I wonder, how has the monetize-attention-with-targeted-ads environment we’ve wound up in changed how we perceive the world and events around us. If the ISS blew up, it’d be big news, but only until the president tweeted something, or some giant company was caught doing something stupid. Or some president tweeted something stupid. News of major events used to bring people together. Physically. I remember watching updates from the original Gulf War, on TVs in hallways on campus. People - students, profs, staff - gathered around, paused together, before moving on and returning later. Now, we glance at a phone, nod, and repeat. It started with the 24-hour news cycle, which really came to become a real thing during that first Gulf War, and has now grown to become endless, individualized, targeted and hyper-tribalized news feeds, optimized not for communication or information, but for maximizing advertising revenue.
I’m taking a graduate computer science course on information visualization. It’s going to be an incredible experience, exploring how to make sense of data sets and use spatial/symbolic/textural/other means to represent various aspects of the data.
A huge part of the course is going to be keeping a daily “visual journal” of things we see, as they relate to information and visualization and design. Sounds something like a photoblog. So, I volunteered to set up a class blog for us all to post stuff together, to see what happens. Of course, I’m using UCalgaryBlogs. WordPress is pretty good for this kind of thing. I’m using the Baskerville theme because it’s nicely visual - almost pinterest-y. And, a few plugins:
I haven’t said anything publicly about this yet, because I wanted to make sure certain people weren’t surprised by internet news without hearing it from me first. I wasn’t going to blog this, but that feels… inconsistent? I’ve been blogging milestones and stuff for 15 years now, and it feels weird to not blog this. So.
First, this is going to sound scary. It’s not. (well, mostly.) I’m fine, and will be for a long, long time.
This post started as a tweet (which I deleted before posting), and then a series of tweets (which I only wrote in my head but never actually posted). Then, hey! I have a blog! So… I’m not going to fully (even partially? at all?) cite references here.
I’ve been uncomfortable with the “education is a broadcast model” narrative that’s been predominant for the last decade(s). It’s making another round, likely fueled by pushback against DeVos in the states (which, yikes!) and some NYTimes articles about billionaires who have ideas to fix education, if we just give them our kids (but mostly our money).
We threw the switch this morning, launching the OER pilot program. It’s a small-scale initiative, intended to support the integration of open textbooks into 10 courses within the 2017/2018 academic year. There are two branches - faculty advocacy, and project implementation. The implementation is being let by my team at the Taylor Institute, working with the University of Calgary’s OER Faculty Advocate and his team.
We’ll be hiring a graduate student to act as a research assistant for the program, who will help coordinate the various projects - hopefully 10 concurrent projects with instructors working with up to 20 undergraduate students to identify good candidate resources for use in a course, which will be reviewed by a graduate student (and the instructor) before being integrated into the course.
The Taylor Institute’s AV systems were designed to be incredibly flexible, able to adapt to changing requirements between (or even during) classes. That meant shifting from hardwired analog systems to fully digital media management to allow for software-controlled mixing and switching of signals.
What people assume, when they walk into a classroom, is something basically like this:
You show up, plug your laptop in, and it sends stuff to the projector. And other stuff to the speakers. Simple.
Dr. Märtensson’s research formed much of the foundation of the plan for the Taylor Institute. Specifically, the macro/meso/micro layers within an organization, and working with each layer in various ways to draw people into the community. Her keynote at the 2017 University of Calgary Conference on Post-secondary Learning and Teaching was great, and nicely connected many of the threads of the conference.
Nowadays, (hyper)linking is an afterthought because most of the action occurs within platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and messaging apps, which all have carved space out of the open web. And the idea of “harnessing collective intelligence” simply feels much more interesting and productive than it does now. The great cathedrals of that time, nearly impossible projects like Wikipedia that worked and worked well, have all stagnated. And the portrait of humanity that most people see filtering through the mechanics of Facebook or Twitter does not exactly inspire confidence in our social co-productions.
We tried something new (for us) this year, and had an Ignite session during the Taylor Institute’s annual conference. It was a risk, as we had never hosted that format before, and none of the 6 presenters (for 5 presentations) had ever done an Ignite. Nevertheless, we persisted.
I got talked into being the (humble) host for the event, introducing the format and acting as emcee between presenters. Each presenter provided their slides earlier in the week, so I had time to smush them all into one master presentation file and apply the automatic slide progression for their decks.
The push for educational technology exists within a broader political, economic, ideological, and technological context. The all-too-common ignorance of this context and the subtleties of learning itself may prove problematic for edtech — and higher education’s future.
The article is a really good one, and points to the broad issues with the disruption-of-education-by-silicon-valley narrative (one which has been championed by Audrey Watters for years, and which also overlaps with the work that Stephen Downes has been doing forever).
We’ve been in the Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning’s new building for almost a year now, and it’s time to step back and reflect on what we’ve learned through that first year.
The building itself is a marvel of architecture, design and technology. We’re extremely fortunate to be able to go to work there every day. It’s been a constant source of inspiration - not the building, but the amazing things that instructors, students and staff are doing within it, together, on a regular basis.
