Blog Posts on D'Arcy Norman, PhD

digital transformation is a teaching and learning opportunity

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 10:49:58 +0000

Reposting the UCalgary News post I wrote for our TI Newsletter:

Digital Transformation (Dx) in higher education has largely been framed as an organizational and IT challenge: enterprise systems, cloud migration, data governance, workforce development. That framing makes sense for the people leading those efforts, and the work is genuinely important. But it can leave a gap for those of us whose daily work is about teaching and learning. What does digital transformation look like when the starting point is pedagogy, not infrastructure?

How I built the Typeset custom theme for this website

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 19:45:00 +0000

I’ve been running this site on Hugo for several years now, and for most of that time I used other people’s themes and tweaked things around the edges. A few months ago, I decided to build my own theme from scratch with Claude Code. The theme is called Typeset.

Why build a custom theme?

The short answer: I got tired of fighting someone else’s decisions. Every borrowed theme comes with assumptions about what a blog is and what it should look like. Eventually those assumptions start getting in the way.

DICE in Practice: Adopting Generative AI Guidelines

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 15:00:00 -0600

The scenario

A mid-sized research university is developing its institutional response to generative AI. There is no single “AI project” - instead, there are dozens of overlapping conversations happening at different levels: individual instructors experimenting with ChatGPT in their courses, departments writing local policies, a provost-level working group drafting institutional guidelines, and national disciplinary organizations publishing position statements. Some faculty are enthusiastic, some are anxious, and most are somewhere in between.

Introducing the DICE Framework for Higher Ed Change Leadership

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 16:15:00 +0000

Leading change in a university involves many kinds of participation at once. In any given week, the same person might chair a committee with real decision-making authority, serve in an advisory role on another, pilot something new in their own teaching, and sit in a conference session absorbing ideas they hadn’t considered before. Each of those is a different kind of engagement, and each contributes to change in a different way.

more noodling on AI and creativity

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 12:30:59 +0000

The 2026 Oscars™ happened, and a questionable “AI Production Studio” and “AI Talent Agency’s”¹ “AI Actor” tried to use the occasion to convince The Academy™ that replacing human actors with AI is actually good, and that they just need to fully embrace it in order to unlock their full potential. The argument was presented in the form of a soul-less, unartistic, AI-generated “music video” that was basically autotune cranked to 3000 or something, belting out lyrics that had the emotional impact of a corporate press release. If this is “AI Art”, real artists have nothing to worry about.

Prototyping a new kind of online course community platform

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 19:41:40 -0700

On the plus side, your humble protagonist has finally figured out how to break out of “the only thing he blogs about is how he uses Obsidian.” Unfortunately, it’s because I appear to be firmly in the middle of a bout of “the only thing he blogs about is how he vibecodes some half-baked idea into a usable thing.”

A blog post in 2 parts:

The Course Community Application
The part about vibecoding and using frontier genAI tools despite everything

The Course Community Application

After my experiment last week in building a local-LLM “course coach” application that students could use to engage with their course materials, a few things happened:

Prototyping a Brightspace Course Coach Application

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 15:42:55 -0700

Last night while watching the Olympics highlights, I was playing around with Claude Code to see if I could implement something I’ve been thinking of for quite awhile. What if students had an application that connected to the LMS (Brightspace in our case) and pulled all course materials, info, calendar, assignments, discussions etc. into a local database, and what if a local chatbot was able to interact with that database to guide a student as they learn? A socratic agent, coaching them without giving them answers. Prompting them as they engage with the course.

not another think piece on generative AI

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 15:20:33 +0000

AKA Please, God, Not Another AI Thinkpiece!

Nope. There have been enough of those lately. Recent posts about art, intuition, semantic ablation, cognitive debt, cognitive shortcuts and atrophy. They get at lots of the nuance hidden between “AI is literally SATAN” and “I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords!”. Mostly, (generative)AI is kinda useful for some things, is extremely problematic for many reasons, and isn’t going away no matter how much anyone wants it to.

Experimenting with RSS Reader Interfaces

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 10:33:12 -0700

I’ve been using RSS readers for over 20 years. Most of that time has been spent using the excellent NetNewsWire application, but I’ve used others (including Google Reader, Fever˚, etc.).

