Blockchain will certainly be used in higher education. It will transform how some things are designed and run. In the same way that relational databases have - Moodle (or even MOOCs 1) wouldn’t have been possible without MySQL. Blackboard wouldn’t have been possible without Oracle (or whatever SQL engine it runs on). Relational databases transformed how courses were offered by higher education institutions, without disrupting the institutions themselves.
Our Learning Technologies Advisory Committee met last week to start to brainstorm what the current issues on campus are, with respect to learning technologies. One of the key themes was a need to systematically evaluate learning technologies to make sure we understand what people need to do, and how the tools/supports/resources can best meet those needs. After the meeting, I was asked to pull together some links to resources that can be used to help evaluate learning technologies from an instructor/admin and student perspective.
After finally deciding to throw caution to the wind and move my webstuff back into a static format, this website finally landed on Hugo. I did an initial migration from WordPress to Jekyll, which looked really promising but took waaaaay too long to generate the 2,800+ posts for this site (taking almost 45 minutes?). Hugo runs as a native application, and runs MUCH faster. Generating the entire site currently takes less than 5 seconds, then uploading it to the server via rsync takes only a little longer.
After many, many, many years running my blog on WordPress, I finally got tired of fussing around with convincing it to do what I want it to do, and trying to get it to perform well enough to not have to wait 20 seconds for page loads. I’m also wanting to shift away from hoarding all of my content online.
I had been experimenting with Jekyll, but it was so unbelievably slow to generate the static HTML for this site that I had to give up on it. I’m now running on Hugo. It’s a native binary application that runs on my laptop, so generation is really fast. It took less than 4 seconds to generate the full website for all 2,818 posts for this blog!
At the COHERE 2019 conference, the informal theme this morning was on modularizing and disaggregating1 - breaking out of the traditional 4-year degree program, breaking away from the semester-long course, enabling access to content and resources and people outside of the traditional contexts. Dr. Reid opened the conference with a description of this shift, and in reframing how we as an institution think about online experiences - that they aren’t “less than” traditional face-to-face experiences. They can be liberating, enabling, enhancing, amplifying. Dr. Karen Willcox gave the opening keynote, describing projects she’s worked on through MIT in an effort to make sense of the complexities of programs and courses through mapping the curriculum. This is something we have a lot of experience with at the University of Calgary, having built a pretty powerful curriculum mapping application that is already being used across the university. Her application of network graph visualization looks like it provides an interesting interface to exploring the curriculum data once it’s been collected.
After quickly (and I mean QUICKLY - it took less than half an hour’s worth of fiddling around with code while sitting on the couch watching garbage TV) building a way for people to markup chunks of text using the TIDraw.net -powered digital whiteboards, I wanted to test it in action. It’s one thing to try it on my laptop or iPad, but digital ink is a different experience on a 50" display. The classrooms have been so busy this semester, I didn’t get a chance to try it until this morning.
We hosted a “TI Instructors Gathering” this morning, where we invite folks who are teaching in the Taylor Institute to come together to share their experiences and we can learn from them about how they use the spaces and technologies. This gathering was predominantly Languages profs - french/spanish/russian/french - and we got to talking about how they’d like to be able to have their students break into groups and use the “Collaboration Carts” to mark up passages of text. That’s not a thing that’s readily done - there are web-based text annotation tools, but not ones that are based on ink. Having students sketch on text is a useful activity, pedagogically, and so I got to thinking…
Robert Kelly has been hosting his Design Thinking course in the TI for the past several years.
I was away over the summer, so missed the latest instance of the course. Giant lobsters! Thankfully, they documented the course and published a video of the shenanigans.
It’s a bit of a challenge when the course is going on, because it’s so profoundly unconventional. Classroom? Classrooms? Nah. Buildings! But - it’s been amazing to see what the participants do, how they work together, and what they build.
The plan for my PhD is taking a bit of a different tack, to take advantage of an incredible opportunity that will remain cryptically-alluded-to for now. I need to go deep on video game design, and I’ll be approaching things from a teachy-learny perspective so ideally I need to spend some quality time with key video games that are exemplars of experiential learning. I’m thinking it doesn’t need to be full-on Oregon Trail you-have-died-of-dysentery, but should include games that pioneered approaches to teach in some way. Things like the deceleration curve path in Forza Motorsport 5 et al. that guides you through difficult turns on a track, or the time-rewind-retry thing in Braid that lets you iterate on a plan until you solve it, or the try-stuff-until-you-figure-it-out exploration of Portal.
I took photos throughout my chemo/immunotherapy treatment, to document my reactions and the view from the poison room. Photos generates a decent slideshow (complete with Generic Copyright-takedown-avoiding Sountrack #1) 1
I spent a few weeks back in 1997 building a similar video with photos from our wedding, in Macromedia Director and then output to VHS to play at the reception in town. I tapped a button on my phone and this chemo slideshow video spit out in seconds. Crazy. ↩︎
