These principles represent what I aspire toward in my work and leadership. I’m actively working to embody and demonstrate them more fully, recognizing that I still have significant growth ahead of me.
On Educational Technology
I’ve developed what I call a “thoughtfully conflicted” relationship with educational technology. I remain fascinated by the potential of digital tools to enhance teaching and learning while maintaining healthy skepticism about vendor promises and technological silver bullets.
PhotoBlogger - custom app for processing images for publishing to my /photos section. Captions and tags are generated using ministral-3:3b running in Ollama on my laptop.
This website doesn’t track anything, and doesn’t set any cookies. I don’t track statistics beyond what is done by the Apache webserver. I occasionally look at high level statistics through CPanel’s Bandwidth tool, or through Analog or AWStats processing of the Apache webserver logs.
Search functionality is provided by a custom SQLite/PHP application running on my own server. It doesn’t track anything about any queries, beyond the normal Apache webserver logs of pageviews - but those are anonymous. It runs on this server, doesn’t track anything, doesn’t share anything, has no ads or algorithms or whatnot. It just does search.
If you want everything, use the main feed. If you only want certain kinds of posts, each section has its own feed – subscribe to whichever ones suit you.
👉🏻 What's RSS?
RSS is a simple way to follow websites without social media or email newsletters – your updates come to you, in one place, on your terms. An RSS app (sometimes called a “reader”) checks your favourite sites automatically and shows you new posts as they arrive, a bit like email but just for reading.
I work in teaching and learning at the University of Calgary, where I’ve spent most of the last three decades in various roles at the intersection of course design, learning technologies, and institutional decision-making. Currently I’m Associate Director of Learning Technologies and Design at the Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning, where I lead a team that supports faculty across instructional design, educational technology, and pedagogy.
Developed using the CD-ROM multimedia training platform I built for the Psychomotor Skills series, this was a collaboration with the UTexas MD Anderson Cancer Centre and Brystol-Myers Squib Oncology. We worked with Medical Audio Visual Communications to produce this title, featuring John Cleese (from, well, John Cleese) and Dr. Robert Buckman (from Toronto Sunnybrook).
I developed a multimedia database and media management system (in Macromedia Director) that was used to produce a series of award winning psychomotor skills CD-ROMs for the Faculty of Nursing at the University of Calgary. The CD-ROMs were commercially sold through Medical Audio Visual Communications, Inc.
From 1992-1994, I worked as a science communicator at the Alberta Science Centre. As part of my work there, I developed some Hypercard stacks to support various exhibits. These were inspired by projects such as Just Grandma and Me (providing opportunities for exploration, searching, and memory) as well as the Mackerel Stack and others.
Exhibits included:
Dinomania
Marine Monster Mania
Backyard Monsters
Cybersense
Unfortunately, I have no documentation of these stacks1. I think there might be remnants on a floppy disk in storage, but there is no way to retrieve that anymore. I’ve been unable to find anything about the exhibits online, either. This was just before the internet became a real thing - at the time, we were using Compuserve to access NASA’s images from Shoemaker-Levy 9 as part of the science centre’s programming…
This was the first fully-functioning prototype of a standards-based learning object repository, and served as a testbed for the evaluation of repositories, metadata standards, and institutional collections of learning resources. Some project info is available on at careo.org1
I built the application in java, using Apple WebObjects. This allowed rapid prototyping and development through the MVC separation which was kind of revolutionary at the time.
Campus Alberta’s vision is to enable Albertans to take courses from any college or university in the province, either on-site, on-line from their homes, or on the job. CAREO’s contribution will be to provide educators with the digital teaching content to make this flexible learning a reality. We will accomplish this not only by providing a location to share and find resources, but also by fostering an online community of educators whose digital materials, expertise, and experience will be exchanged. Although the collected teaching materials will be available to all, those who register as members in this community can contribute their own materials, review existing resources, and contact other members with similar interests.
I work in teaching and learning at the University of Calgary, where I’ve spent most of the last three decades in various roles at the intersection of course design, learning technologies, and institutional decision-making. Currently I’m Associate Director of Learning Technologies and Design at the Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning, where I lead a team that supports faculty across instructional design, educational technology, and pedagogy.
