So… after a year-long hiatus from doing this weekly review thing, I'm thinking it's time to start it back up. I'm not sure what the format should be…

Work

We hosted the (fourth?) TI Learning Spaces lunch session, to help bring together instructors who are teaching in the TI so they can share what they're doing. This month's topic was assessment - how do you assess learning in a flexible space, with active learning and a strong focus on student agency? Lots of great ideas from the instructors - and TI staff - who participated in the session. And we're all looking forward to a gala dance in the forum next semester as part of a course on Jane Austen…

First year education students had a digital poster fair on Friday. 160+ students, 2 months into their program at university, sharing academic poster presentations. Amazing. The energy in the room was incredible, and students were commenting on how much fun it was. Wow. 2 months into my undergrad program, there's no way I could have done what they did. Students are so incredibly capable and engaged. One student was Facetime-ing into the session from Montreal, where he had just finished practice to prepare for the Vanier Cup game the next day.

From an event-support standpoint for the poster session, we raised 2 Skyfold walls (AB and BC) to combine Learning Studios A, B and C, and moved most of the tables and chairs out of the way to leave the combined learning studios open for students to move between the collaboration carts. Student groups were assigned a station (with a station number indicated by a sticker placed on top of the metal cart number signs - protip: don't use stickers for this). We had the room set up in less than 30 minutes, and it took about the same time to reset it to "normal" afterward. Many hands, yadda yadda. Go team!

PhD

I went to a CMD lunch presentation by Naithan Bosse, on interactive soundscapes. Lots of interesting ideas and examples for incorporating binaurally spatialized sound to locate it in 3 dimensional space, and to connect it to other locations/times/people. It can become a form of audio augmented reality, or collaborative co-composing.

Other

Stuff I've starred in FeverËš and/or added as a link:

• Joe Mullin: Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook's fake news: We're working on it
• Phil Hill: University Responses to Piazza: Some good, some bad, some web site changes
• Clint Lalonde: Supporting what I use 2016 edition
• UCalgaryBlogs: The Teaching Unconference: Fostering a community of practice for postsecondary educators
• Tony Bates: Report on SFU's experiences of teaching with technology
• Alice Marwick: A new study suggests online harassment is pressuring women and minorities to self-censor
• Cory Doctorow: Conservative Alberta politician changes sides over Trumpism, gets gendered death threats and slurs from the Tory base (Sandra Jansen is my MLA. She's fantastic, and I'm horrified at the level of abuse she takes as part of her role in public service. That is not OK on any level.)
• Jon Kruithof.: Why Can't Students Opt-Out of Data Collection in Higher Ed?
• George Veletsianos: Digital Learning Environments, Networks, Communities. Your thoughts on a new course?
• Cory Doctorow: Malcolm McLaren's son torched his punk collection to protest the 40th anniversary of punk "celebrations"
• Enabling Student Control of a ClassroomÂ’s Shared Screen | Tony Tang - Academia.edu
• Open Space Resources – Chris Corrigan Looks like a fantastic start for planning the learning technologies symposium. Thanks, Grant!
• Scientists created the mobile game Sea Hero Quest to help detect the early onset of dementia — Quartz Before the game begins, it collects some basic demographic data: gender, age, and where you live. As players move around the game, their positions create heat maps that are relayed back to scientists. This data is analyzed to show navigational decision-making in different conditions. Alzheimer's disease affects parts of the brain that process visual information and deal with spatial awareness.
• Click ⚡️ (an interesting demonstration of the kinds of surveillance possible via tracking scripts. This link points to my own session…)
• Blender 3D modelling/animation tests slowly learning to do stuff in Blender…
• Gargron/mastodon: A GNU Social-compatible microblogging server via @nessman - distributed twitter-like-thing.
• dnorman - Mastodon hosted instance of mastodon. not sure what this gives that's different than twitter. a non-corporate twitter is a good thing though.
• Types of performance-based assessment use of portfolios for documenting/reflecting/assessing performance development This is an excerpt from Measurement and Evaluation in Human Performance, Fourth Edition With Web Study Guide, by James R. Morrow, Jr., PhD, Allen W. Jackson, EdD, James G. Disch, PED, and Dale P. Mood, PhD
• Window Inserts | Indoor Storm Windows | Energy Interior Winter Insulation (winter is coming/here)