trying to blur the lines between teaching and research, and this is one very concrete way to do that – using the same types of tools and practices to help people collaborate. Love it.
• We made some great progress in selecting sessions for the 2015 University of Calgary Conference on Postsecondary Learning and Teaching. Now, to work up the schedule, and start ramping up for May. Which is coming up really quickly.
• The new Faculty Design Studio is shaping up really nicely – almost everything has arrived, and now we need to figure out how to set it all up and use it before we can unleash instructors on it. Soon.
• Nancy Chick started this week, as Academic Director for the Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning. So good.
• A new member of our Learning and Instructional Design team started this week, too. This will really help the LID team to continue to shift and provide great programming and support to instructors.
• Had a demo from Crestron, on the Air Media and Capture HD lines. Both look interesting – I like that Capture HD doesn't come with its own media hosting cloud service baked in, and that people can just stuff their own USB drive into the thing to record their media. We'll need some time to actually play with the things, but from what I've seen they look pretty much ideal for our needs.
• Starting to plan our upgrade from D2L 10.3 to 10.4. Hopefully, that will be a reasonably transparent process for users. If it will require a big communication and training push, we won't be able to do it responsibly until next year.
• Forcing myself to use a Surface Pro 3. Again. I think this is the third time. I need to push myself out of platform lock in, and need to be familiar with windows. Looking at the thing as a laptop rather than a tablet helps. It sucks as a tablet. But as a OneNote appliance, it's pretty good – the pen is awesome. Also, using Windows Live Writer to write this blog post – should be interesting to see how much the markup gets munged.
• I've been using an iPhone 6+ for over a month now, and am absolutely loving it. Best piece of tech I've ever used. Can't imagine going back to a phone-sized phone again. I find I'm hardly using my iPad anymore (which is what made the third attempt at using a Surface more viable).
• We're about to go through a pretty major upgrade to our campus wifi networks – the backbones etc have been seriously upgraded over the last couple years, and now it's time to beef up the wifi access points. This is the number 1 request from everybody who uses anything that touches a network. Looking forward to it.

Read

• Google Maps for the human body – could be interesting, if paired with our visualization studio or an Oculus VR headset…
• Our Environmental Design students are working on some really cool projects.
• George Veletsianos is pulling together links to various institutional strategy documents
• Moises Naim: The Hidden Effects of Cheap Oil. The USA's current economic war with Russia over oil will have some fun side effects.
• via Stephen Downes: John Danaher - Can blogging be academically viable? TL;DR: yes. maybe. I've had several people tell me they've started (or restarted) blogging as a direct result of the week-in-review style posts. Sharing what we do is important, and it doesn't have to be a Big Scary Thing.
• via Stephen Downes: Mark Federman – Five secrets of effective and enjoyable leadership. I'm not sure any of these are secrets. But yup.
• via BoingBoing: The Slanted Door Modern Vietnamese Cookbook. I ate there once, years ago, and wow.
• Jim Groom: UMW's Console Living Room. This is a really fun project by the DTLT gang at UMW. I think it's really important to show technology in the context of its day – wood paneling sounds hokey, but that was part of the experience. Media programmed into cartridges, accessed linearly, on fuzzy screens and fuzzier furniture. But, I wonder about the risk of being overly nostalgic about this stuff.
• Faculty Focus: Taking the Leap: Moving from In-Person to Online Courses. Some good tips. When I read it in my RSS reader, I didn't get the annoying pop-up asking to subscribe, or I wouldn't have saved the link. Anyway.
• via Stephen Downes: Jane Hart – 5 stages of workplace learning (revisited again). Some good descriptions of stages of development, and roles of instructors/facilitators/coaches. We're working through many of these transitions as well.
• Brian Lamb: Open Ends. A response to Sheila MacNeill's upcoming OER15 presentation. Also, Brian is blogging again!

Other

We got out for one last ski day. I'd written Nakiska off for the year, but they got some snow the other day, and had posted some photos that showed good coverage. Forecast looked good for today, so we took a shot. Lots of ice, but also still lots of good snow left. It's amazing how much has already melted though. I wiped out on the ice at the end of the third run, and messed up my hand. Awesome. Typing with a hand brace on is fun.

