Work

I took a week off, but lots of important stuff happened. Surprisingly, the university doesn't stop when I leave campus. Crazy!

The Educational Development Unit's Strategic Plan was published as part of our department website. What a fantastic, inclusive process. The EDU's strategic plan is going to be the foundation of everything we do, and it will be extremely useful to have this as a public and living document. Also, the EDU Portfolio, to document what we do as a department.

D2L is upgrading our environment to the latest-and-greatest 10.5.1 next week (we're still running on 10.3.something), and there were lots of things that needed to be checked/verified/tested/not-lost-in-noise. In hindsight, this was a pretty horrible week for me to be away. But it was also pretty amazing, seeing team members track the important moving pieces, develop testing plans, coordinate with people across campus, and manage the final stages of upgrade planning with the vendor. Absolutely fantastic work. I couldn't be more proud of the entire team, but especially Izzy, who absolutely knocked it out of the park this week. I was going to dial in to the Big Go/No-Go call to help make the final decision, when I realized there was literally nothing that I would add to the process at that point. She'd already shepherded the process and called the ball. I am so completely impressed by her, and by her growth in the new role. Fantastic!

Read

Edtech-ish

• Jim Groom
  • Single Most Important Development in Edtech in Last 2 Years…
  • A Long Short History of Reclaim Hosting
• Ben Werdmüller: What would it take to save #EdTech?
• Jon Kruithof.: LMS Review
• via Stephen Downes
  • 10 reasons why Salman Khan is a more important educational theorist & practitioner than Ken Robinson or Sugata Mitra
  • Deceptive Publishing: Why We Need a Blacklist, and Some Suggestions on How to Do It Right
• Clarence Fisher: A Challenging Tweet
• Bryan Alexander: Touring the ruins of Minecraft
• Campus Technology
  • The Move from Course Management to Course Networking
  • Australian University Eyes Use of Badging for Credit
  • CampusTourVR Brings Virtual Campus Tours Directly to Prospective Students
  • The Move from Course Management to Course Networking -- Campus Technology expecting the LMS to change how people teach is faulty…
• Justin Fletcher: Breaking the ice – 5 tips for getting your discussions started in myCourses
• Hannah Rose Mendoza: Dem Bones Seeks to Revolutionize Veterinary Education with 3D Printed Canine Skeletons
• Colin Madland: This Week I Learned 08/21/15
• Tom Woodward: Refining the My Sites List
• Ryan Anderson: Forget the outrage: Stop signing away your author rights to corporations
• Tony Hirst: Getting Your Own Space on the Web…
• Design Thinking Comes of Age
• Video: Why Is Measuring Learning So Difficult? | EDUCAUSE

Miscellanea

• Ars Technica: The new, underground sport of first-person drone racing
• Mark Frauenfelder: What does a $300,000 house look like around the world?
• Jason Kottke: How to live the good life
• Mike Murphy: Giphy's new app lets you record life's shareable moments and immortalize them as GIFs
• Adam Epstein: The actual NASA technologies that Matt Damon will use in the space survival film "The Martian"
• via Nick Heer: Deciding Between Spotify and Apple Music Just Got Easier
• The Canadian Press: Municipalities unprepared for 'weather whiplash,' warns top meteorologist
• Jason Kottke: The Jefferson Grid
• John Gruber: ★ Safari Content Blocker, Before and After

Other

I took some much-needed time off, and headed out of town for a few days. Thankful for good friends who tolerate friends imposing themselves.