Blog Posts on D'Arcy Norman, PhD

rebooting my note-taking

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 20:09:42 -0600

I’ve been using a digital notebook of some sort since the 1980s, starting with a Casio Digital Diary, then, in the 1990s, a Newton MessagePad 120. Eventually, iPod Touch, iPad, and the software that they can run. Evernote. OneNote. Apple Notes. Obsidian. I gave up on iPads long ago and have just used my laptop to take and manage notes. I likely spend entirely too much time and energy thinking about how I take and manage my notes, because it’s a huge part of my professional, academic, and personal lives. I’ve been (affectionately?) described as “a dork” about this kind of thing.

2026 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report - Teaching and Learning Edition

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Thu, 21 May 2026 13:08:19 -0600

The 2026 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report - Teaching and Learning Edition was just released. I had the opportunity to serve on the “global panel of experts” that brainstormed topics and examples to shape this year’s report. The brainstorming activities were done asynchronously, and it was really interesting to see the ideas shape up and connect to examples from various institutions.

From the report’s Executive Summary:

on monocultures, institutional agency, and resilience

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Sun, 10 May 2026 09:49:11 -0600

Canvas was hacked this week (starting around May 1, so over a week ago now). No details yet, and I’m not going to speculate or make assumptions. My heart goes out to the people at Instructure and the 8,800 institutions who are dealing with this. There are a few lessons from the incident and collective responses:

1. Clear and authentic communication is essential

Instructure’s initial response was to shut down the Canvas LMS and put up a “Canvas is currently undergoing scheduled maintenance” notice up. Which solved the initial problem of “people can’t access Canvas” but raised more questions. Eventually, word got out that Instructure had somehow been hacked - much of that coming from a message posted by the hackers themselves. Students posted screenshots of the hackers’ message on Reddit etc., and that served as the update for a few days.

Introducing Jellyboard: A Collaborative Sticky-Note Board for Workshops

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Mon, 04 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

When Google retired Jamboard, a lot of facilitators lost the tool they’d been quietly relying on. It wasn’t fancy. It just worked in a room full of phones, laptops, and a projector, with people who had no interest in making yet another account.

I’ve been building Jellyboard to fill that gap (well. Claude Code has been building Jellyboard…). It’s a browser-based sticky-note board for workshops, meetings, and brainstorming sessions. No installs, no ads or tracking, and no accounts for participants. Display a QR code, share a short join code, or paste a link into email etc., and people are in.

2026 UCalgary Conference on Postsecondary Learning & Teaching

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Fri, 01 May 2026 11:18:11 -0600

This was the 10th annual University of Calgary Conference on Postsecondary Learning and Teaching, and it had the highest attendance for an in-person offering of the conference. The theme this year was “From Disruption to Connection Digital Transformation in Postsecondary Education” and that turned out to capture a lot of attention and engagement across UCalgary and our broader community.

As I shared with the TI:

I’m still pretty overwhelmed by the conference experience. By the numbers, this was the biggest in-person offering in the 10 years of this conference. The numbers don’t capture just how great this year’s conference was, though!

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.