Work

It was a pretty epic week - we had our 2nd annual University of Calgary Teaching Awards ceremony on Tuesday - lots of really amazing instructors doing interesting things on campus. We’ll be looking for ways to showcase their (and others’) work over the coming year.

• refining the EDU’s strategic planning document - it’s coming along really nicely, but we need to figure out how to condense some of it without losing the meat.
• participated in a workshop on Public Pedagogy and Popular Culture in the Classroom - interesting discussion of the role of pop culture as more than just sprinkling superficial interestingness in a course - pop culture is pervasive and we are continuously learning and shaping our perception of the world through our interactions with it.
• finished the annual reviews for the team. best team ever. most of them.
• started reviewing the RFP responses for providing the AV equipment for the new Taylor Institute building. And realizing just how broken the RFP review process is, with checkboxes in spreadsheets rating administrative details rather than the actual qualities of the responses.
• Met with some folks who are interested in adopting badges.ucalgary.ca at a faculty level - lots of interesting ideas, and we will be working to enhance the campus badges platform before the fall semester (it’s currently being used in a small-scale pilot, but it looks like adoption is going to increase rather dramatically soon.¹
• provincial budget season. Alberta budget delivers lower than anticipated cuts to universities. Hooray for lower-than-anticipated cuts!

Read

• Jane Hart: The difference between social learning and social collaboration
• Stacy Greathouse: The Best Post Wiki: A Tool for Promoting Collaborative Learning and Higher-Order Thinking - interesting team-based approach to using wikis to enable ongoing collaboration in a course.
• WNYC: Being 12 - the year everything changes - having a 12-year-old at home, this is rather relevant…
• Bryan Jackson: The Quantified Self - on personal activity metrics as motivation to keep moving, and other things. I’ve been using that kind of personal data (and now fitbit and healthkit) to try to keep myself moving for a few years now. It works, mostly. But it also puts a lot of pressure to beat personal bests, etc, and I think that’s one of the things that led to me messing up my knee and foot. Also, getting old may have had something to do with that.
• Phil Hill: How Much Do College Students Actually Pay For Textbooks? - whatever the market will bear. One of the more important things we can do is support the meaningful development and adoption of open resources so students don’t have to bankrupt themselves to buy the latest edition of a corporate textbook. It’s a racket, and we can break it.
• Jim Groom: UMW Domains Data through Spring 2015 - some seriously impressive adoption of UMW Domains by undergrads at the University of Mary Washington.
• Quartz: Catholic priests are stirring up an epidemic of yogaphobia - we hit this a few years ago in The Boy™’s previous school. As chair of the school council, we brought in a yoga instructor to supplement phys ed activities. So kids could learn to bend and pretend to be trees and dinosaurs. But some parents freaked out because EVIL! SATAN! MUSLIM!² “If he empties his mind, SATAN WILL ENTER!” and the like. Insanity. It’d be nice if this kind of nonsense could be left out of public education. And yet, here we are again. Anyway.
• UV Letters: Not Invented Here - on the striking similarities between university missions and strategies. Isomorphism.

Other

I took a day off, to burn off vacation time that keeps building up. Finally went out on a decent bike ride to Cochrane and back. Ouch. I am so horribly out of shape. Lots of work to do.

Work

• boxes are still arriving for the Faculty Design Studio and Technology Lending Library. We need to get it all sorted, set up, and configured before we can open things up. Need to set up an inventory tracking system for the lending library items, so they don’t walk away without a trace. Once things are ready, both projects will have a home on the about-to-be-relaunched elearn.ucalgary.ca website
• annual review season. basically, best. job. ever. and with such an amazing team, too.
• continuing work on some classroom redesign projects - can’t wait to see these learning spaces take shape. We’ll have a lot of work to do as a unit to support instructors as they shift to more active learning strategies, and that’s going to be a lot of fun.
• shot another Instructor Intro Video™ - this one was completely different from any of the others I’ve done before. The instructor wanted to try something different, and read a storybook to share and model for her education students who are heading out to do their practicums. practica. whatever. The goal of these videos is to do fast intros for instructors, ideally in their offices/classrooms/wherever, rather than having a High Production Value™ professional marketing video. Seems to be working well so far.
• met with our privacy, copyright, and com/media folks to try to figure out the process for documenting consent to record and broadcast various types of sessions on campus - everything from public events such as convocation, to registrar classes, to workshops. Each has different requirements from policy standpoint, and it’s confusing about what’s needed in order to record them. Hopefully some clarification coming soon on the relevant websites.

