Blog Posts

weekend hammerhead caffeine fix

For the last few weeks, I’ve been making a “hammerhead” on weekend mornings. It’s probably the best cup of coffee I’ve had. Anywhere. Here’s how…

Basically, a hammerhead (or High Test, or Shot in the Dark) is just a good, strong cup of coffee, with a shot or two of espresso added for good measure.

Start by getting the espresso going. I got a little 2-cup Moka Express1. It ain’t no fancy schmancy push-a-button-and-insert-disposable-plastic-pod thing. It was designed in the 1930’s, is made of solid aluminum, and goes on your stove top. It takes about 10 minutes to make, so get that started first. I’ve been using illy medium roast espresso, pre-ground. 1 big scoop into the hopper of the Moka Express, and it’s set.

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edtech fetishism

Additionally, educational technology can be prone to cycles of hype and fetishism, where new tools and applications are rapidly adopted by individuals who are seen as innovators in the field, with little time for thorough or rigorous investigation of the pedagogical strategies that may be enabled by the affordances of these new tools.

Norman, D. (2013). A Case Study Using the Community of Inquiry Framework to Analyze Online Discussions in WordPress and Blackboard in a Graduate Course. (Master’s thesis, University of Calgary). Retrieved from https://darcynorman.net/thesis

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train ride through calgary

the City of Calgary Route Ahead project’s twitter feed just posted a link to this awesome timelapse of a C-Train ride from the far northwest terminal (near my house), past my office (right before the first tunnel), through downtown, and then to the Deep South. I love me some HD timelapse train videos…

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on the university of phoenix lms patent

So the University of Phoenix was awarded a patent recently, and on first glance it looks to be another round of “patent the LMS and destroy the competition”. But it’s not.

Here’s the press release.

Here’s the patent.

It’s about automatically sequencing a series of learning objects based on the activity of students. Someone does something, and the order of presentation of some items is shuffled in response.

This is not a patent on learning management systems. This is not a salvo in an ed tech war to end all ed tech wars. It’s learning objects. Remember those? Yeah. Just barely. But now there’s a patent for one aspect of automatically sequencing them.

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on bookmarks

Season 3, Episode #19 of “Who gives a crap?” - the one where the guy moves bookmarks around

I’d installed a copy of Scuttle a couple of years ago, and have been happily saving bookmarks on my own server since then. But I got frustrated when stuff didn’t play as nicely with my stuff, when compared to delicious.com or diigo.com or the like. IFTTT scripts. Importers. Evernote import-bookmarks-into-a-note stuff. etc…

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on hype cycles and easy answers

David Kernohan published a revised edtech hype cycle, rightly pointing out that it’s not a cycle, and that “progression” to the “plateau of productivity” is not a foregone conclusion. Here’s David’s EduBeardStroke Parabola 2013:

EduBeardStroke Parabola

I’ve seen the Gartner Hype Cycle used quite a bit - I’ve even used it myself on campus briefings and reports. It’s never sat well with me, but I couldn’t articulate why. I mean, Gartner hires The Experts to Make Sense of Things. And this is how they do it. And people understand the simplifications and generalizations, and feel comforted that Everything Will Be OK.

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"I'm in a glass case of emotion" (or, on Enterprise Solutions on campus)

Brian Lamb wrote a fantastic post that linked to Martin Weller’s recent post that touches on enterprise-vs-twitter-scale-support.

My synopsis of the important issues:

  1. People are different. They have different needs, different capabilities, different comfort levels, etc… etc…
  2. Institutions are (relatively) good at offering Enterprise Solutions.
  3. Enterprise Solutions kind of suck for individuals, and for small-scale innovation.

My take on this is that the institutions need to provide a “common ground” so all members of a community have access to core services and functionality. The LMS/VLE does that. Not always well, but the intent is to provide everyone with the ability to manage a course online. To do that at the scale of a modern university1 means invoking Enterprise Software. So we get things like Peoplesoft as the Student Information System managing course enrolments and the like. And we get things like Blackboard providing the online course environment. Everyone gets to play. Maybe not in the exact way they’d like, but they’re in the game, and they get support to help them along. This is good.

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UofC LMS RFP engagement report

So, this project has taken up the vast majority of my Day Job for the last year or so. We’re finally approaching the point where a decision can be made on which LMS we’ll be using.

I just published our working group’s report on the project website, so we can share the current data with the university community. Long story short, it’s a draw between Canvas and D2L, with further information needed before Those Who Are Higher Up Than I Am can make the decision. Good times.

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almost 2 decades in edtech

I realized while writing my comprehensive list of edtech predictions for 2013, that I’ve been playing around with edtech for almost 2 decades. That kind of surprised me. It doesn’t feel like that long. But, when I step back and think about it, yeah. Almost 2 decades.

  • 1994 - started working as a contractor at the UofC faculty of Nursing, building a series of award winning multi-media inter-active CD-ROMs.1
  • 1998 - left the UofC to work for a small eLearning company, building a multi-media inter-active learning management system for corporate training.
  • 2001 - dotcom bubble asploded. unemployed worked as an independent consultant for awhile.
  • 2001 - back to UofC, working in the Learning Commons as a consultant, building learning object repository prototype and other fun stuff. also built a corporate learning management system based on learning objects and standards etc…
  • 2001 - hired as an instructional designer / programmer at the UofC Learning Commons. Worked on a bunch of various projects, including EDUSOURCE, CAREO, Pachyderm. Got to travel a bit.2
  • time passes, hilarity ensues. blogs. wikis. podcasting. rss. good times. it was the golden age of edtech…
  • 2011 - moved into IT at the UofC as an “IT Partner”, working with a few faculties, focusing on elearning stuff.

so. yeah. that’s a long time. and it feels like we’re constantly just on the verge of changing everything. No. Really. It’s all going to change for real this time. For good! Seriously! Wait. Why are you laughing? Stop it! cough

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