After reading Terry Godier’s post on RSS readers being stuck in the email metaphor, I wanted to experiment with some ideas for a “non-email” metaphor for a feed reader interface. The most interesting and useful version of this that I’ve used was the “Hot” view from Shaun Inman’s Fever˚ application. What would it look like to integrate something like that into my NetNewsWire database?

another 365 photos

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 20:32:51 -0700

Thanks to gentle nudges from Alan, I’ve wrapped up another 365photos “daily photo for a year” project for 2025 and started one for 2026. I’d marked this on Mastodon, but hadn’t mentioned anything here on my blog. Maybe I was waiting to see if I’d actually go for another round? 18 days into 2026 and it looks like I’m still doing it, so…

I started back in 2007, mostly as a way to learn to use my then-new, then-fancy Canon Rebel XT. I carried it in my backpack everywhere and got some interesting shots. I learned to use it pretty well and learned to see differently. Apparently, something clicked because years later I was able to get into a PhD program that required an “artist’s portfolio” and I got in on the strength of my photography. Who knew? #365photos was the beginning of that.

copilotting

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 15:17:54 -0700

Microsoft keeps renaming things to be various versions of “copilot”. A snarky toot pointed out that there were now 4 MS products called Copilot. I thought there were more, so I asked Copilot (MS365 Copilot™). It thinks there may be at least 7 different Copilots? But its LLM may be out of date…

Prompt:

How can I keep track of all of the things that Microsoft now calls “Copilot”? Is there a map or guide?

on building an Obsidian Related Notes plugin using Google's Antigravity IDE

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 11:13:36 -0700

TL;DR:

I built an AI/LLM-powered “related notes” plugin for Obsidian. It seems to work, but who knows? There’s a video tour, and the code is in a GitHub repository.

I’ve been using Obsidian for a few years now, and have always wanted a good “Related Notes” plugin to help me find things that overlap with what I’m working on - based on the content itself, not metadata or links. Haven’t had any luck so I kind of gave up.

UCalgary Conference on Postsecondary Learning and Teaching - Call for Proposals

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 09:18:21 -0700

I have the honour of co-chairing (with Natasha Kenny) our 2026 University of Calgary Conference on Postsecondary Learning and Teaching.

The conference is shaping up to be an absolute banger. The theme is From Disruption to Connection: Digital Transformation in Postsecondary Education - a timely topic, given… gestures wildly. We have some AMAZING keynotes lined up (watch for announcements in early 2026). The entire 3-day conference is going to be an incredible showcase of communities and our collective work as we are all navigating, shaping, creating, fostering, and responding to various layers of digital transformations.

Building a standalone bookmarks web application

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 08:37:20 -0700

TL;DR

I used Claude Code to build a standalone web thing to manage bookmarks.

It’s at https://darcynorman.net/bookmarks/

I’ve also shared the code in case it’s useful to anyone. It’s AI Slop, with no warranty or support or whatever.

It’s at https://github.com/dlnorman/standalone-bookmarks

Back in the olden days, I was a pretty heavy user of the del.icio.us web bookmarking service¹. Then, it was acquired by Yahoo! and sold, then relaunched, then mothballed, then who knows? It’s been offline for awhile. I stopped using it somewhere in the Yahoo! era - I didn’t feel like feeding Yahoo!² so in 2013 I started using an open source bookmarking application called SemanticScuttle.

Building a standalone RSS-to-Mastodon bridge

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 10:21:52 -0600

I’ve been working to minimize hosting requirements and to reduce external dependencies for my website. I now have simple, lightweight, self-hosted search and commenting functionality. The only external dependency remaining was the way new posts were cross-published to Mastodon.

I’d been using the excellent Mastofeed service. Mastofeed works great! If you’re looking for a hosted (free!) solution, definitely check it out. You authorize it to post items to a Mastodon account, and it automatically toots whenever you publish something on a website by checking the RSS feed for new items. Easy peasy. But it’s an external dependency - it could disappear, or change, or start inserting ads or something, or who knows?