After consulting the available stats and readership metrics, I compiled the following likely-comprehensive list:

1. I don't know.
2. I have no idea.
3. Who tracks this kind of stuff?
4. Seriously? Stats are bogus anyway.
5. LOL stats don't tell you anything about what's important.

Work

This was the first time in a few years where I actually took time off during the christmas break. Last year, it was in the height of LMS implementation and transition. The year before that, writing up the LMS RFP report. The year before that, another Big Important Report™ that I don’t think was actually read. Anyway. Took 2 weeks off over Christmas, and did almost no official work. Wow.

Episode 2 of Reclaiming Educational Technology, focusing on the DTLT unit at the University of Mary Washington, and how they are able to successfully foster a culture of innovation.

Reclaiming Educational Technology - fostering a culture of innovation from UCalgary Taylor Institute on Vimeo.

Work

Kevin did a soft-launch of the UCalgaryBadges platform, using Mozilla Backpack as the badge framework. But, it's down at the moment (keep reading re: campus network overhaul).

Not much else - was only in the office on Monday, then off work until January 5. And, with campus networks down for a comprehensive overhaul, I can't even open my calendar to see what I did that day. Also, no support requests, because all campus systems are down (including elearning platforms and email - so, nothing to break, and no way to complain about it. aaaaah…)

Work

• had several meetings with instructors and dean-type-people in different faculties this week. Lots of interesting ideas for projects, and more interestingly, lots of interest in building up communities and communities-of-practice around many topics - including learning technologies, development, learning spaces, content creation, etc… Great stuff. Can’t wait to help support those communities (and more)!
• Met with a prof who has taught herself how to produce screencasts to create videos for use in her courses. Love it. Gave her some (very minor) tips, and set her up with a better mic and webcam to use. Can’t wait to see what she comes up with.
• getting lots of interest on campus, from people who are putting together proposals to present at the 2015 University of Calgary Conference on Learning and Teaching - which is shaping up to be a really fantastic event (again).
• mid-year reviews with my team. so good. best team ever.
• visited the video game collection at the TFDL to. um. research the history of interaction design. with the team. cough So good. Fired up an Intellivision, slid in the plastic controller sheets, and fired up Skiing.

intelligent television from D’Arcy Norman on Vimeo.

Work

• learning spaces - my group is going to be focusing on the design of learning spaces starting in the new year - especially on how physical and digital learning spaces overlap, and how design can help to shape engaging learning experiences.
• paperwork. the absolute worst part of my job is reconciling the damned AMEX statement each month. I'm getting better at it, so it's slightly less painful now. Might be worse, if vendors actually took AMEX…
• the office non-denominational winter-solstice tree-shaped social artifact is up and decorated.
• cleaned out a storage room to use for the "technology lending library" - starting to collect a few different bits of tech that instructors can borrow to experiment with. Swivls, microphones, cameras, etc…
• got a Canon HF G30 compact video camera, to use with some projects. Holy. What a fantastic little camera. 20x optical zoom (and 400x digital zoom! I haven't tried that yet). f/1.8 lens. Wifi control and streaming. Crazy.
• moved into the new iMac 5K as my main work computer. Wow. So many pixels. But they're too small to actually see… Already starting to crunch away at the Reclaim Hackathon interviews to get a second and third episode up soon. Ish.

Read

• Support Hack Education - Audrey is one of the most important, authentic, critical voices in education (and ed tech). She does it without the support and safety net of a corporation or institution, and needs our support to keep going. Well worth it.
• Top Ed-Tech Trends 2014 - speaking of Audrey, here's her killer roundup of 2014 in edtech. Holy. I haven't had a chance to do more than skim the articles. I will be going back to read every word.
• thanks to a tip from @DrGarcia, I started reading C. Strange's Educating by Design. 1 chapter in, and it's already given me a lot to think about.
• Malcolm Gladwell is a hack. But you already knew that.
• Hiring a tutor may have short-term gains, but long-term losses. Teach a fish to read, and it something something for a bicycle.
• Instructional Design in the VUCA World (via Stephen Downes). It has a pretty diagram.
• Toys are more gendered now than they were 50 years ago. At least they make pink toy crossbows to to even things up. cough
• template for transformation to blended learning - via Ray Henderson. It's a bit over simplified, but could come in handy.
• Steve Wheeler on flipping classrooms
• Ruben Puentedura's presentation on an integrated approach to technology in education

Other

• the skiing line of the year - no. way. in. hell. I'm getting into skiing, and I admire the lines and skill of these people. But nope.
• took The Boyâ„¢ out to Nakiska again today. What an absolutely amazing day. He's getting stronger and more confident. So amazing to see him get better every time we go out.

Work

• I posted the first episode of what will become a series, pulling from the footage recorded during the Open Ed Reclaim hackathon at UMW. More to come, ASAP.
• plans for the 2015 Design for Learning conference are shaping up nicely. Nearly ready for submissions. This is the key teaching-and-learning event at UCalgary, and it’s going to be another great one.
• quick chat with Brian at TRU about their initial plans for an LMS migration. Just when I thought I was done talking about LMS migrations…
• Spent much of the week debugging slow performance on our application and database servers. Still have no real solid evidence on what’s bringing the servers to their knees, but I sure am enjoying the constant stream of Pingdom “YOUR SITE IS DOWN” notices, and gentle nudges from our IT Operator account that the server is down. The servers hosted by IT. cough Anyway. Using Apache scalp to mine the apache logs, and MySQLTuner.pl to try to figure out WTF is going on. No luck yet.
• Spent the week trying to use a Surface Pro 3 as my mobile device. I tried first last weekend, and after a few hours rage-restored-to-factory-condition and put it back in my backpack. Some people love it. I don’t. I initially thought of it as a big-ass, expensive iPad. It failed miserably at that. Then, I thought of it as a more expensive MacBook Air, but crippled by Windows 8. Yeah. That basically sums it up. So, now it goes into the tech lending library for people to experiment with, and I happily go back to my iPad for mobile stuff, and MBA for desktop/less-mobile stuff.

Read

• UofC Law prof embraces innovative teaching methods
• Tannis Morgan’s notes from her Open Education session on shifting an institution toward Open
• Tony Bates compares/contrasts the Toronto School and Alberta School perspectives on online colloborative learning
• First Monday - the function of buzzwords
• First Monday - is “quitting online stuff” a thing?
• STEM teaching and learning community at UCalgary
• The Conversation - office design should focus on people, not just the work they do
• McGill teaching and learning blog - how to find free, interactive resources for your courses
• Hack Education - Audrey takes on buzzwords
• The Conversation - how to spot a scary mole
• Tony Bates - ed tech hasn’t really changed things in 30 years
• Stephen Downes posted notes from an ePortfolios and Badges workshop at Open Educa Berlin
• Jane Hart on technology training vs. changing training
• a truly annoying rant by an opinionated burnout teacher/network-administrator, condescending to everyone who hasn’t had the urge to compile their own kernel in the last week. This is exactly the wrong attitude for anyone remotely responsible for providing support. Or, you know, interacting with humans.

Other

not much. aside from taking Friday off to go skiing with The Boy™ at Nakiska. Still pretty barren on the slopes, but we still had a blast!

During the Reclaim Hackathon at UMW last week, several of us were talking over food and beverages and realized that we had the opportunity to document the current thinking in the “edtech scene”. It’s something that we hadn’t tried to do explicitly before, but we realized that if we don’t do it ourselves we’ll be left with the narratives pushed by the Big Business of Edtech Venture Capital™. So, David Kernohan and I took it on as a project. We recruited Andy Rush to record a series of impromptu interviews with some of the people who were present at the event¹, and off we went.

Work

• Final preparation for launching the Curriculum Alignment Tool to support curriculum review on campus.
• Started logging and working with the interview footage from the Reclaim Hackathon interviews. Lots of work left, but it's started.
• Had my mid-year review. Huh. I might actually be good at this stuff after all. Having a blast, for sure.

Read

• Patrick Finn appeared in the latest episode of the UofC's Peer Review podcast
• John Gruber on Paul Ford on why HTML5's official status is important to humans.
• Fitness tracking data being used in court. A Calgary lawyer is using data from Fitbit to try to show that his client was actually injured. How long before this stuff gets used badly? Insurance companies using it to downgrade customers or refuse payment. etc…
• Debugging slow MySQL servers: check for fragmentation, run MySQLTuner.pl
• McMaster's Learning Portfolio project sounds interesting.

Travel

• returned from Fredericksburg on Monday. Car, train, train, plane, (de-icing), plane, car, home. Whew.
• hoping to get out to Nakisha on the weekend for the first ski day, if it's not -5000ËšC or anything crazy like that…

Work

• extremely short work week, due to travel for Open Ed etc…
• Open Education 2014 was pretty amazing. The conference has changed pretty drastically over the years as it's gotten bigger. That's a good thing - but the vibe has definitely shifted from a fringe/evangelist gathering to a full-on Real Conference. Still lots of butts-in-seats, but lots of amazing stories and projects being shared.

