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.
Doc Searls, writing on Medium1 about some important projects to help pull the balance of power on the internet back to the individuals that make it awesome in the first place.
There’s a new sheriff on the Net, and it’s the individual. Who isn’t a “user,” by the way. Or a “consumer.” With new terms of our own, we’re the first party. The companies we deal with are second parties. Meaning that they are the users, and the consumers, of our legal “content.” And they’ll like it too, because we actually want to do good business with good companies, and are glad to make deals that work for both parties. Those include expressions of true loyalty, rather than the coerced kind we get from every “loyalty” card we carry in our purses and wallets.
After deactivating my twitter and facebook accounts (again. again.) I was struck that most people don’t seem to subscribe to RSS feeds anymore, relying on twitter and facebook for notification when content is published. Which means, on the one hand, I’ve muted myself because many people will no longer know when I post something (which may be for the better). On the other hand (actually, I guess it’s the same hand…), it means that many people have completely abdicated control for their information to companies and their opaque/secret/unknown algorithms.
When it comes to security, where will this sea of abandoned devices get security patches from? Who will write them, and how will they get paid?Like Ward, I worry that it’s not just an internet of things, but a proprietary mess of interdependent services built on the shifting sands of unstable business models. Unless we develop standards and protocols that reduce that proprietary interdependency we’re eventually going to have a lot bigger problem on our hands than Twitter outages.
For an undetermined amount of time, I’m going to be taking a break from most social media activity. Call it whatever you want: rest, recovery, therapy, need for a change of scenery, election fatique, information overload, a distraction. They are all correct.
Yup. I’m right there with you, Adam. I deactivated my Twitter and Facebook accounts about 10 days ago. Not sure if I’ll let them evaporate at the end of the 30-day cooling-off period, but I sure feel less frustrated with the world since dropping out.
A crazy/deep overview of some of the amazing developments in machine learning in the last couple of years, especially as a medium for artistic expression and exploration.
This last year I’ve been getting back into machine learning and AI, rediscovering the things that drew me to it in the first place. I’m still in the “learning” and “small studies” phase that naturally precedes crafting any new artwork, and I wanted to share some of that process here. This is a fairly linear record of my path, but my hope is that this post is modular enough that anyone interested in a specific part can skip ahead and find something that gets them excited, too. I’ll cover some experiments with these general topics:
We’ve been adapting to life in a shared, open workspace environment. Most of us in the Taylor Institute are in pods, trying to balance productivity, collaboration, distractions, competing demands for attention. It’s hard to describe what it’s like, but it adds overhead on top of everything. Quincy describes it well, from the perspective of s programmer, but I think it applies to the rest of us as well.
Let’s talk a bit about how us humans get work done. Is it four hours of crushing it, a lunch break, then four more hours of crushing it? No. It’s more like coffee, email, coffee, meeting, coffee, lunch with coworkers, coffee — OK finally time to get some work done!
I don’t think of AI as trying to invent an artificial human, but it’s extremely important to think about the cultural, moral, racial, and gender biases that get baked into code through histories of projects.
This is cool. Christian’s lab has been producing some amazing tech for visualizing and interacting with human and cellular anatomy, including LINDSAY Virtual Human, and now this:
Christian Jacob and Markus Santoso are trying to re-create the experience of the aforementioned agents in Fantastic Voyage. Working with 3D modelling company Zygote, they and recent MSc graduate Douglas Yuen have created HoloCell, an educational software. Using Microsoft’s revolutionary HoloLens AR glasses, HoloCell provides a mixed reality experience allowing users to explore a 3D simulation of the inner workings, organelles, and molecules of a healthy human cell.Jacob has plenty of experience in bioinformatics as the head of the Lindsay Virtual Human Project.
