As an institution, we design learning spaces and select learning technologies, and implement them in ways to make them available to enable and enhance student learning. But, the design decisions made in the development, selection, and implementation of these resources shape what is perceived to be possible. The resources may not be technically restrictive to specific usage patterns and pedagogies, but through design decisions there are paths of least resistance that will naturally be found.

I did my BSc in zoology, and wound up focusing on invertebrates. There’s an amazing diversity and beauty in them. There’s just something about radial symmetry that still mesmerizes me.

via Jason Kottke

Work

• helping to refine the technology/space plan for the new building. learning lots about the intersection between space and technology - blog post on that brewing. hopefully, time to write it next week.
• head down reading nominations for this year’s University of Calgary Teaching Awards - I get to sit on 3 committees, so there’s lots of reading involved. lots of amazing work on campus.
• piloted the use of Swivl robot camera mounts to record lessons as part of the Instructional Skills Workshop. Previously, they’d used huge, cumbersome, complicated video recording carts. Now, they use an iPod Touch to record good quality video, on an automated robot tracking camera mount. Worked great, and we learned a few things to improve the process.
• working on plans to spin up a new Faculty Design Studio in the office - a place where instructors can come to make stuff to use in their courses. Still early days - haven’t even placed the orders for stuff yet (that’s the plan for the next few days) - can’t wait to get this set up and let people book it to make great stuff to support student learning.
• I’m borrowing a Dell Latitude 7000 2-in-1 tablet/laptop, as a possible alternative to Surface Pro 3. It’s supported by IT, which means it should Just Work™. Early reactions, with about an hour of play time, is that it’s a total turd. Crappy as a laptop. Crappy as a tablet. But combined? Crappy 2-in-1. With Windows 8 Enterprise, so much of the touch-enabled stuff from Pro was turned off by default. I’ll put some more time into trying to convince it to suck less. So far, not impressed. Hard to tell, right?
• my team went on a tour of learning spaces on campus, led by the director of Campus Planning. Saw some horrible and embarrassing spaces, and some absolutely amazing and inspiring ones. We don’t often get into some of these spaces, because there are classes using them (hence the tour during Reading Week). So, the tour was extremely helpful, as we’re working to come up with plans to improve learning spaces across all campuses.

Read

• The Online Photographer: How to improve your photography - practice.
• Michael Feldstein - Wanted - a theory of change

If there is a way forward, that is it. We need to try things together and see how they work. We need to apply our theories and find out what breaks (and what works better than we could have possibly imagined). We need to see if what works for us will also work for others. Anyone who does that in education is a hero of mine.

Work

I’m forcing myself to work from a Surface Pro 3 tablet for awhile because I need to avoid locking myself into a pure monoculture. I’ve used the thing for 3 (non-consecutive) weeks now, and it’s been an eye-opener. I’ll likely write up something separate with some details. I’m writing this blog post on it. And I’m not sure I’ll finish the post without switching to my real laptop.

Not much noteworthy at work this week - most of the office was away for the EDC conference in Winnipeg. I went to 2 HR workshops. And worked part-way through a stack of award nominations for the 2 review committees I’m sitting on this year. Good times.

Work

• Lots of meetings and manager stuff.
• Nancy Chick appointed Taylor Institute's first academic director. Awesome! Can't wait for her to get moved in.

Read

• George Veletsianos: Open practices in the absence of institutional policies
• Ben Stern: Four Smart Tips for Instructional Tech Specialists
• Maryellen Weimer: Group Work: What Do Students Want from Their Teammates?
• Head et al: Lifelong learning in the digital age: A content analysis of recent research on participation
• Daniel Christian: Will micro-credentialing be an example of the use of big data in education and training? (maybe?)
• Scott Haselwood: Six Ingredients for Sweetening your Flipped Classroom Recipe - another list blog post. ugh. but some interesting bits in it regardless.
• John Gruber: Dazzling Results
  

  conventional disruption theory does not apply to consumer-driven markets in which outstanding design and integration (as opposed to modularity) can drive demand.

Work

• I was in Kamloops for the week, meeting with folks to talk about planning campus engagements regarding common platforms for learning management systems. TRU has a really fantastic engagement started, documenting everything in a wiki and trying really hard to include anyone who is at all interested in participating. Looking forward to seeing how their process evolves this year.
• Got to hang out with Brian, Alan cough, Irwin, and so many others. Lots of great people working together at TRU!
• Our campus datacentre had an “unexpected power outage” yesterday. I don’t have details about what exactly happened, aside from the visible symptoms of every online service at the university going dark (including the website, and CAS authentication - so, even though D2L was happily chugging along, nobody could login ¹ ). We need to work on rapid communication about these catastrophic failures. I was tweeting updates from the @eLearningUofC twitter account for almost half an hour before I saw anything official from campus.

