Blog Posts

Must-play examples of great video game design?

The plan for my PhD is taking a bit of a different tack, to take advantage of an incredible opportunity that will remain cryptically-alluded-to for now. I need to go deep on video game design, and I’ll be approaching things from a teachy-learny perspective so ideally I need to spend some quality time with key video games that are exemplars of experiential learning. I’m thinking it doesn’t need to be full-on Oregon Trail you-have-died-of-dysentery, but should include games that pioneered approaches to teach in some way. Things like the deceleration curve path in Forza Motorsport 5 et al. that guides you through difficult turns on a track, or the time-rewind-retry thing in Braid that lets you iterate on a plan until you solve it, or the try-stuff-until-you-figure-it-out exploration of Portal.

Snapshots from the poison room

I took photos throughout my chemo/immunotherapy treatment, to document my reactions and the view from the poison room. Photos generates a decent slideshow (complete with Generic Copyright-takedown-avoiding Sountrack #1) ¹

Best Paper awards in compsci

Jeff Huang compiled a very long list of “Best Paper Award” winning papers in various computer science disciplines. Lots of interesting papers in there… Awesome.

No guest posts

No, I don’t do “guest posts” or ads.

Not “full stalker”? Oh, then by all means! Write a post for me!

I also need more blogs

Ben Werdmuller wrote a post this morning on the value of blogs and regular longer-form writing. I 1000% agree with him.

You should start a blog, if you don’t have one already. There’s nothing better for organizing your thoughts and socializing ideas. You don’t have to labor for days over a post; blogs are often better when they’re off the cuff. Writing in an interface away from the hustle of social media often allows you to express yourself more calmly (I certainly find this to be the case). And I would love to read your thoughts.

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Apocalypse Chic

Charlie Tyson, in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Anyone can weaponize melancholy; but distinguished older professors who have lived through the declining prestige of the humanities and of humanistic forms of knowledge - who have seen their own power and possibilities diminish within their lifetime” may be especially vulnerable.

Fashionable fatalism is often practiced by academia’s putative leftists, whose projects of resistance have left them world-weary. But it should be clear already that this argumentative style is not just complacent but cynically conservative. By pronouncing the uselessness of action, it bows to the status quo.

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Lockdown - privacy app for iOS

I was sure I saw a link to this from Daringfireball, but can’t seem to find it again. Anyway. I’ve been running Lockdown on my phone for a couple of weeks now, and it’s been working great. It’s an app that integrates with the VPN feature in iOS, so all network requests get pushed through the app for filtering. It doesn’t actually do a VPN, but uses that as a hook to block domains that are requested in any app. There are app-specific tools like Firefox Focus, or Safari-tools like Better Blocker. But Lockdown should work in for any app because it runs at the VPN network level (so it could do things like blocking embedded marketing trackers that report when you’ve viewed an email in Mail, etc…).

moving my digital notestuff to Notes

I’ve been using digital notebooks for many, many years. Everything was in Evernote, until it wasn’t. Then I used Noteshelf for the great ink. Then I used OneNote for the organization and even better ink. All along, I’ve kept a series of paper notebooks, which I’ve found myself using more often in the last couple of years ¹. And, our campus IT had been making somewhat-arbitrary changes to configuration involving OneDrive (and therefore OneNote) that made me uncomfortable continuing to keep The Sum of My Digital Notes™ in one basket that was configured by people with a track record of changing things without consultation ². I’ve moved my OneNote notebooks to my personal account, and am starting fresh in Notes. I’ve been using Notes (mostly on my phone) for trivial notes-in-passing for years, but the app has been improved a lot in the last year or so, with many more improvements about to drop.

An update from chemo-land

The one where our protagonist realizes he hasn’t published a blog post since November of last year and becomes paralyzed by the realization that he has nothing of note to write about, aside from a health update. Which is a great problem to have, given the circumstances.

So. I’ve been on medical leave from work for 4 months now, as I undergo treatment for lymphoma. I’ve finished round 4 and am gearing up for round 5 next week - then only one more round after that before recovering a bit and returning to work in mid-august.

Defining Learning Innovation | Technology and Learning

Several interesting points by Joshua Kim, on the nature of innovation in higher ed.

A focus on institutional learning innovation may involve the decision that all new classroom spaces and renovations will result in active learning spaces, with flat floors and moveable furniture. Or it may revolve around an initiative to embed academic librarians with professors throughout the course development, teaching, and redesign process.

…

One example comes from the world of online learning. On its own, an online learning program is not all that innovative. What is innovative is when the school tries to figure out how to bring the lessons, methods, techniques, and resources from online courses to residential courses.MOOCs are not innovative. What would be innovative is to leverage what is learned from MOOCs to improve traditional online and residential courses.

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articles in the Journal of Learning Spaces 7(1)

4 interesting articles in the most recent issue, in no particular order:

McDavid, L., Carleton Parker, L., Burgess, W., Robertshaw, B., & Doan, T. (2018). The Combined Effect of Learning Space and Faculty Self-Efficacy to use Student-Centered Practices on Teaching Experiences and Student Engagement. Journal of Learning Spaces, 7(1). Retrieved from http://libjournal.uncg.edu/jls/article/view/1597

Instructors who teach well in one kind of learning space don’t magically translate that ability into teaching well in another kind of learning space. They need support/PD/consultation when moving, say, from a lecture hall to a flexible learning space (or vice versa?).

Resources for learning space evaluation

I was asked to pull together some links to resources that can be used to get started in evaluating learning spaces - how are they used? how effective are they? what kinds of interactions are enabled by the spaces? etc. There are some great resources - best to share the list here rather than just in an email…

EDUCAUSE has some really fantastic resources on evaluating learning spaces. They have a book full of concepts and case studies: