Blog Posts

Taylor Institute forum theatre conversion timelapse

The forum in the Taylor Institute converts from a gymnasium-sized flat-floor active learning classroom into a 336-seat theatre for keynotes and special events.

Sketchnote for Jos Boys' keynote #ticonf2016

on digital posters at an academic conference

Poster sessions are an important part of any academic conference - providing a way for researchers (including both faculty and students) to share their research in a format that supports describing methods, discussion, and results as well as fostering discussion about the project. Normally, these posters are printed on large format printers, carefully rolled into tubes for travel, and hung from poster boards or walls in a conference venue. It works, but requires the posters to be completed days (or weeks) ahead of time to allow for layout and printing (and any revisions to fix typos or omissions). It also requires a the content to be static - it’s a printed poster - and the format usually involves a 4’x6’ sheet of paper packed with dense micro-print and footnotes.

on the Taylor Institute grand opening

It’s been a long process, but the Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning opened this morning. The last 4 years have been an intensive planning/collaboration/development/implementation process, with people from many organizations coming together to build on the vision of the Institute. From the Institute’s website:

The Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning is dedicated to better understanding and improving student learning. It is both a building and a community that extends well beyond the building’s walls. The Taylor Institute brings together teaching development, teaching and learning research, and undergraduate inquiry learning under one roof. The institute supports building and sharing teaching expertise; integrating technologies to enhance learning; and conducting inquiry to improve student learning. Through the College of Discovery and Innovation, the Taylor Institute offers undergraduate students opportunities for inquiry-based learning, experiential learning and interdisciplinary research.

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Updating my WordPress plugins

I’ve cobbled a few WordPress plugins together, primarily to do stuff on UCalgaryBlogs by exposing built-in WordPress functionality through shortcodes so that people don’t have to manually edit themes.

And then I basically ignored the plugins for a few years, because they don’t actually do anything, so there’s not much to update or fix. But it looks bad if a plugin hasn’t been tested with recent versions of WordPress, so I just did some testing of them all. They all work on WP 4.4.2, and I’ll re-test after 4.5 drops. I did find some funkiness in one of the plugins, and that’s been taken care of (and I made it a bit more generalizable, so yay progress). I’m hoping to give the plugins some more love - I definitely need to spend more time actually building things instead of just talking about the stuff that people do with the things I made a few years ago…

On starting a PhD

Last night, I officially accepted an offer to enter a PhD program at the University of Calgary. So, it’s a thing, now. Starting in Fall 2016, I will be a PhD student in the Computational Media Design program. CMD is an absolutely amazing interdisciplinary program. From the About blurb:

At the University of Calgary, we formed the Computational Media Design Program to enable students to conduct research at the intersection of art, music, dance, drama, design and computer science.
The Computational Media Design (CMD) graduate program is composed of the Faculty of Science: Department of Computer Science, the Faculty of Environmental Design and the Faculty of Arts: School of Creative and Performing Arts and Department of Art. Students can earn graduate degrees, both Master of Science and PhD. The research-based graduate degrees explore the relationships between and among art, design, science and technology.

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EdTech Speculative Fiction anthology

I’ve been reading the awesome “Pwning Tomorrow” speculative fiction anthology published by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Fantastic stories written by the likes of Neil Gaiman, Cory Doctorow, Bruce Sterling and many others, exploring the implications of technology policies. They look at biology (hacking genomes etc.), privacy (internet-of-things writ large), communications, surveillance, and many others. Some are subtle. Some, less so. But every story has made me think.

It hit me - we need something like this, to explore issues in educational technology. We have scholarly publications, we have critique and commentary, but we need future-looking explorations of the implications of what this stuff may mean for teaching, learning, and society.

Looking for digital whiteboard software

We’re setting up a bunch¹ of “collaboration carts” in the new building. They’ll be used to do a bunch of things (videoconferencing, wireless collaborative displays via Mersive Solstice Pod, Google Docs, Office 365) - when someone plugs one into a floor box, it fires up and asks them what they want it to be. One of the things we want it to be able to become is a digital whiteboard - as much as people love digital stuff, they really love whiteboards.

Thoughts on the iPad Pro

I cringe at how this post will likely be read - as a fanboy OMG DIS AWESUM! post. Whatever. I promised several people that I’d write up something about my early experiences with the iPad Pro and pencil. 

As part of my role in helping to refine the learning technologies platforms and support on campus, I force myself to use as many different devices as I can in order to make sure I understand what people will be bringing to campus. I used a Surface Pro 3 for about 6 months last year - and while the hardware was OK, it felt comically big. The digital ink, though, was fantastic. In the end, I couldn’t get past how horribly the software was (not) designed for touch interaction. I wanted something that size (but not as thick - Surface Pro 3 felt like carrying around a 12" picture frame), but with digital ink that was as good as the Surface pen. But I went back to a combination of iPad Air 2 and MacBook Air as my non-desk computers.

Gephi twitter community detection screencast

Paul asked about some of the quirks. Easier to show than tell… (based on the instructions linked here…)

Community Detection on Twitter

I’ve been thinking a lot about how to visualize online presence and community. There are lots of great tools to do post-hoc analysis, but I’m thinking about something more realtime. It doesn’t exist yet, though. In the meantime, I’m playing around with the current tools to get a feel for what stories they can pull from the social graph data.

Yesterday, I followed the howto from Caleb Jones, to pull the social graph data from my Twitter account. The process took about 15 hours, because of Twitter’s helpful throttling of API calls. Thankfully, the twecoll python tool takes that into account and gracefully pauses when Twitter API tells it to cool it.

2015/365photos

I just posted the set of daily photos for 2015, wrapping up the 9th year I’ve done a 365photos project.

I’m trying a new publishing tool - instead of generating static HTML from Aperture, I’m exporting 960px-wide images from Photos, uploading those to my server, and using UberGallery to generate the web pages automatically. I haven’t done much with metadata for the photos, so I’m just showing the photo and a title if available. I saved a snapshot of the generated HTML as the index.html file for that directory, so the server load should be pretty trivial, and it shouldn’t require active PHP scripts to run in the future…