Read

• Tony Bates: Balancing the use of social media and privacy protection in online learning
• Jared Stein: Infographic on LMS course web site designs (by the Instructure Research and Education team)
• Tony Hawk: Who You Callin’ A Sellout? (on getting paid to do what you love)
• Yuki Noguchi: And So We Meet, Again: Why The Workday Is So Filled With Meetings (NPR). “Parkinson’s Law. This is the idea, backed up by research, that tasks take as long as the time allotted. If you budget two hours, it takes two hours.”
• Trevor Owens: Advance Praise for Designing Online Communities - this is another one on my to-order list. Looks like the book will be available in a couple of months…

Other

Next time I head to Kamloops, I’ll have to try to get out a bit more. Maybe a day trip to Sun Peaks (which I saw from the air on the way in, and it looks like fun!)… All I saw of Kamloops was the bottom couple hundred feet of the valley, buried under an inversion for the week…

Work

• The EDU had the second retreat to work on vision/mission/strategy for the unit. Lots of great ideas on how we can have high impact across campus.
• Launch of the UofC Badges platform for use in a pilot project for professional development programs in the EDU. (I have a profile on the platform, but haven't hooked up a Mozilla Backpack yet)
• an update on the pilot/relaunch of the UofC elearning support site
• Werklund School of Education's IDEAS Conference is coming up, April 30-May 1, 2015.
• Cumming School of Medicine's Health and Medical Education Scholarship Symposium is coming up, Feb. 17, 2015.

Read

• Karen Walrond on the necessity of practice
• UofC researcher Margaret Clarke, on the growing number of autism cases
• via Ars Technica, the Crash Override Network to provide community support for anti-harassment online.
• Gardner Campbell writes about Sweet Spots and pulls together some interesting reading on the topic.
• Louise Katz on the commodification of creativity in higher education
• Gardner Campbell on the relationship between play and practice
• Ben Thompson on the end of trickle-down technology (reminded me of my technology adopters curve )
• Giulia Forsythe: should faculty provide students with lecture notes? - sounds great, but does it turn teaching into a content production mill? are there better ways to record and/or share notes for a class, than having the instructor produce the canonical and static set of notes for students?
• Mike Caulfield: Rethinking wiki lifecycle: sites as bounded conversations. Federated Wiki feels right, but I'm still not sure I totally get it.
• Audrey Watters: a hippocratic oath for ed-tech - what would this look like? I love the idea, but because of the individualized nature of the field, I think we all need to craft our own code of ethics.
• Scott McLeod: avoiding worst-case technology scenarios through mindfulness (linking to an article by Mike Crowley
• Tom Woodward: It could be beautiful: aspirational vs. operational edtech
• Cole Camplese: teaching (and learning)
• Irfaan Sorathia on online tools for making affinity diagrams
• Mike Caulfield: "Users" - false hierarchies of creators and the impact of creatorism
  

  To coders, people who don't code are not makers. But we keep punching all the way down. Published writers kick bloggers. Bloggers see themselves as creating on a level that readers don't. It's not just about your job title, it's about your internal taxonomy.

Work

• planning what the EDU needs to find out regarding physical learning spaces across campus - formal, informal, f2f, blended, online. We need to build an inventory of what we have, how it’s used, what people would like to do, and where gaps exist. Then, we can smush that together with scholarship of teaching and learning, institutional priorities, funding, etc… to help plan things.
• starting to plan a campus engagement regarding lecture capture - I hate the phrase lecture capture, so I’ll eventually be calling it something else. Lecture Capture implies that all an instructor (it’s always an Instructor) needs to do is press “record” (or, better yet, have it automatically scheduled so they don’t even have to do that), and they are magically innovating and engaging as online rock stars. No. That’s uninteresting. It’s part of it - the ability to record classroom presentations can be useful, but I’d rather frame the whole thing as a media production platform that lets anyone (instructors, students, staff, others) record, publish and share their stuff without needing multi-thousand-dollar appliances or high end equipment. We’ll be working with people across campus to find out how to do that.
• I’m trying to find out if students use the D2L “Content Browser” widget, which is handy, but doesn’t show all content so things get lost (if a prof posts a syllabus to the Overview section, which seems like the best place to do that, the widget can’t display it, and students then think the prof hasn’t posted the syllabus at all. Hilarity ensues.) D2L: the Content Browser widget in 10.3.x needs some serious love. It’s incomplete and therefore confusing or worse.
• Still working with Dublabs on the next version of the D2L mobile app. It’s getting closer, but isn’t quite where it needs to be in order to replace the version that’s live now. Currently, the new version of the app can’t display content in a course. Which is kind of important.
• Thanks to Tim Owens, I’m playing around with Sandstorm.io - this has HUGE potential to let folks spin up tools as needed to support teaching and learning (and other important stuff). Jim Groom writes about it. Unfortunately, our campus runs an older version of Linux, so we can’t readily deploy it ourselves. Looking into better options for my group to be able to spin stuff up without hitting that obstacle.

