Work
We hosted some visitors from MRU, to give a tour of the TI and talk about active learning and pedagogy and eat some pie. MRU is doing some really interesting things, and we need to work more closely with them…
I did some testing with a prof and TA, trying out connecting Raspberry Pi dev kits to the fancy 50" displays in the learning studios. Worked like a charm. Her course next semester is going to be kind of awesome, with students hacking hardware and software to build sensors and convert input into music and visualizations.
Our D2L account reps came for a visit, and we talked about how we're using the various bits of D2L. We're going to take a closer look at the Wiggio integration, which could provide ad hoc community tools that fill the gap by not allowing people to go out and use random third-party internets.
Video hosting. Slow progress. I think something is going to start happening on that soon…
PhD
I was fortunate to attend another presentation by Adam Bradley, on "Producing the Interdisciplinary Thesis" - his work involves building software tools to enable more effective close reading of poetry, and he talked about how he connected various components of the humanities and computer science. Sounds rather relevant to my work… The big takeaways were around the concept of bridging humanistic and computational, of enabling cognitive offloading and memory augmentation in order to amplify intensely individual and personal interpretations of a poem. The exact opposite end of the spectrum from the Big Data Will Reveal The Truthâ„¢ camp. I like it. The other takeaway was "break off small pieces - don't build the entire telescope at once." Which segues into…
I basically blew up my research plan and am starting to rebuild it from almost-scratch. That's part of the process, and definitely an important thing to do in the early days of a PhD. I don't want to lock into something so early, and need to be able to rethink things as I learn. Otherwise, it's just an exercise in project management, not research.
Read
- Cécile Méadel: "Reclaiming the Internet" with distributed architectures: An introduction
- Panayotis Antoniadis: Local networks for local interactions: Four reasons why and a way forward
- Dominique Boullier: Cosmopolitical composition of distributed architectures
- Paris Chrysos: Monuments of cyberspace: Designing the Internet beyond the network framework
- Grant Potter: 106.js is an emulation of the classic Roland Juno-106 analog synthesizer
- Alan Levine aka CogDog: What's My Next Online Community Life Cycle Curve?
- The City of Calgary: Cycle track pilot project summary
- flexspaceorg: ELI17 – Using FLEXspace and the LSRS to Guide Learning Space Planning and Boost Stakeholder Engagement
- Cory Doctorow: Quitting Facebook feels GREAT
- Annalee Newitz: The "technosphere" now weighs 30 trillion tons
- Nikhil Sonnad: Data scientist Cathy O'Neil on the cold destructiveness of big data
- Audrey Watters: Education Technology and the Promise of 'Free' and 'Open'
- Andrea James: Freeskiing. At night. On LED-covered skis.
- via Stephen Downes: Frederick County's Call to Administrators: Focus on the "Innovator" and "Early Adopter" Teachers, First
- Cory Doctorow: A checklist for figuring out whether your algorithm is a "weapon of math destruction"
- Taylor Institute Blog: On being inspired
- Alan Levine aka CogDog: I Guess An Eight Year Old WordPress Plugin Might Be an Issue (FeedWordPress blows up with WP 4.7. Yikes.)
- Doc Searls: Exploring the business behind digital media's invisibility cloaks
- Tom Woodward: Work This Week – Week 4 (another case of FeedWordPress blowing up with WP 4.7. Glad I didn't update UCalgaryBlogs right away…)
- 2016 Lecture of a Lifetime -- Aritha Van Herk Hosted at the Taylor Institute this year
- Rubber hand illusion
- Guy Hoffman - robots with soul
- Bob Shaw - Light of Other Days
- Indiana University - Mosaic active learning initiative Each Mosaic classroom is different, but all Mosaic classrooms support: Collaboration—with student-accessible screens or whiteboard surfaces intended for collaboration and presentation Student grouping—with flexible or fixed furniture that allows for easy student grouping Movement—with square footage requirements that allow space for students and instructors to interact in a variety of ways
- AWS Blog - Canadian hosting A new hosting option. Sub-50ms latency to Calgary. Canadian hosting (but by an american company). This could be handy. Need to get campus legal to look into it…
- How to be 1% Better Every Day (The Kaizen Approach to Self-improvement) – The Mission – Medium I'm soooo not a fan of self-help articles, but this one struck a chord. Think big, start small. And keep going. Monolithic Projects are intimidating and depressing because they are so big/far away. Focus on the small individual steps.
- The fourth industrial revolution: a primer on Artificial Intelligence (AI) – MMC writes – Medium A really nice overview of the state of AI and machine learning - several things have happened recently to push extremely rapid development of effective ML. Deep learning, algorithms, hardware and libraries, and access to high quality data have all pushed the field forward since ~2010.