Having spent the last 2+ years of my life working on the LMS selection, implementation and replacement here at UCalgary, I can relate to this awesome new article on a pretty profound level. My life in educational technology has been almost entirely redefined in relation to the LMS. That's a horrifying realization.

This part weighs particularly heavily…

The demands of sustaining infrastructure have continued to dominate institutional priorities, and the recent promise of Web 2.0 has been unevenly integrated into campus strategies: instances of broad, culture-shifting experimentation along these lines in higher education can be counted on one hand. IT organizations have started outsourcing enterprise systems in the hope of leveraging hosted solutions and the cloud more broadly to free up time, energy, and resources. The practice of outsourcing itself seems to have become the pinnacle of innovation for information technology in higher education. Meanwhile, IT organizations are often defined by what's necessary rather than what's possible, and the cumulative weight of an increasingly complex communications infrastructure weighs ever heavier.

This is where I go out on a bit of a limb, but I think it’s important to share this kind of info to see if it’s on the right track, too ambitious, or not ambitious enough.

Basically, the last year has been one of constant change in learning technologies at the UofC. We changed LMS, from an antique version of Blackboard, to the latest version of Desire2Learn¹. We replaced Elluminate with Adobe Connect². We rolled out Top Hat as the campus student response system. It’s been a lot of things changing, some while the academic year was under way. I’m hoping we have these things stabilized by the end of the Fall 2014 semester, so we can move on to more interesting things.

I was fortunate to be able to present a session at CNIE 2014, to share some of the campus engagement stuff we did as part of our long LMS replacement project. I tried to stay away from the technology itself, and focus on the engagement process. Full slide deck is available online, and fuller reports describing the engagement and findings are still available online, as well as the GitHub repository of LMS RFP requirements¹.

We're working on something that would benefit from being produced in the form of a well-designed online document, so I'm gathering some samples and links…

Some Samples

• Harvard: Beyond the Horizon
• Interactive Documentaries via @cogdog's iDocs presentation at Skidmore College
• Tim Owens - Community Web Hosting
• New York Times - Snowfall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek
• Medium - The Importance of being Satoshi Nakamoto
• The Guardian - NSA Files Decoded
• Smithsonian - Oral History of the March on Washington
• Esquire Magazine - Seven Strange Days With the Young Syrians Fighting Assad
• The Seattle Times - Coffee in India
• The Chicago Tribune - Curtis Duffy's Saving Grace
• Women & Tech - Nora Young Interview
• ESPN: The Long, Strange Trip of Dock Ellis
• LiveStrong 2012 Annual Report
• Ford Foundation 2011 Annual Report

Some tools

• Bootstrap responsive design framework (and a sample skeletal mockup )
• ScrollKit - recently acquired by Automattic, to be included with WordPress
• Aesop Story Engine (WordPress plugin, installed on UCalgaryBlogs)
• Pages - produces PDF or ePUB versions of documents
• iBooks Author - author eBook PDF/ePUB/iBook format
• NewHive
• Jux
• BookCreator - for iPad and Android

Any other awesome examples or useful tools to make this kind of design activity not cost a fortune or rely on a large team?

Just processed a quick time-lapse test, using the camera ¹ that we installed to monitor construction of the new digs. This’ll work nicely… Now, to test a few video hosting platforms, to see which one mangles the video the least…

** YouTube version: **

MediaCore version:

Aggregated stats for D2L usage during the Winter 2014 semester (Jan-Apr 2014). Counts number of visits, not pageviews.

The first week of January was the ramp-up to the official semester start. Reading week is visible as the slump in February. Kind of trails off as finals approach…

News of a new collaboration between UGuelph and D2L, on a major pedagogy research initiative:

The pedagogy research project strives to help schools track and report on learning outcomes across programs over time. Researchers will use D2L’s predictive analytics capabilities to document and discover the effectiveness of assessment tools on specific subjects while working with educators to develop a curriculum that results in greater student success.

via University of Guelph to Leverage Desire2Learn’s Integrated Learning Platform for $6 Million Pedagogy Research Initiative | Desire2Learn Press Release.

Awhile back Bill Nye debated Ken Ham on science vs. creationism, at Ham's museum of young earth creationism. Nye just posted some background on the talk and his preparations, and this kind of jumped out at me:

On the slides in my "decks," as they're called, I do not use many words. My colleagues sent me dozens of PowerPoint slides for my use. Thank you of course, but my goodness you all, when I watch many of your presentations, it's like reading a page of book projected on a wall. How can someone in the audience focus on what you're saying, when there's a blizzard of words in front of her or him?

Dr. Bates has been seriously kicking ass for many years. He's decided to retire - and he deserves it. I can't even imagine how much energy he's dedicated to the field of teaching-and-learning, and eLearning, over the last few decades. Well earned retirement.

His post announcing the decision is full of gems. I have to admire his no-BS summary of the state of eLearning.

Even the processes of learning, which used to be relatively stable, given how much is biological, are also undergoing change. Technology is not neutral; it does change the way we think and behave. Furthermore, I foresee major developments in the science of learning that will have major implications for teaching and learning – but it will also have major false directions and mistakes (be very careful with artificial intelligence in particular). So this is a field that needs full-time, professional application, and very hard work, and I just don't have the energy any more to work at that level. To put it simply, this is not a profession where you can be half in and half out. Dabbling in online learning is very dangerous (politicians please note).

The taste of "success" in our world gone mad is measured in dollars and francs and rupees and yen. Our desire to consume any and everything of perceivable value – to extract every precious stone, every ounce of metal, every drop of oil, every tuna in the ocean, every rhinoceros in the bush – knows no bounds. We live in a world dominated by greed. We have allowed the interests of capital to outweigh the interests of human beings and our Earth.

From our latest Comprehensive Institutional Plan:

There are two initiatives that have the potential to address our access issue and increase enrolment with strategic allocation of new resources. The first is the development of a learning technologies strategy that will include a focus on enabling and enhancing learning experiences through the integration of learning technologies, with the potential to create alternative instructional approaches that allow for a larger on- line presence and admissions (strategy will be developed by June 2014).

Why does a show about the universe produced in 1980 have such a strong pull on us today? It's not because of the compelling communication style of Carl Sagan alone, although that is a small part of it. Nor is it because Sagan gave us information that most of us never had. The reason Cosmos endures is because the presentation of the original Cosmos series made it clear why what we were seeing and hearing mattered. Even if it was not always explicitly stated, the message was clear: This is important. This is remarkable. And you are a part of it.