Read

• Tony Bates: Identifying the unique educational characteristics of a medium for online learning
• via Jason Kottke: 80s tech and Back to the Future - got me thinking about the interaction patterns of technology and implications for course design and student centrism. 80s tech was linear - you dropped in a cassette, and pressed play. you could scrub forward or backward, but the recording was fixed. 00s tech is nonlinear - anyone (not just teachers or producers) can assemble references to any number of things of various formats, which can be accessed in any order or reassembled. What does that do to how we think of media and learning?
• Audrey Watters: Openness and Ownership: Who Owns School Work? - this is something we think about a lot, when instructors ask us about a campus anti-plagiarism tool. We don’t have one, largely because the entire concept is based on violating students’ ownership of their work, which is counter to what we are about as an institution of higher learning (and counter to what they’re asking for regarding anti-plagiarism, ironically).
• Jon Kruithof: Publisher integrations with D2L - I spent some time working with D2L and Pearson to get their stuff integrated over the last couple of weeks. Yeah.
• Isabelle Barrette-Ng does some really great work with her large classes at UCalgary
• Cyclelicious: Fast after 50 - I’m neither a racer nor over 50, but some good tips on not letting age kick you in the ass. As it is currently doing. I need to work on that… Also, I need to pick up a copy of this book.
• via Stephen Downes, BCCampus: Building better curriculum through Universal Design for Learning - we’re focusing more on space design (physical/blended/online, so UDL is an interesting/important framework to approach that
• via Jason Kottke: DFW’s 2005 Kenyon College commencement speech. Watch it. A few times. I hadn’t read the speech, or seen this video interpretation of it, but have been trying to push myself to think more positively about people and situations, rather than just being about ME ME ME I AM THE CENTRE OF THE UNIVERSE. As it is easy to do. Have a nice day.
• Audrey Watters: What do we mean by Open Education?
• Tony Bates: Seeking the unique pedagogical characteristics of audio
• My Uni Trade - UofC students got fed up with the crappy return on their textbooks when the resell them through the bookstore. So they built a website to do it better. Awesome. Now, if only they didn’t have to spend a couple thousand on books each year in the first place…
• New York Times: Silicon Valley Turns Its Eye to Education. The article suggests that education is the last field to realize that the internet exists. Which is total BS, because the internet was invented by education. Do these writers have no knowledge of history beyond the last week or so?
• via Daniel Christensen: iBeacon in education case study by Stephen Perse Foundation
• We don’t need no stinkin’ badges: the impact of reward features and feeling rewarded in educational games (Elsevier paywall warning. Awesome.) (Does every badge-related article or presentation really need to reference this?)
• UFV Cascade: Sociology department head Martha Dow breaks tradition with student-centred learning contracts - interesting approach to have students design their own assessment strategy.
• A better way to tie shoelaces. Life altering. Works like a charm. I’ve been doing a simplified version of this (doing a single loop, skipping step 6) for a week and haven’t had to re-tie once.

Other

Not a lot. It’s been a busy week. Got out skiing with Evan to Nakiska, for Ski Day #9 of the season (so far). Super windy day. Super crowded. But we had a blast. (see the DFW commencement video - thinking differently about crowds and obstacles really does help).

Work

• Still working with DubLabs to get our updated D2L mobile app working with UofC CAS authentication etc…. This has taken a long time. Hoping the end result is worth it - we have a working mobile app (built with the original D2L-built Campus Life platform), but that product was phased out by D2L¹, to be replaced by the DubLabs-powered service. Seriously unimpressed by how this transition has been communicated and handled.
• Did the first “intro to my course” video, which will eventually be used as a way for (primarily online) instructors to put brief “Hi! This is me, and here’s some stuff that’s going to be awesome in my course/research/etc…”. The first video was mostly to do a full cycle of planning/shooting/editing/publishing, and it worked out pretty well. I’d do a few things differently, mostly in composing the framing of the shot (I’d tilt the camera down a bit more next time, for less dead space above the instructor, and be more mindful of lines in the background).
• Edited and posted Reclaiming Educational Technology: Higher Ed and Startup Cultures - all 4 videos are available, and now I need to work on a super-cut edit that pulls the bits of all topics together.
  Worked with Pearson to integrate their stuff into our D2L environment. And, on the same day, consulted with an instructor who is putting together an OER grant. I’m hoping that balanced things out enough…

Read

• Natasha got a paper published - Exploring the context of Canadian graduate student teaching certificates in university teaching | Kenny | Canadian Journal of Higher Education

The Electronic Freedom Foundation is taking on online harassment as a serious barrier to freedom of speech:

Just because the law sometimes allows a person to be a jerk (or worse) doesn't mean that others in the community are required to be silent or to just stand by and let people be harassed. We can and should stand up against harassment. Doing so is not censorship—it's being part of the fight for an inclusive and speech-supporting Internet.

Episode 3 of Reclaiming Educational Technology, looking at the transition from monolithic vendor-provided enterprise solutions to more flexible and adaptive projects. Some of the segments are also used in episodes 1 and 2, but in order for this to work as a standalone piece, needed to be re-included here as well. When I do a longer supercut version, I’ll remove the duplicate clips.

Reclaiming Educational Technology - episode 3 from UCalgary Taylor Institute on Vimeo.