Audrey Watters, presenting to Pepperdine University:

Ed-tech works like this: you sign up for a service and you're flagged as either "teacher" or "student" or "admin." Depending on that role, you have different "privileges" — that's an important word, because it doesn't simply imply what you can and cannot do with the software. It's a nod to political power, social power as well.

Many pieces of software, despite their invocation of "personalization," present you with a very restricted, restrictive set of choices of who you "can be."

UCalgary made the national news, with this segment titled “Calgary professor bans modern technology in his classroom”¹.

I really don’t know what to say about this. My gut reaction is something like “if they’re tuning out and checking Facebook in class, that’s data about how the class is going, and banning technology would just hide the symptom rather than actually fixing anything.”

Also, the prof still uses her own tech in every class, with laptop and projector etc… fired up. So, it’s not about technology on its own.

elearn.ucalgary.ca rebuild

The elearn.ucalgary.ca elearning support website accreted content over the years. It was long overdue for a major overhaul in order to make it useful to people who are looking for info. While that info was in the previos website, it had grown difficult to find stuff because the site had become a dumping ground of content - to the point that the elearning support folks couldn't find stuff on it, and didn't know what was there. It needed to be rebuilt to reflect how people look for support, and to make sure we keep it active and current. We had known it was needed for a long time, but didn't have the time until after the D2L migration was complete. It's complete now.

Badging

We're working on a couple of badging-related projects in the EDU. Kevin's looking into Mozilla's Open Badges platform/framework, and we're exploring what it means for a department/faculty/university to issue (and accept) badges as microcredentials. Lots of really great discussions on this. Looking forward to seeing what we come up with!

Committees and Reports and Bears Oh My!

Yeah. Making sausage. Mmm. Sausage.

Learning Object Repository

Seriously. I'm having flashbacks. But, we have faculties who need to be able to share files within the context of their online courses, and public websites aren't appropriate. So, LOR in D2L is being spun up. Thankfully, this time around, it's just a bunch of checkboxes instead of having to build a platform and implement IMS LOM and other fun bits. I've enabled a University-wide repository, where anyone can push content to share with the whole campus. We're also working with the faculty of Veterinary Medicine, to figure out a good way for their folks to share learning resources across courses in the program.

When we work with instructors, there are 3 general groupings, in terms of their comfort level and technology integration and innovation in their courses.

Reluctant

There is a small group that doesn't use much technology, doesn't integrate much in their teaching, and don't pursue any strategies that would be considered "innovative." From the outside, this group is often labelled as Luddites or dismissed as being laggards, but that is definitely not always the case. There are important innovations happening in this group, but they may not be visible to outsiders because they aren't using the shared language of silicon valley innovation. Not every innovation requires high technology, or even technology at all. We can learn much from the Reluctant adopters, because many of them are reluctant to adopt mainstream technology because it doesn't do what they need.

The Colesâ„¢ Notesâ„¢ version: a super-short week that felt like a super-long one.

Thanksgiving. And 45.

Thanksgiving on Monday. And I turned 45 on Tuesday, and I took the day off because why not. We had a quiet family extra-long-weekend, and spent some time out in the Elbow Falls area. Wow, did the 2013 flood ever rampage that area.

Open Education

Picked up the plane ticket. Assuming air travel is still a thing next month, I'll be in DC for Open Ed, and then Fredericksburg for the Reclaim thing on the weekend. Totally looking forward to both, and to reconnecting with the Open Ed crowd. It's been far too long.

A busy but quiet week.

Learning Outcomes in D2L

Working with the Schulich School of Engineering to figure out how to map the CEAB Graduate Attributes and supporting outcomes into D2L, so they can report back through the accrediting process about their curriculum and the students’ overall competency at The Attributes. Lots of struggling on my part, trying to work through the D2L documentation to figure out how to model the outcomes hierarchy, and then to figure out what kind of reporting and rollups can be generated. Hopefully, we’ll figure this out in time for them to use it for their faculty accreditation process.

I did some googling (DuckDuckGoing? that’s not a thing yet, is it?) on Michael Betzler, who was the director on the previous skateboarding documentary. Looks like he now is/was director at the olympic media consortium. Before that, he was involved in this bit of awesomeness.

I would have been the same age as my son is now, when this footage was shot. Wow. My dad had his insurance agency in the Lougheed Building downtown, so I would have been down there pretty regularly. Amazing, how much the city has changed in just a handful of decades…

This documentary is awesome.

So many 1986.

I picked up a Swivl robot camera mount to kick off our “tech lending library” here in the EDU. It’s a pretty interesting piece of kit that will let anyone record a session without having to spend $100K retrofitting a classroom with PTZ cameras and switching boards. Slap this thing onto a desk or tripod, drop your iPhone (or iPad, or Android device) into the slot, plug the microphone cable into the mic jack on your device, and hit record. Done. It now automatically tracks the lanyard, which also has a built-in microphone that sends decent audio to the recording device. Nice.

I've been noticing this for awhile under iOS7, but had been hoping it was a storage bug that would have been fixed in iOS8. Nope.

I "cheaped out" by only springing for the 16GB iPhone5, which means that I effectively get 12GB of space for stuff like apps, music, photos, etc… Shouldn't be a problem, but I've been hitting the cap pretty regularly now. I've resorted to deleting big apps, deleting all of the music that I'd put on the phone (thankfully the train ride is very short now), but still the danged phone reports no free storage.

Designing Libraries for the 21st Century

I attended the 3rd annual Designing Libraries for the 21st Century conference on campus. Library-design-folks from around North America (and Australia and the UK) came together to talk about what future libraries need to be. It was my first library conference, and I was struck by 3 things:

1. What an amazing, open, inviting group of people. It didn't matter who you were, or where you were from, people actively welcomed everyone in conversation.
2. Librarians are really thinking critically about what a "library" means, and coming at it from how to best support the activities of the people. Books? Necessary but not sufficient. They're doing some amazing design work on how to deconstruct and redesign library spaces.
3. They sure do like to sit and listen to people talk. The presentations were good, but many could have been ably replaced by MP3 files.

I have 10 pages of notes from this, and it's triggered and reinforced some plans I'm working on for our group in the EDU. Faculty Makerspaces? Hell yeah. Collaboration with the TFDL (and other library) folks? You bet. Technology lending fleet? Yup (already have some cool things to loan out for experimentation by profs). Field trips and site visits? Yeah! And more to come, once plans are worked out a bit more.