We’re getting ready to roll out the new “Daylight” interface for D2L, which will go live on May 4, 2018. The biggest benefit is a responsive design, which will make the experience on mobile devices much, much better. And, it will also make it more usable through screen readers and other accessibility devices. Also, it’s very shiny.
The Pilot Project was announced in March 2017 at UCalgary Open Education Week, with the call for proposals being released in July 2017. Workshops were held for academic staff interested in obtaining an OER grant. In late August 2017, the UCalgary OER research assistant was hired and committee met and decided on the ten pilot project grant recipients. A list of the recipients and details of their projects can be found here. The project runs until June 30, 2018.
Well, mostly. I’ve been mostly without Twitter for a couple of months now. I haven’t had a Facebook account for much longer than that. I stopped Instagramming when Facebook bought them. I’ve deleted the Twitter apps from my devices, and now if I want to check in I have to use the browser. Not having notifications or easy launching of a stream adds a bit of friction. I also have 2-factor authentication enabled, and logout after checking in, so dropping into twitter is deliberately kind of a pain in the ass. I only post to Twitter via auto-tweeting from my blog when I post here.
Wiki.ucalgary.ca is the longest-running learning technology platform at the University of Calgary - I launched it back in December 2004, and it’s been chugging along for over 13 years. It’s a teenager. Generations old, in internet time.
It started with a blank copy of Mediawiki, and an edit button. Over 13 years, 1,871 pages were created (for everything from faculties and departments, to collaboratively published articles for student projects to resources for organizing courses and programs). 71,393 edits were made (many of those were reverting spam attacks, however).
I’m looking to add another member to the Learning Technologies Group in the Taylor Institute for Teaching and learning. It’s part of a really amazing team, and will involve consulting with instructors, providing advanced technical and pedagogical support for the integration of learning technologies, and the development of resources and programs to support the work of the team.
It’s a limited-term position, and we’re looking to hire quickly. If you know someone who would be awesome for this, please share the posting with them. If you are someone who would be awesome for this, please apply!
Algorithms, tuned not to help readers but to help advertisers. Intermittent reinforcement tuned to maximize engagement/addiction. This is some scary shit, but it’s the web in 2018. We can do better.
But whereas Twitter sort of stumbled upon addictiveness through the weird 140-character limit, Facebook mixed a new, super-potent active ingredient into their feed called Machine Learning. They basically said, “look, we are not going to show everybody every post,” and they used the new Midas-style power of machine learning and set it in the direction of getting people even more hyper-addicted to the feed. The only thing the ML algorithm was told to care about was addiction, or, as they called it, engagement. They had a big ol’ growth team that was trying different experiments and a raw algorithm that was deciding what to show everybody and the only thing it cared about was getting you to come back constantly.
This is a program we launched in Fall 2017, to coordinate programming offered by the Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning for graduate students who are interested in developing expertise in university teaching and learning.
It’s run on the badges.ucalgary.ca platform built by my team (go, team!), as well as D2L courses for online content and discussion. As grad students work through the program, they earn badges for completing a set of workshops or sessions in an area of focus:
Indigenous pedagogy, which refers to a way of teaching using Indigenous educational principles, is grounded in creating, fostering and sustaining good relationships between student and teacher. Teaching moments are found in the human-to-human interactions which are reciprocal — my students understand that I have certain knowledge and experience they can learn from and I understand that I, too, can learn from my students.
For once, I’m not deleting anything. But, I’ve been struck by how
a) bad algorithmic news feeds are at actually getting what I want and need, and
b) how horribly distracting and time-sucking they are.
Companies - and we’re well past the rubicon of DIY internet hippie utopia - it’s companies all the way down now - have no reason to make their algorithms work better for me (or other humans). Their algorithms weren’t designed for that - their only reason for existing is to generate advertising revenue for the company, and to maximize that at all costs.
The article isn’t as hyperbolic as I was braced for, and connects the recent spate of Facebook billionaires lamenting that they just discovered that Facebook may not be the best thing for people or society (but thanks for the $billions).
I’m not about to say that having supercomputers in our pockets, wirelessly connected to the sum of published human knowledge and to every other pocket-supercomputer, is anything but an incredible boon for humanity. But, the way that capitalism and advertising revenue combined with algorithmic distribution to maximize “engagement” and tie into the feedback loop to boost ad revenue and then tweak algorithms and then boost ad revenue etc. etc. ad nauseum? Yeah. That might need a little work.
This won’t be a big mopey retrospective, but I thought it would be useful to document some of the major things that happened this year. It’s been a doozy. In roughly chronological order…
My team continued to be awesome. I’m so fortunate to be a part of such a diverse, thoughtful, and insanely productive team.
The Taylor Institute hosted the 2017 University of Calgary Conference on Post-secondary Learning and Teaching. I hosted the Ignite sessions. It was fun. We’ll be doing that again.
I was co-author of an article about using a humanoid robot to teach people to assemble mechanical gearboxes, published in ACM HAI 2017.
We launched an OER pilot program at the UofC. 10 small grants were given out, to help 10 instructors find, adapt, adopt, or create open educational resources in their courses. We deliberately selected courses with a broad range of disciplines and levels - everything from large first-year courses all the way up to small senior grad courses. We’ll be using what we learn through the pilot to make decisions about how we can support open education (and OERs) more broadly as a university.
We wrapped up the first round of EDU strategic planning process, as documented in the department’s ePortfolio.
I finished the coursework portion of my PhD program with a 4.0 GPA. Go figure. Now for the easy part. Candidacy, research, dissertation and defence. cough The coursework was an amazing experience - working on everything from connecting research methods in performing arts to SoTL, to programming a humanoid robot to reproduce a recorded performance, to playing with data and information visualization.
We’re about to launch a new “Learning Technologies Advisory Group”, which will make it much easier to make recommendations for how the learning technologies and platforms offered by the UofC can be adapted and enhanced to make the teaching and learning experiences better.
Probably a bunch of other stuff that I’m forgetting at the moment. It was a big year.
Adapted from the popular Food Network game show, four teams will battle it out, generating innovative learning designs in real time before the audience and a panel of judges. Course by course, teams are “chopped” until one remains. The challenge? Teams have only minutes to plan amazing student learning experiences with a basket of mystery ingredients. Then at the sound of the buzzer, they head to the chopping block to face our panel of expert judges: Leslie Reid (Vice-Provost Teaching and Learning), Nancy Chick (TI Academic Director and University Chair of Teaching and Learning) and Richard Sigurdson (Dean, Faculty of Arts). On the chopping blockEach team is a dynamic combination of University leadership and TI staff. Come cheer them on!
