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!
This is a cool new website that was just launched by the University of Calgary. It points to several really interesting initiatives and articles by leaders across the university. Definitely worth spending some time reading the full website…
These grants facilitate projects through three structural streams:
Practice grants: This stream of grants supports our pursuit of professional learning about research-informed teaching and learning. Practice grants are one-year grants, individual or collaborative and can receive funding up to $7,500.
Lesson study: These grants support team-based studies of a single lesson, carefully developed and studied to promote a significant learning goal. Lesson study grants are one or two year grants for teams of three to six members. Teams can receive funding up to $7,500 per year, to a maximum of $15,000 per year, for the entire team.
Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: These projects are formal, evidence-based studies to better understand or improve student learning. They can be individual or collaborative and one or two years in duration. Individual projects can receive up to $10,000 per year, to a maximum of $20,000 for two years. Collaborative projects can receive up to $20,000 per year, to a maximum of $40,000 for two years.
Canadians are lucky to have the creative contributions of Gord Downie, frontman for the Tragically Hip, who passed away this week at the age of 53. He embodied a beautiful paradox in our conversation about Canadian culture. He wrote poetry about hockey and our complicated history, quoting both news and literature, and singing those poems to diverse audiences in hockey arenas.Where America’s poet, Walt Whitman, spoke of “containing multitudes,” Downie connected multitudes. Like Downie, the country he loved resists summation. What is Canada? What is Canadian culture? Who is a Canadian?Canadians do not agree on what it means to be Canadian. Our conversations on the subject end with more questions than we had when they began. Two approaches are often used when trying to capture the essence of Canada. The negative, “I don’t know what it means to be Canadian, but I am not American,” is countered with positive summaries like, “We are a cultural mosaic.” Downie’s work avoids such shortcuts. And somehow, that works. We like the questions.
The Teaching Challenge is a website built by the team at the Taylor Institute, partially inspired by the DS106 Daily Create. The goal is to provide a platform - scaffolding - to give instructors concrete projects to try in their courses. Projects can range from building some media - make a video - to more complicated things like incorporating active learning. Participants post reflections on what they’ve tried, how it worked, and share with the community. Some very cool stuff. It’s started basically as a skunkworks prototype, but is growing to become a foundation of how we do things. I believe this forms an important way for people to take risks and try new things - and, when combined with Badges and ePortfolio, provides a meaningful way to document and develop growth as a teacher.
This is an important project, led by my team in the Taylor Institute (go, Ykje and Samara!). We’re all looking forward to seeing what the grant recipients come up with this year.
OER grants fall under two streams: “adopt and adapt” and “create.” The former category consists of projects in which grant-holders redevelop existing materials for their OERs, whereas the latter involves the inception of an OER from the foundation up.
I’m hoping to add a grad or senior undergrad student to the Learning Technologies Group. This position will work closely with other members of the team, and will get to work directly with instructors who are teaching face-to-face, blended, or online courses as they integrate various learning technologies. Like consulting and collaborating with instructors who are doing cool things in their courses? Like working with people from all 13 faculties and with people in key departments across campus (including, of course, the Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning, Information Technologies, and Libraries and Cultural Resources)?
Open Classroom Week is one of the programs that have grown over the last few years - instructors volunteer to open their classrooms to other instructors to come and observe how they teach, so they can see different kinds of learning activities and teaching strategies in practice.
As its name suggests, Open Classroom Week (OCW) is all about openness. By allowing instructors to observe and be observed by one another in active classroom environments, this event presents participants with the opportunity to engage with, and learn from, one another’s classroom strategies, disciplinary specialties and technological teaching applications. At the end of Open Classroom Week, both observed instructors and observers gather for a themed conversation that encourages reflection and cross-faculty insight.
I’ve been uneasy with the role that social media has in my life for a long time. One part information, one part connection with friends and colleagues, one part numbing, one part noise and abuse and racism and sexism. I don’t know a healthy way to approach social media. I don’t believe there is one. The concept is attractive - instant connection with people I know and love! Who wouldn’t want THAT? But it comes with so much other toxic garbage that it feels like forcing myself to wade through an endless cesspool in order to catch glimpses of those people who are important to me.