Read

• Audrey Watters: (Why) Does Your Education Website Collect Information about Visitors? - we all need to think seriously about what we track, why we track it, what happens to that data, and who has access to it. And, when that data needs to be shredded. This stuff becomes Big Data Permanent Records for students if we’re not careful.
• Jared Stein: Why I Only Read Half the Things I’d Like To (and Remember Less than Half of Those I Do) - info vs. knowledge, in an info-glut world.
• Tony Bates: Rethinking learning spaces in a digital age: an example from Singapore
• Chris Nelson: Gaming reaches into far corners of academic world as U of C builds huge collection - on Dylan Tetrault and the awesome video games collection at UCalgary.
• SFU’s EdMedia Studio is open - sounds similar to what we’re planning with the Faculty Design Studio. Convergent evolution.

Lots of other stuff to read. Not sure if this part is worth doing a recap. There’s the “Shared Items” from my FeverËš RSS reader, and links.darcynorman.net for other stuff. Holy. This part takes forever to put together. May need to figure out a way to streamline this.

I've had an SSL certificate installed on my website for awhile now, but it only kicked in if someone manually typed in HTTPS (which I've been using when I login to the site to do stuff). I'm trying to reduce ways in which my activities online expose privacy (for both myself and the 3 people who read my blog), so it's time to throw the switch for the default to be encrypted HTTPS SSL access to this site. I'd held off because I wasn't entirely comfortable that my SSL certificate would be accepted by all browsers, but it seems to be working. I'll be switching to the new Let's Encrypt SSL/TLS system as soon as it's up and running. Hopefully this summer.

Audrey Watters has opted out of tracking people on her websites. It’s a good read. I agree 100%.

I’ve felt creeped out by the pervasive tracking networks online - analytics, ad networks, cookies, super-cookies, browser fingerprinting, etc…. This surveillance ecosystem is the end result of an arms race to find out about people reading web pages online. There are a few reasons, but my gut says it boils down to 2:

Pearson is apparently monitoring social media, to detect signs of cheating during exams. That's insanely creepy, and a horrible violation.

"And for those who think "Well, its Twitter, its public", remember this: So is walking down the street. But is it OK for the government to monitor us with street surveillance cameras and send us fines for not crossing with the crosswalk?"

via Pearson Caught Spying On Students. Big Brother Is Here.

Work

• Helping to plan the scale-up of the THRIVE Project offered by our Student Success Centre - an incredible pro-active student support system, working to find students who may be in need of support to succeed in their program. Man, I wish this was a thing back when I was an undergrad.
• More progress on learning spaces projects - I’m learning a lot about designing flexible spaces, and balancing priorities of people who need to use and support activities in these spaces.
• Curriculum mapping - starting to reflect on our successes and challenges in rolling out a curriculum mapping tool for use across campus. We’ve learned a lot, and need to start planning how to offer that service in a sustainable and effective way.
• I guest presented in Heather Ross and Ryan Banow’s Introduction to Learning Technologies course. We had a fun discussion/Q+A. Hopefully I didn’t ramble too much. We covered a lot of topics in the hour. Might be useful to revisit some of the topics/themes in depth later. Also, this was, surprisingly, the first actual Google Hangout session I’ve been in (aside from test sessions). It worked really well - kind of makes Adobe Connect feel… antiquated…
• I shot another instructor-introduction video. We’re hoping to get more done over spring/summer, so online students know a bit about their instructors. Trying to go beyond “hello. welcome to my course.” and more “hey. this is why this course should be interesting. also, I’m a human, and am looking forward to it.”
• paperwork. yay! year-end reconciliation of stuff. good times. cough
• IT launches new university-wide initiative to protect data - I have a sinking feeling this is going to trip a lot of people up.
• Boxes of stuff for the new Faculty Design Studio are starting to arrive. This is going to be great - a place where instructors can play with, use, and make stuff with emerging technologies. For instance:

Work

More focus on learning spaces, both for the new Taylor Institute building, and for a classroom renovation in Haskayne. Lots of interesting options for flexible use of space. We are looking at using hardware as the core platform within a space, with software adding the actual interaction stuff - that model makes it much easier to switch things around, without having to have monolithic devices and appliances that try to do everything. Small pieces, loosely joined.

Work

• This week was largely about committees for adjudicating the University of Calgary Teaching Awards - I sat on 4 committees this year, with 3 of them convening this week. Yikes. Lots of incredible stuff being done on campus. I was especially impressed by how all of the student (undergrad and grad) reps handled the process - complete pros in every sense. Love it.¹
• Produced another “intro to my course” video, for Ellen Perrault, in Social Work - these are intended to be short, informal videos that put a face to online instructors.
• Went to a talk by Kevin Kee (from Brock), about the “200 million email problem” - turns out, it wasn’t about my inbox. Learned about the rapidly-increasing-by-orders-of-magnitude problem in digital humanities, as everything has become (is becoming) digital, and how important it is to shift from reading everything and summarizing, to filtering, prioritizing, aggregating, and building tools and networks to make sense of things that can’t possibly be understood by brute-force reading it all. Kee outlined some of the changes to research, writing, publishing and communicating scholarly works.
• The first meeting of the EDU Book Club - we’re reading Fink’s book Creating Significant Learning Experiences. I only had time to get through the first 16 pages before the meeting, but it’s already got me thinking about some tangential things.
• We picked up an iPhone 6 Plus to use as a test device, so Kevin can test the stuff he builds on the bigger screen. I’ll be using it as my phone, as well. First reactions: holy. it’s big. Also, that’s kind of great. I take back all of the snarky comments I’ve made to people with giantphones (Brad and Jason - you guys were right). And, this thing is probably the best camera I’ve ever used. As NK would say: aMAZing!

Read

• Quartz: The architectural theory that’s killing personal space at the office - we’re moving to a much more open/communal environment in The New Building™ - less personal space for many (including myself, as I’ll lose an actual office), but I’m looking forward to having everyone sharing space (with enough other spaces in the building for alone-time when needed).
• Audrey continues her guide to GitHub and Jekyll (I haven’t had a chance to catch up, though…)
• a systematic analysis of downtown donair vendors. for science. time to plan a field trip.
• Dr. Barclay is still working on bats and windfarms - back in the day, a friend of mine worked in his lab, and said that it’s not contact with the blades as much as the drastic changes in air pressure that kind of make the little critters explode. yikes. still working on that.
• MediaCore raised some cash.
• Audrey Watters: How Steve Jobs Brought the AppleII to the classroom - on how policy and lobbying does more to spread tech in education than tech or educators do.
• The Conversation: The words that make a successful grant application - developing and understanding new and novel systems.
• Mount Royal University’s updated strategic plan
• Jon Kruithof shares some code he uses to hack data reports in D2L
• Derek Bruff posted an interesting article and presentation on learning spaces at Vanderbilt.
• Campus Technology: How course web design impacts student engagement

Other

• Spock rode a bicycle
• We’re trying a “screen” purge at home. No screens, except for school and work stuff (and we slipped and had a movie night last night). I’m surprising loving it. We went about 3 days with total screen blackout at home, and I was really surprised at how quiet it was at home, and at how much more we all talked. OK - after hitting Publish, this laptop gets put away again.

Only 1 ski day this week - I took Wednesday off to head back out to Nakiska. The silver chair was out of order, and the other side of the mountain was split up by race training and fences running across it. Some actual powder, but not many ways to actually get to it. Still, not a bad way to spend a morning.