I (finally) got outside on an actual bike ride, just straight out to Cochrane and back on 1A. That felt great, but sssssslllllooooowwwww. And an hour in zone 5 is probably not ideal. My VO₂Max is still “below average” so I’m aspiring to make it up to average this year.

⚙️ Work

• Tyson led a great discussion in the Learning Technology Forum, gathering questions from instructors and staff about their use of edtech.
• We had an interesting Copyright Committee meeting. Which is a thing that looks weird to actually type out but is genuinely a thing that happened. And we wrapped up with a lively discussion about one of our vendors who has produced a content publishing platform and who has described it as having “no concept of attribution”. Which is a fun thing to talk about with librarians and lawyers.
• I went to a retirement party for two long-long-timers from IT - the guys that have basically run classroom AV and videoconferencing on campus for the last 30+ years.

🔗 Links

Neurodiversity

• Alex Paquette wrote a guest post on Michele Jacobsen’s blog: To mask or not to mask?: A story of a neurodivergent graduate student in STEM

⚙️ Work

• A vendor came to campus to offer sessions for instructors and staff on how to use their product. The product has changed pretty significantly from when we adopted it several years ago, and we’ll need to figure out if those changes are things that we as a community care about. Otherwise, they’ll become the de facto platform for that other stuff, short-circuiting a lot of strategic planning that’s already in progress.
• Someone decided to replace the trusted UCalgary contacts database for quickly finding staff info with a new Drupal-powered thing that seems to find .doc attachments of CVs more often than anything else, after a several second delay. Awesome. With like 48 hours notice. (Ironically, when Contacts originally launched in 2009 to replace the even-older Seek cgi-bin tool, it was a lightweight Drupal site providing a front-end for UNITIS. It’s the UNITIS back-end that’s being retired, partially because the Drupal front-end is so old it can’t be patched.) With all of the effort we spend trying to manage and communicate and support changes for teachy-learny tools, an admin tool can just go “heyyyy - we decided to do something different. here you go.”
• Leanne Wu started a fundraising campaign in memory of Fairooz Shafin, a student who passed away last year.

📚 Reading

• Lindstrom, G. (2024). Rethinking critical thinking, diversity and Indigenous awareness from a Blackfoot perspective. Identities, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/1070289X.2024.2335813 - Gabrielle Weasel Head is a Blackfoot scholar, was an educational developer in the TI, and is now an assistant professor at MRU. In this article, she describes the role of “relationality” as opposed to “critical thinking” in engaging with EDI concepts. (I have a PDF of the article if needed)

Hugo is the static site generating content management system that I use to publish this website. It works really well, and has some deep functionality that I’m not even touching. For instance, it can parse data files while generating the site - including JSON and XML - and can use the content of those files to display information on web pages.

I was going to follow some recipes that I found online, but they involved converting the OPML file into JSON to be read by Hugo. I didn’t want to do that if possible. So, time to roll my own solution using built-in functionality in Hugo…

My theme song this week:

⚙️ Work

• Completed annual performance review discussions with all Learning Technologies Group staff. What an absolutely incredible team - and what an honour to have the opportunity to work with them all.
• Planning a potential on-site visit with our D2L representatives.
• Preparing a conference presentation about the architecture course from F2023.

📚 Reading

• Kurt Vonnegut: Harrison Bergeron (newly typset by John Gruber). “The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal.” A short story from 1961.

🔗 Links

Miscellaneous

• Jeff Wetzler @ HBR: How to Get the Honest Input You Need from Your Employees. Via Rob Crooks. I’m not super fond of calling team members “my employees”, but some good ideas for asking better questions…
• Ian Semple @ The Guardian: Two nights of broken sleep can make people feel years older, finds study. I’ve had insomnia for years now, and can attest to this¹. I finally had a decent night’s sleep this week - the first in months - and felt like a completely different (and younger) person the next day. Insomnia is like playing life in Hard Mode.
• A new mechanical keyboard inspired by the C64? Tempting…
• Evan Boehs: Everything I know about the Xz Backdoor. An apparently malicious developer gained trust in the open source XZ (data compression) libraries (and others). Then they inserted a backdoor into the code, which was then automatically deployed across the internet via package managers - apparently mostly affecting Red Hat users. Yikes! (via Will Dormann)
• Orion Reed: 3D DOM Viewer. Paste his code into your browser’s developer console, and it renders the current web page in 3D, with layers and z-order visible. Amazing. (via @ResearchBuzz) (and, if you paste the code into Bookmarklet Maker, you can have a handy-dandy “3D” bookmarklet ready to click for any web page…) (or just drag that “3D” link into your bookmarks bar…)

