I just pulled together photos from each day of 2016 - and realized I’ve been shooting at least one photo per day for a decade now. I didn’t think I’d be able to keep doing it, but now can’t imagine not doing it.
The latest gallery has 366 photos, due to the leap year. My photos have gone through artsy phases, and have pretty much settled into an informal documentary style. Lots of repeating shots over the years. Lots of progress shots - of people and places. This was the year of building the Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning, installing a bunch of tech, and moving in. So, lots of photos of that.
One of the things I’d come to depend on when using FeverËš was a hand-rolled PHP utility script (cleverly called “Readinator”) that grabbed all feed items that I’d starred in FeverËš in the last week and generated a list in Markdown syntax for easy copy/paste into my Week in Review™ posts (it also pulls links that I’ve added to my Scuttle bookmark server in the last week as well). After moving to Newsblur, my utility script obviously became less useful. Sadface.
Audrey Watters’ third annual edtech book publishing spree brings us The Curse of the Monsters of Education Technology - a compilation of her keynote addresses from 2016. As with the previous two, it will be a must-read. Given how dark and dismal 2016 was, even/especially in edtech…
Once again, I spent much of 2016 on the road, traveling and speaking extensively about education technology’s histories, ideologies, and mythologies. The Curse of the Monsters of Education Technology is a collection of about a dozen of those talks on topics ranging from pigeons to predicting the future.
I’ve lived with RSS as a major source of information for over a decade. I’ve been using Shaun Inman’s fantastic FeverËš self-hosted reader since 2009 or so. It’s been a solid workhorse, and I’ve built quite a workflow around it. Shaun is refocusing his efforts on software that he uses himself, and is putting FeverËš and Mint out to pasture. That’s a hard decision to make, and I admire him for making it. Since FeverËš is self-hosted, I could just keep using it until it eventually crumbles (as PHP updates around it, etc.) but I’m taking this opportunity to take a look at how I manage my feeds.
Having done the delete-social-media-account dance again, I’m without Twitter and Facebook. And still feeling really really good about that. But, I miss being part of an extended community of interesting people who share ideas quasi-synchronously. A social network, as it were.
So. I’ve been looking at some of the alternatives. I don’t think any of them are “there” yet, but they each provide an opportunity to explore different aspects of community and software design. When looking at these alternatives, I’m trying to learn about how the design of software affects what people actually do with it. I’m also aware that much of the difference, when compared with twitter or facebook, is due to novelty and freshness - there are no trolls there (yet), and everyone who is exploring the platforms is doing so because they care and are interested and interesting. So, not apples-to-apples. But, still, there is much to learn by actually using these things. That’s the only way I know of to really learn what these things mean.
I’ve been playing video games since I started typing them into our Vic=20, from the pages of Compute! Magazine. ASCII-art games, in glorious 22-column resolution. Amazing. Console gaming for me started with Intellivision in 1980. One of my favorite games was Skiing, which was an incredible and exciting ski simulator.
I hadn’t planned on writing anything here about this, but enough people have asked me variations of “OMG ARE YOU OK?” that it’s worth saying something. On October 7, I deleted my twitter and Facebook accounts. It’s not a nihilistic dramatic cry for help. I am fine. Doing great, actually.
It was directly triggered by US election fatigue (and I’m horrified, watching the results starting to trickle in as I write this. How on earth is this even remotely close?). I just got tired of the constant drain, the constant snark, updates, trash talk, and general toxicity of the whole process. For a country that likes to think of themselves as the paragon of democracy, it’s truly shocking just how dysfunctional, distracting, divisive and corrosive their process is. It’s going to take a decade to depolarize and repair after this madness ends.
This is cool. Karen is teaching one of her Victorian literature classes in the Taylor Institute, and redesigned the course to take advantage of the flexible space and collaborative technologies. Awesome. I can’t wait to hear more about how it goes (as well as learning from the 20 other instructors and ~2000 students working in the TI this semester, and even more queued up for W2017!)
This semester I decided to do something a little different. I have the privilege of teaching my Victorian literature class in one of the fancy new classrooms at the Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning at the University of Calgary. My 40-person class has six big touch screens, and as a result we’ve been able to do a lot of hands-on work in small groups leading into discussions with the whole class.
This is cool. CAM(era)-(COMM)unity. A project by the Graduate Students’ Association here at UCalgary. Not just a “create a profile and post a photo” site - but a physical token that must be passed from grad student to grad student to unlock a login to the site. An interesting way to get students to meet each other, and also to share information about themselves and their research.
I thought he might be talking about where we host our stuff as our castles, but he means it in a much more personal and direct way - web browsers (and other internet-abled apps, I would add) are extremely personal spaces where we invite content and code from outside the walls. I think I have the right to make sure guests leave surveillance devices and weapons outside before entering.
Blended learning, n. The practice of combining digital and analog teaching. Also referred to as “teaching”, “learning”, and “the real world”.
Flipped classroom, n. “The practice of replacing lectures that instructors give to summarize a course’s readings with videos of lectures that summarize a course’s readings.”
LMS, n. 1) A document management system, whereby a faculty member can transfer a single document to his or her students. Curiously overpowered for this purpose, nevertheless universally deployed.
