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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
Mike Caulfield has a good post about how Facebook and siloed social media got traction in ways the blogosphere circa 2005-2008 never maintained. He has a good point about the user experience - people aren’t going to go look at 10, 100, 1000 different websites with different graphic designers, publishing models, and navigation structures. That’s where the simplified UX of Facebook comes in. A single stream, pulling stuff from everyone a person cares about. And that jerk from junior high.
I have a stack of old CD-ROMs from projects ranging from 1995-2003. I wanted to save a few of them to add to a portfolio of projects, before the projects were lost forever. It’s ironic - back in the olden days of multimedia, we burned fancy new CD-ROMs that were sold as “100 year archive medium” - costing $30 or more per disk back then, and we figured it was money well spent. Now, just 20 years later, most of those archival “green media” disks are completely unreadable, having degraded already. Thankfully, I have several projects that were commercially distributed, meaning I have actual pressed CD-ROMs rather than DIY burned disks. These disks read just fine - and should for decades to come.
I’m not going to write a year-in-review post. It’s been an epic year on many fronts, and next year is already shaping up to be bigger, more amazing and even more exhausting. In great ways.
So. What about 2015? For me, it was a year that I became more internally-focused. I traveled less. I worked more on the local campus context. And that’s a great thing. I plan to travel even less in 2016. I think the biggest impact I can have is in helping to foster active networks and communities on my own campus, and to connect people across faculties and contexts.
I was lucky to have been taken to a masters’ student seminar by Tatiana Karaman yesterday 1, to see some work on a number of her related neuroanatomy projects as part of the Computational Media Design Program at the University of Calgary.
I’ve been reading 
