It’s an application that supports curriculum design and review - an entire program can be designed before it’s submitted to a faculty for approval, allowing for pre-flight testing of the program. Do all of the claimed program-level outcomes get incorporated appropriately? Are there gaps? Redundancies? Is every course trying to teach one outcome, but none are teaching another one?
Some people1 have asked me how Hugo works for publishing my site. It’s working great for my needs, and although it still needs some command-line work, it’s simple enough to learn it.
I’ve been setting up my website, and had things working pretty much exactly how I want them. But, I’d been struggling with how to properly separate content on the website while combining content in the main site feed. The main reason is to be able to have things like /reflections to separate week-in-review reflection posts without overwhelming the homepage with weekly posts that would make all other content that I post on less than a weekly cadence be lost in the noise.
I’m following Brian’s lead, and signing up for the TRU Digital Detox program that will run throughout January 2020. I’m not sure my health plan covers the cost of a full rehab, so this will hopefully serve to help nudge me toward thinking about my relationship with online technologies.
Brenna Clarke Gray has been setting up some really interesting work in her new role at TRU (and, really, the whole TRU Open Learning team is doing some seriously awesome work). I’m looking forward to learning more from them throughout the detox.
I’ve had the opportunity to work with leaders from various faculties, to develop work plans for developing communication/support, inventory, and procedures that are involved in providing and integrating learning technologies into courses. There are a few themes that keep coming up (paraphrased):
we need to be led by pedagogy, not technology
our tools shape what we do with them
campus platforms are designed for the institution, not the people within
our processes for requesting/implementing new tools can be prohibitive and stifling
Looking at Brightspace, our campus LMS1 is automatically available for use by every course, in every faculty. If a course exists in Peoplesoft, the instructor is able to activate a course site in Brightspace and use it for whatever they need. The courses are customized slightly for each faculty (some navigation tweaks, some default content, maybe some grade schemas…). The instructor then builds the course - adding course content, setting up discussion boards, gradebook, assignments.2 Then, typically on the first week of the semester, the instructor activates the course and students can access it.
I didn’t really track my media consumption in 2019 - most of this was pulled together from watch history in various platforms, and from memory. So, likely huge gaps in there. My non-work reading was pretty sci-fi focused - I need to branch out a bit there, maybe after book 9 of Expanse comes out…
Anyway. Here’s most of the media I consumed in 2019.
2019 was a year for the record books. Looking back, it was basically a constant stream of life-altering challenges (many of which were profoundly unbloggable), but we got through everything and are thriving as we go into 2020.
Looking back at 2019…
I went through chemo. But, I made it through and am now stronger than I’ve been in years. And, when it does come back, I know that we have a plan in place and that it works. Hopefully, we won’t have to test that for another 5-10 years.
I don’t care about the business of edtech. I don’t care if a company buys another company, or what their reasons are. I care about how technologies are used to improve the learning experience for students. The business of edtech is a means to that end. But…
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!
I went through chemo. But, I made it through and am now stronger than I’ve been in years. And, when it does come back, I know that we have a plan in place and that it works. Hopefully, we won’t have to test that for another 5-10 years.