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Thanks to a nudge from Alan, I jumped back into the 365photos project for 2022. I put together a quick video of the 365 photos - it’s kind of surprising just how much happened this year! I’ve been doing this project since 2007, but I’m not sure if I’ll keep it going in 2023.

The album for 2022 is available online (as well as albums for each year of the project). (the photo gallery script seems to be acting up. awesome. I’ll have to fix that when I have some time…)

I gave a graduate seminar to the Faculty of Science and Taylor Institute for Teaching & Learning today. It was the first time I’ve had the opportunity to talk about the dissertation research projects that make up my dissertation. I also got to share the framework that I developed to describe teaching and learning using concepts adapted from the formal analysis of video games.

The dissertation became a description of a way to integrate the disciplines of HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) and SoTL (Scholarship of Teaching & Learning). I’ll be able to share the full dissertation after the oral exam in January and whatever embargo delay is required by the university. In the meantime, here’s a recording of my grad seminar, and the figure representing the framework.

I thought I’d try ChatGPT to see what it would do with my dissertation topic.¹ I gave it the prompt:

Explain the ways in which “Scholarship of Teaching and Learning” and “Human-Computer Interaction” can be integrated using research methods adapted from the formal analysis of video games.

And it returned:

The scholarship of teaching and learning is an approach to education that focuses on studying and improving teaching and learning processes in order to enhance student learning. This can be done through a variety of research methods, such as classroom observations, student interviews, and surveys. Human-computer interaction, on the other hand, is a field that focuses on the design and evaluation of computer systems and technologies that are easy and effective for people to use.

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I finally (finally) upgraded my phone from an old iPhone X to a new iPhone 14 Pro. I splurged, figuring I spend enough time using it… The phone’s nice, but the cameras and lenses are insane. 3 physical lenses and one cropping trick to make a fourth using optical lenses at 14mm, 24mm, 44mm, and 77mm focal lengths. On a phone. But what does that mean? Here are some sample photos at the extreme ends - 14mm ultrawide angle, and 77mm telephoto.

Justin posted a thing on listedtech, looking at historical “big booth” presenter data from the EDUCAUSE annual conference, with data from 2012-2022¹. It’s an interesting approach, but the charts he used didn’t make it easy to see if there was anything going on. Any trends? Shifts? Gaps? So, I took a couple of minutes to throw the data into Numbers and created the 2 visualizations I was looking for in the article. I didn’t adjust the categories from the article - how is conferencing different from conferencing/email? How is mobile different from mobile or networking? security vs. consulting? etc…

Back when I was first diagnosed, we joined Wellspring and started going to a weekly yoga class for people with cancer (and their families). It was really great, just being around people who were going through similar things but not being directly about “hey let’s talk about cancer because cancer cancer cancer”. We did that for over 2 years, as I went through treatment and began to recover. (and then COVID hit and yoga classes for people with compromised immune systems became impossible)

Stephen Downes just posted his list of top tools for learning. I’m thinking about the tools that I use in my practice, and they’re pretty different from Stephen’s. These are the tools that I use for working and learning.

1. Safari and Edge

Web browsers run most of what we do. Safari is my main browser because it’s so nicely connected to sync bookmarks etc. over all of the devices that I use, and does it without draining batteries more quickly than necessary. But not every website works well with it, still, in 2022, somehow. I just can’t make myself use Chrome. I use Firefox occasionally. But Edge has really come along, and provides the Chrome renderer without the Google-ness. Yes, it’s Microsoft, but it’s pretty good and if I have to let a company track what I do on the internet, I’d rather Microsoft than Google. D’Arcy from 2005 would be shocked to hear 2022 D’Arcy say that…

I’d previously written a bit about shifting to more agile/adaptable/flexible learning technologies, and I’ve been meaning to write something about our work to adapt spaces in the Taylor Institute as we try to enable some kind of remote- or hybrid- or mixed- or whatever modality thing we wind up calling this stuff. So… here goes…

When everything shifted online at the beginning of the whole COVID thing, the learning spaces at the Taylor Institute kind of got put on hold for awhile. We focused on online platforms for a year, and then slowly started dipping back into hybrid scenarios where some students are physically in the room and some are elsewhere, wherever.

Holy. 20 years. 2 decades. That’s how long I’ve been blogging, how long this humble website has been around. The first (surviving) post was published on May 2, 2002, shortly after we found out that we were going to be adding a person to our family. That person is now 19 and in post-secondary education. That’s mind-boggling in ways that makes a couple decades of blogging seem a little less impressive.

I just popped into TI 110 (Studio A) in the Taylor Institute, to try out the fancy new auto-tracking camera and to see how it works with YuJa on the podium computer. The auto-tracking thingy uses computer vision to detect the “teacher” or “presenter” in the room, and doesn’t need a tracking device to be worn (like the previous camera did). Which is great, as long as the computer vision stuff can figure out where you are, and as long as it doesn’t get confused by multiple people (or images that look like people) in a room ¹.

I’ve been part of several initiatives on campus over the last year, looking at how we provide and support learning technologies as a university. Several themes have consistently emerged across all of these.

1. Instructors need a baseline of common technologies to enable a consistent teaching experience across courses
2. Instructors need flexibility, to be able to use different technologies that enable discipline-specific teaching and learning practices
3. Students need to be able to access technologies, both within and outside of formal course activities
4. Everyone experiences a course differently, depending on their role in the course, their connections to others in the course, and the various technologies that they use (both formally and informally)¹

Universities tend to focus on the first point. Let’s develop standards and ensure that all learning spaces meet them. Which is great, as long as the standards are current and as long as sustainable funding is available to ensure all learning spaces are continually updated to implement these standards.

The Learning Technologies and Design Team in the TI just produced this outstanding resource (with design by our Comms team), with strategies for engaging remote and face-to-face students. Top tier work by the entire team, and some really great collaboration as well, with instructional designers and learning technologists and graphic designers coming together to create highly compelling and useful resources. Best team ever.