AI Is Awesome™

• Tamar Satov @ Maclean’s: ChatGPT is everywhere. What’s fair use for students trying to get into university?. Featuring the work of Sarah Elaine Eaton.

⚙️ Work

In the D2L Steering Committee, we planned a transition of authentication systems from the deprecated CAS to the new standard Entra ID for this summer. It should work better and more reliably, but we’ll lose the ability to allow prospective students (who login using eIDs, which are not supported in Entra ID) into D2L courses.

I decided to stop tracking license renewals for campus platforms. I’m not responsible for them, don’t own the contracts, don’t have signing authority, and haven’t been successful in helping to nudge people to get renewals done before it becomes a last-minute panic. So, I’m letting go of the stress of trying to push string. It feels like a big weight off already. This is one of the things that has been distracting me from my main focus, and energy spent on this is energy not spent where it needs to be.

⚙️ Work

• From the “do stuff until someone says no” school, I took a shot at rewriting big chunks of the draft genAI operating standard document, including renaming it. I think it’s better, and will be more useful to our community. I wonder how many of my edits will survive to the final version of the document… I mean… If I get edit privileges on a document, I should contribute as fully as possible¹. I used to look at these things as “how can I edit this without getting fired?”²³⁴ and now I’m looking at them as “they gave me edit privs for a reason, so I shouldn’t hold back.” Regardless, it’s off to Legal now…
• Scholarship of Teaching & Learning at UCalgary - Campus Survey. “This survey aims to increase understanding of teaching and learning scholarship, research, and inquiry at the University of Calgary.” Part of the UCalgary SoTL “Yellow Cubes” project.
• Brian installed a fancy new MIDI adapter for the piano in the TI, so it’s gone from us having to put the cover on the piano so it doesn’t disrupt classes to leaving it open and available for anyone to play.
• In a governance meeting discussing how we can improve a policy, I wound up being the one who spoke up to mention that the main paragraph of the item being discussed has only one sentence that doesn’t have wiggle-words in it, and that might possibly be part of the reason it’s being inconsistently interpreted. For some reason. Maybe. It’s easy to sit back and think “surely, someone will speak up to mention the obvious thing. Surely the long list of people who are smarter than me have seen this and commented on it already.” And then nobody does and maybe it’s going to get through the discussion with nobody saying “hey - there’s an elephant in the room. Right there. In the middle.”⁵
• We had a good and important team discussion about how we would like to plan and implement our programming. I had recently kind of blown it big time with how I communicated some planned changes, and this was part of working out of that. The team is amazing, and I’m grateful that we can have these kinds of open discussions without tension or blame.
• An RFP for a major campus platform was delayed. Again. Now the main demos/evaluations land on the week I had been hoping to head to the Okanagan for a week on the bike⁶. It’s frustrating, as all I can do is say “hey - there’s a contract renewal coming up in [ 1 year | 6 months | 3 months | 1 month ]” and hope that the people who own the contracts do something in time. Which means that something that was originally going to get posted in November now goes out in March, and my own plans get blown away as a result. Cool.

🔗 Links

Documents, data, webstuff

• Anil Dash: Make better documents. He’s really concerned with formatting (stop adding borders to tables! etc.) but that’s just cosmetics - the design of a document is more about the flow, intention, and clarity. Cosmetics follow that. You can have a beautiful document that says nothing, or a deep article that looks like garbage.

Kashmir Hill published an article in the New York Times this week: Automakers Are Sharing Consumers’ Driving Behavior With Insurance Companies(free share link). This prompted some follow-ups by Bruce Schneier, Nick Heer, et al.

