A 15km ride from UofC to Deepest NW Calgary - only a couple of blocks worth of marked bicycle lanes, and a couple km of separated pathways. I used a helmet-mounted GoPro Hero 4 Silver set to shoot a 4K timelapse with frames recorded every second, played back at 30fps. Nice.
Read MoreThis video by Michael Wesch is fantastic. Thanks to Mike Caulfield for the link!
Empathy is a powerful thing. Big Data and analytics misses this aspect of teaching and learning.
Read MoreJim wrote about his thoughts on the most important advancements in educational technology. I think he’s onto something - the exact tech isn’t important. Nor are the logos on the shiny things we build and/or buy. My personal stance is that we’ve seen 2 major changes on our campus - neither of which are directly related to specific technologies.
The first shift is nothing new - it’s also not constant or consistent. It’s about individualized ownership/control/access to technologies. Some new tools are cheap enough that people grab their own copies - even gasp without asking permission, or even notifying anyone. Some tools are good enough that The University grabs a few copies and hands them out more freely for people to do stuff. I’ve seen people do things with creating online resources for their courses that was simply not possible even a few years ago - and even if technically possible, involved the need to spin up projects, find funding, management, designers, etc…. Now, an instructor can sit at her computer and create really good resources for her courses, on her own, without needing to ask permission. And students can do the same. That’s a fantastic shift.
Read MoreI was asked what we needed to buy for instructors to explore integrating technology into their courses. Although we have many 3D printers on campus, I wanted one set up in the Educational Development Unit so that instructors could come and experiment with it in a safe place on neutral territory. I also wanted to expose people to an emerging technology so they would be able to incorporate it into their evolving understanding of literacy and of the types of things that are now possible. Simply having a 3D printer in the Unit would help even through simple exposure and osmosis. And, once people start to try things, there would be opportunities for cross-pollination and discussion beyond the simple technology. I also wanted to try something that wasn’t just replicating what was being done elsewhere on campus - we have some absolutely fantastic Maker spaces provided by our libraries, and several departments and faculties provide labs for student project development.
Read MoreI finally had a chance to finish Neal Stephenson’s latest novel, SEVENEVES. It was deeply interesting, combining epic tales of survivalism after a natural disaster wreaks havoc on the entire planet. Definitely a good read. Highly recommended. Some thoughts below - spoiler alert - not a full-on review, but some stuff I thought about while reading the novel.
The description of the events leading up to, and through, the Hard Rain were amazing. The narrative of final goodbyes as the first Hard Rain impacts hit actually choked me up. I must be getting old. That’s the first time a novel has done that to me.
Read MoreBrendan Burchard’s D.U.M.B. goals, on trying not to get buried and lost in busy task-completion. He seems to be of the Tony Robbins / TED school, but, still, there’s something to this.
Read MoreAlec asked how people manage and publish photos, which got me thinking about how I do it. I use a mix of old school offline management via Aperture on my home laptop as the central hub (which makes me nervous now that Aperture is Dead App Walking). I publish photos first to my own website, and then republish to other platforms automatically. If the third party stuff goes away (or I decide they’re evil enough to cut ties with), I lose nothing.
Read MoreThe SSL certificate I’d been using for this site had been about to expire, so I tried yanking it so I could replace it with something powered by Let’s Encrypt (which is backed by the EFF, Mozilla, Automattic, etc…). But, Let’s Encrypt doesn’t launch until the fall, so the timing wasn’t right. In the meantime, some browsers were throwing fits as some of the parts of my site were still trying to load via secure HTTPS connections, while others weren’t. Chaos and hilarity ensued. 
So, I just threw some money at the problem to get a shiny new certificate from SSL2Buy to get the site back on the air. I’d been trying to set up a free certificate through StartSSL, but that just didn’t work (and Firefox still freaked out with the free certificate).
It seems like a small, unimportant thing, but the D2L homepage is probably the single most important web page for students. While they occasionally use the university website, and periodically use the my.ucalgary.ca portal (to sign up for courses and pay fees), D2L is where they spend a substantial chunk of their time as they work through their courses and programs. We’d launched D2L with a news-centric homepage, so that we could easily push notifications and support resources during the transition from Blackboard. It worked well for that, but became a dumping ground for accretion - links added, blurbs added, until it was a wall of text that everyone basically ignored.
Read MoreI filed a request under the Access to Information Act, for “All Information Available” - mostly, I was curious to see if my fraternization with Open Content Hippies or Open Source Radicals had placed me on any lists. I’d followed a link on Facebook (which I can’t find now, yay for no searchability in FB-land) with the link to the Government of Canada web page with the request process and form, and a note suggesting that the form would be disappearing soon.
Read MoreI was at InfoComm 2015 this week, touring some vendors that have been recommended by our AV consultants for the Taylor Institute construction project, The Sextant Group. This was my first time at InfoComm, and I was kind of stunned at the sheer size of the trade show - and at how many similar products exist, with variations and overalaps. It’s rare to see a product that is truly unique - and from what I saw, it comes down mostly to the overall experience and how people are able to actually use the tools, rather than the feature-list checkboxes. No surprise there. Sometimes, having the most features is not a good thing. It’s having the right features (and not having the others). Here are my rough-ish notes about some of the vendors and products that we visited.
Read MoreNew forms of online education like MOOCs lost both forms of primacy at once. By making them free, students had few incentives to not quit any time the course materials got boring or difficult. Without a physical presence, there weren’t the social peer effects of friends encouraging us to attend our classes on time, or shaming us about our poor performance.
These products often tried to emulate the feel of a course by forcing students to take them concurrently. The effect of that model, which Coursera particularly prioritized, appears on the surface to have been unsuccessful, while also reducing the convenience that should be the hallmark of online education.
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