Another big week.
Work
- We had our third EDU strategic planning repeat, to focus on how to build an assessment plan for the department. As always, what an amazing group of people. Trust the process. Trust the people. The strategic plan document will be published this summer, and we'll be keeping it as a living document with portfolio to support it.
- Final preparations for our 2015 University of Calgary Post-secondary Conference on Learning and Teaching, which takes place next week (!!!). The schedule for the conference looks strong, and I had to make some seriously hard decisions about which sessions to fit into my schedule (thanks to the awesome app, that was a pretty seamless process).
- 2 new additions to the Technology Integration Group (and EDU) for the summer - we were able to secure funding to hire a grad student and undergrad student as research assistants to explore and document learning technologies and spaces over the summer. They've already started, and we're all pretty excited to see what they come up with, and what we all learn this summer. We'll be figuring out the plan sometime after the conference ends next week.
- We gave a presentation/demo of the Student Signup Manager at the 2015 D2L Ignite regional conference at SAIT. It was the first off-campus demo of the tool, and it was very well received. Even more importantly, I think we had a great discussion as members of the Calgary D2L community about how to better form a developer community in the region. Almost every post-secondary institution in the city uses D2L, as well as both school boards and many private schools. We need to work together more.
Read
- Robin Mueller reflects on 1 year at the EDU
- Dave says content is people. No. Content is content. People is people.
- George and Stephen had a bit of a falling out, over George's new book. I couldn't follow the whole argument, but they seemed pretty intense about it. Something about rigour, or lack of it, or academic integrity, or lack of it. It seemed like they were loudly agreeing about something. And then the NRC released a document outlining a plan for a Learning and Performance Support System, which kind of negated the whole scholarly-rigour bickerfest, to me.
- Daniella Zalcman, Quartz: Photos: after years of forced assimilation, Canada's indigenous people begin to heal.
- Michael Cowling, The Conversation: How 'digital natives' are killing 'sage on the stage'. Ugh. Just need to throw in something about learning styles. Oh. wait. Bingo.
- Keurig realizes that DRM kind of sucks (for the bottom line).
- Michael Ullyot: Content Providers and Consumers
- Scott McLeod links to a Forbes article talking about educational games teaching skills vs. thinking. Gamify everything. Train all the things. Or do something more interesting.
- Jason Lengstorf: The Cult of Work You Were Never Meant to Join. Really nice article on choosing to work yourself to burnout. I've come close far too many times. I don't want to let it happen again. We're doing important work, and I'm not going to let burnout screw that up.
Other
- Provincial election this week, which surprisingly was the end of a 44-year reign by the Progressive Conservative dynasty (which had become progressively less Progressive each decade). NDP took a majority. Wow. I did not see that coming. Alberta is full of wonderful surprises lately.
- The Norman family kind of got into the Fitbit thing. J wanted one, so I got her the nicer one with the watch, and we all started walking so much more. 2 more are in the mail. Hopefully we stick with the walking. It's been really nice getting out as a family and just hanging out without anything planned.