In recent years, insurance companies have offered incentives to people who install dongles in their cars or download smartphone apps that monitor their driving, including how much they drive, how fast they take corners, how hard they hit the brakes and whether they speed. But “drivers are historically reluctant to participate in these programs,” as Ford Motor put it in a patent application that describes what is happening instead: Car companies are collecting information directly from internet-connected vehicles for use by the insurance industry.

⚙️ Work

• I renewed my SCUP membership for another year. I don’t think I’ll make it to the annual conference (unless my session proposal makes it off the contingency list). Although, Philadelphia in July could be interesting. Next year’s in Honolulu??? That might be a stretch…
• Our Vice Provost Teaching & Learning just launched their new website, including this page on Generative AI in Teaching and Learning.
• We’re working on an institutional “Natural Language Generators Operating Standard” policy document, covering academic, research, and operational uses of generative AI. I’ve been making contributions to incorporate the guiding principles from our VPTL page on generative AI, and some other teachy-learny bits. The operating standard will have to go through governance for review and approval, but we’re getting there. The tricky bits are related to data classification levels - what types of institutional data/content are allowed to be shared with any third-party, not just genAI - and of course copyright and intellectual property and ethical use of these tools. Anyway. I think I made some good contributions to the Operating Standard draft, adding some things that should make it more useful to people, rather than just being a legalese document of record. Still getting used to being in a position to actually help write these things…
• I’ve been taking Fridays off for the last couple of months to try to burn off some of my vacation balance. In that time, my vacation accrual has gone up by 15 hours. It’s going the wrong way. I’ll need to plan some longer blocks of time off through the summer…

📚 Reading

Here’s the thing. I have a stack of reading, but I just can’t do it. I can’t muster the energy to read anything longer than a few sentences, and very little of what I do read makes sense the first time so I get to re-read things a few times. I spent some quality time in waiting rooms this week, and tried to find some good fiction to read. But I just didn’t want to? Wound up sitting quietly instead. I’m hoping this is tied to the whole insomnia thing, and that I figure that out soon. It feels like I’ve been running at maybe 50% capacity for a while, and that doesn’t feel very good.

⚙️ Work

The Celebration of Teaching awards ceremony for the 2023 University of Calgary Teaching Awards winners was on Wednesday evening. Amazing. This is the highlight of the year, and it’s inspiring to hear the stories from award recipients. Elders Reg and Rose Crowshoe did the ceremonial opening/closing blessings, and Elder Rod Hunter performed the UCalgary Honour Song. Reg’s comments about how the university has changed since his days as a student long ago, and how much our progress toward reconciliation means.

When I restarted these weekly things, I wasn’t sure I’d have anything to write about each week. It feels like “the usual”, with nothing of note. But, writing it all out. Holy. There’s a lot going on. And there’s a lot that I can’t document here, too.

⚙️ Work

Thanks to a lucky combination of Family Day long weekend and my taking Fridays off to burn off my vacation balance, it was a 3 day work week. I could get used to that.

⚙️ Work

We put the finishing touches on the survey we’ll be using to gather feedback from UCalgary community members about their experiences with our programming, and what they’re looking for from us.

The first Learning Technologies Advisory Committee with a new Vice Provost co-chair. What a great discussion! We’re rebooting the committee by rethinking what’s needed, given that the TOR was written like 5 years ago and there have been at least a couple of changes over that time…

We’re continuing to hear from instructors and students that the Brightspace Discussions tool sucks. It’s sucked since 2013 when we adopted Brightspace (but, at the time, it was better than Blackboard 8’s discussion board), and it hasn’t been improved since. We had a Learning Technology Forum community session this week, with a focus on discussing community platforms used in courses. A dozen people were at the session, and they listed 14 different platforms that they use in addition to Brightspace because the built-in discussion tool sucks. This is not sustainable (despite the fact that it’s been sustained for over 10 years now). We need to provide a better default community/discussion platform. This is something I’ll be pushing at LTAC and D2L Steering. I debated breaking this out into a separate post, but I need to noodle on this so it’s not just a full-on rant…