Since we’re adopting Desire2Learn, the UofC sent a few folks to the annual Desire2Learn Fusion conference - the timing was extremely fortuitous, with the conference starting about a month after we signed the contract. I’d never been to a D2L conference before, so wasn’t sure really what to expect. Looking at the conference schedule ahead of time, it looked pretty interesting - and would have many sessions that promised to cover some of the extremely-rapid-deployment adoption cycle we’re faced with.
The big spike on the far left? Google Reader. Still counting for almost 77% of RSS-related accesses to my blog. Except no humans can see what it’s still indexing using GReader…
Google Reader appears to be a zombie process, obediently and tirelessly indexing RSS feeds, oblivious to the fact that nobody will be able to view the product of its work…
I treat my Desktop as “stuff I’m working on right now” and file things away into project folders after I’m done actually working on them. I also use 3 different computers, and a couple of iOS devices. How to sync this active-work area across all? This would work with any other file sync tool1.
It’s an easy trick, based on one I found on Lifehacker2. It’s also not necessary - it’s trivial to just leave the active-work files in the Dropbox directory, but then you have to go digging every. single. time…3
I pop over to Google occasionally, but for about 90+% of my searching, DDG has it covered. Without the creepy overly-attached-girlfriend google tracking…
So, we’re moving to Desire2Learn. Lots of things happening to get us there. Everything is being driven by a timeline leading to the decommissioning of our old LMS on May 31, 2014. Which means, when dealing with academic calendar years, and semester cycles, that we have 3 semesters to get from 0-100% adoption of D2L before we turn off the Blackboard servers.
I know. The timeline is kind of crazy. But, it’s totally doable. We’re going to have to be OK with noise and mess, and with not having all of the answers ahead of time. We’re going to be needing a lot of support from Desire2Learn (thankfully, they’re up to it), and from the UofC community as a whole.
Jen suggested many (many) months ago that I post the requirements we used in the LMS RFP on github so people could use them, fork them, etc…. A starting point, so every institution doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel each time. Considering the amount of time and effort she put into helping craft them, how can I possibly refuse? I can’t, that’s how.
I’ve been working with people on campus for a long time to try to figure out what we need to do about our campus LMS. My oldest file for the endeavour was created on July 19, 2011. Seriously. Almost 2 years ago. We did a couple rounds of campus engagement1, ran an RFP, and wrote several reports. Provincial politics, budget crises and legal processes intervened, and here we are. The decision was formalized in the RFP system this afternoon, and it’s official: the University of Calgary has selected Desire2Learn as its next learning management system.
An idea I first saw Tim Bray do - when he finds a bunch of interesting tabs open in his browser, he writes a “tab sweep” post to share the links, and why they’re interesting. I think it’s a good idea. So, here are a few tabs that got opened up during my lunch-hour RSS feed reading…
I’ve really been loving running my own dropbox clone, by using owncloud running on my Hippie Hosting Co-op account. It’s (mostly) seamless and automatic, and (usually) Just Works™. It’s not as polished as Dropbox’s UI, but that’s not critical (although the status badges on files and folder badges would be nice…)
But, over the last week or 2, I’ve been noticing that owncloud on my work computer gets wedged. Digging into the status, the URL changes from my owncloud instance to something intercepted by browser-based wifi authentication. Just changing the URL in configuration doesn’t seem to solve it. I have to nuke my owncloud settings, add a new config, delete it because it insists on syncing to /clientsync rather than /, and then re-adding it manually. Then, deleting the /clientsync folder on the server. Annoying. I just need this to work.
Tim Bray on blogging (yes, blogging) - it’s not dead yet. The long-form nature is obviously more appropriate than 140-char bursts for important things:
We increase and improve our body of knowledge through conversation. When this involves serious issues, those that matter, the appropriate unit is, more or less, the essay; neither very-long nor very-short form.
and that blogging has an important role in countering the BS that filters through more traditional everything-to-everyone press outlets. He refers to the “Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect”, where we see faults in press coverage of topics we’re familiar, but trust it in areas we’re not expert in. When, more likely, the quality of analysis is probably equally crappy and misleading across the board.
I was talking with a prof yesterday, about how our CIO has an IMDB page1 . We both thought that was pretty cool. Afterward, I was thinking about IMDB and how non-film people don’t have a similar common CV/project/collaboration/history listing. I mentioned this on twitter, and Boris nudged me that, yes, we actually do have that. It’s LinkedIn.
@dlnorman you’re going to hate me for saying this, but @linkedin does fit the bill. Also check out @gklist & @zerply
