Work
The UCalgary Makerspace community met over in the Environmental Design fabrication shops. Lots of awesome stuff going on there, and they’re adding 2 giant 5-axis robot arms for high end custom fabrication.
Reps from Top Hat were on campus, doing a series of workshops for instructors and staff. Top Hat is used pretty extensively in some of our largest courses, but also in many smaller ones. The more interesting uses involve anonymous questions and formative feedback from students…
PhD
I went to a presentation by Mike Casey from Indiana University, on media preservation. He’s working to save a giant collection of analog recordings, which are in the process of degrading and the players are obsolete and failing. Triggered thoughts about planning to keep important (and even not-important) media safe so that it will survive shifts in technology and whims of budgetary processes over the years.
I was fortunate enough to hear 2 presentations by Adam Bradley, who is doing post-doc work in the INNOVIS lab with Sheelagh Carpendale 1. Adam is doing interesting work on augmenting close reading of poetry, and had a room full of computer science nerds analyzing a poem together - and all actively engaged in the process. Code can be used to infuse humanity and art, rather than algorithmically sucking the life out of it. These talks triggered a LOT of thinking for me, and definitely adjusted how I’m looking at my PhD research plan.
Other
- Sean Gallagher: How to stop the wave of Apple Calendar invite spam
- Rob Brooks, Scientia Professor of Evolutionary Ecology; Academic Lead of UNSW’s Grand Challenges Program; Director, Evolution & Ecology Research Centre, UNSW Australia: How tribal thinking has left us in a post-truth world
- Matthew Braga: Carleton University computers being held hostage for bitcoin
- Cyrus Farivar: Worried about US surveillance, Internet Archive announces mirror in Canada
- Audrey Watters: Education Technology and the Year of Wishful Thinking
- Paul R. Pival: Before and After - Calgary and Ft. McMurray
- Gee Kin Chou: ​Overcoming Hacking and Cybercrimes — The Next Obstacle to Edtech
- Brame, C. J.: Effective Educational Videos: Principles and Guidelines for Maximizing Student Learning from Video Content
- Stoltzfus, J. R., Libarkin, J.: Does the Room Matter? Active Learning in Traditional and Enhanced Lecture Spaces
- Brickman, P., Gormally, C., Martella, A. M.: Making the Grade: Using Instructional Feedback and Evaluation to Inspire Evidence-Based Teaching
- Oliver Staley: There’s a reason why it can be easier to work in a Starbucks than in an open office
- Elizabeth Cameron - For Metro: U of C students paint ‘the rock' for Standing Rock
- Tony Bates: Building a national survey of online learning in Canada
- The Box 5-axis robot arms, with projection-mapped displays.
- Design of Multiple Epistemologies | Department of Computer Science | University of Calgary A talk by Adam Bradley, post-doc in the Innovis lab.
- Presenter Concierge | EDUCAUSE.edu handy guide by EDUCAUSE on prepping a presentation/poster at their conferences
- Mastodon thanks to Scott Leslie @sleslie for the tip. this is an interesting experiment in distributed social networks…
- Timelapse – Google Earth Engine search for any location and get a timelapse from 1984-today. Calgary almost doubles in size. Crazy.
- Freedom Mobile Everywhere 55 Holy. I pay nearly double this with Bell, for 1GB. Might be time to move… competition is desperately needed in the Canadian cellular market.
- Travelling internationally? Know your roles and responsibilities | UToday | University of Calgary need to register before travelling to countries at-risk. for instance, Houston.
- Courses hosted in the Taylor Institute | Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning I pulled together a list of the courses that have been offered (and will be offered) since the Taylor Institute opened. An amazingly diverse cross-disciplinary collection of active-learning-based courses.
- via Kottke: The Map of Physics absolutely fantastic physics video, mapping out all major concepts in the entire field. could be a really powerful tool for first year students… or with similar things in other fields…