• Reclaim Your Domain: UMW Hackathon - including some early work on a documentary project to capture the current edtech scene and frame it in ways other than the standard Silicon Valley VC Solutioneering narrative. More to come on that soon…
• visiting the amazing new Digital Convergence Center at UMW - an inspiring facility, but it's the team here that makes it so amazing. Can't wait to see what kinds of stuff they do together. Lots of interesting ideas that might be repurposed into a new Institute for Teaching and Learning cough
• Speaking of which, the crane was removed from the Taylor Institute construction site. Progress! Still a year away, but we're getting closer…

It's going to take a long, long time for me to work through all of my notes, photos, videos, etc… from this week. Wow.

The work-log format wasn't working, and was missing huge chunks of stuff through the week. So, being more fully inspired by Audrey Watters' and Clint Lalonde's week-in-review styles…

Work

• started placing orders for items to add to the fledgeling "technology lending library" that will be managed/provided by my group in the Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning. So far, it's a very small library, but I'll be adding things to it as I'm able, and offering it all out for instructors to explore/experiment/use. So far, we've got a Swivl robot camera mount, a couple of iPod Touches for recording video, a GoPro HERO4 Silver for HD video and wifi goodness, and some microphones. I'll be adding iPads and a MS Surface Pro 3 tablet in the next couple of weeks. More to come… I need to figure out a good process for making sure people can sign the stuff out and actually use it, and track what they do with it so we know what's needed…
• tweaking our D2L environment so faculties can ramp up their use of ePortfolios, now that email addresses aren't considered Super Secret Private Information after the switch to O365 and everyone activating their @ucalgary.ca addresses.
• I was volunteered to a new General Faculties Council subcommittee on learning spaces - the Campus and Facilities Development Subcommittee (CFDS). This should be a great group to be working with, and we're being asked to look at physical learning spaces across the university.
• working on a regular report to our Teaching and Learning Committee on the state of learning technologies at the UofC, and tracking our implementation of the Strategic Framework for Learning Technologies. I'll miss the TLC meeting next week because I'll be dodging bulletsattending Open Education in DC.

Read

• Explorable Explanations - essay on post-static-text modern ebook-type-thing, by Bret Victor
• HuffPo article on "hottest ed tech" (which seems rather similar to our own list of stuff to explore)
• UToday article about augmented reality in education, with 3D brains popping off the printed page.
• Another UToday article, about flipped classrooms, featuring Alice Woolley from Law.
• more on banning personal devices in class, and still not getting that this is about power and control more than it is about technology.
• I found my next bike.
• EdTech Magazine article on using Oculus Rift VR headsets to give tours of learning spaces. Yup. We'll be playing with that. Previsualizing renovations and new spaces? You bet. And some other ideas I'm working on…
• Stephen Downes linked to the Mozilla Badges wiki - lots of info and links there.
• 20 Linux system monitoring tools every sysadmin should know - could come in handy, when trying to figure out why a server is suddenly acting funky for no apparent reason cough.
• they landed a robot on a freaking comet
• a great presentation on Badges from an anonymous person from UC Davis
• sustainable technology via biodegradable materials?
• Amazon selling student work without consent? Unpossible! But check out the last paragraph - that's basically my take on TurnItIn and its ilk - it's not OK to force students to upload their work to a third party so it can be sold back to them (and others). It's the same model as academic journals taking the work of researchers, and then selling it back to them. But people don't see the problem there, either…
  

  "I am also concerned by the fact that some institutions are requiring that dissertations be run through a check against the Turnitin database before submission," Stommel wrote. "This creates a culture of suspicion around student work that I find directly hostile to the enterprise of education.... Ultimately, I'm not opposed to people choosing to sell their dissertations, but I am opposed to institutions requiring graduate students to upload their dissertations to corporate platforms like Proquest and Turnitin."

• The EDU folks all met with the director of the Centre for Teaching and Learning at our Qatar campus (she was in town for the week, working out of our offices). We figured out lots of ways that we can collaborate.
• starting to order items to add to the “tech lending library” fleet, as well as stuff we can use to make videos etc…
• reverted the elearn.ucalgary.ca site to the old broken Drupal version because it was too jarring having some stuff in the awesome new WordPress knowledgebase, and other stuff in the old site. When we’ve had a chance to move all content to the new site, I’ll just throw the switch and be done with it all at once.
• started rebuilding the UofC D2L mobile apps in the DubLabs application framework¹. They’ll do the first build of the app (just working on CAS authentication now), and then I can take it from there. Should be a better mobile app that’s more than just a webkit wrapper. Hopefully.
• again, more stuff that needs more time to grow before it can be blogged.