D'Arcy Norman

2021 Week 20

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Sat, 15 May 2021 09:49:59 -0600

⚙️ Work

This is cool. Mohammad Moshirpour (from the Schulich School of Engineering) was just awarded a 2021 D2L Innovation Award, by STLHE.

President McCauley published the latest draft of UCalgary’s Growth Through Focus strategy. A good chunk of it relates directory to the work of the TI.

🤔 PhD

Had a great discussion with Ehud about my plans for chapters 6 and 7. Time to step away from playing with the transcripts and just write and write and write. And then revise.

📚 Reading

UCalgary’s TALON Teaching and Learning Online Network community just posted Issue #24, with a focus on online experiential learning. Lisa Stowe, Kara Loy, and Rachel Braun from the TI’s Experiential Learning group contributed the article.¹

Heilporn, G., Lakhal, S. & Bélisle, M. An examination of teachers’ strategies to foster student engagement in blended learning in higher education. Int J Educ Technol High Educ 18, 25 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-021-00260-3

Maren Deepwell: Leading a virtual team: mental wellbeing for virtual teams

Robert Lewis, in EmergingEdTech: 7 Lesser Known Zoom Features to Improve Remote Learning - the “optimize for video” bit is useful, but he forgot to mention the Share > Advanced: Video tool that lets you directly stream any video file without recording/streaming your screen…² I’ve remapped the mute/unmute keyboard shortcut to use F5, so it’s a quick one-key toggle.

advanced: video">

Labouta, H. I., Kenny, N. A., Dyjur, P., Reid, L., & Cramb, D. T. (2019). An Inclusive, Dynamic and Collaborative Framework for Improving Curriculum Review in a Post-Secondary Program. Transformative Dialogues: Teaching & Learning Journal, 12(1).

Kathryn Dill, in WSJ’s The Future of Everything: WeWork CEO says least engaged employees enjoy working from home.

Waszkiewicz, A., & Kominiarczuk, M. (2021). Towards a Model of Objective-Based Reward Systems. Game Studies, 21(1).

🧺 Other

I upgraded our home internet to Shaw’s Fibre Gig. It’s a gig down, but 100 MB up. Not symmetrical, but still way better than the 15MB up we had on the previous plan… And now my home office is connected with wired ethernet, so no more wifi flakiness.

I’m debating moving our cellular plans to Shaw. It’s sooo much cheaper than the Rogers plans we’re on now, but it sounds like coverage is nonexistent outside of the city, with handoff to roaming not always handled smoothly.

Speaking of which, I have got to get outside of the city. The last time I saw an actual dark sky was 3 years ago in Strawberry, AZ. I have trouble even imagining what this is like in person…

I did get out for a ride on Friday afternoon, which was awesome, but being wind-blown along the side of a highway for an hour and a half isn’t the same as just… being… out of the city.

🗓️ Focus for next week

Hiring committee. Lots of D2L-related meetings. Some planning meetings. And I need to make progress on a website mockup project.

the issues/Letters are posted as pdfs, but are available online. a bloggy thing might work better for this kind of thing? ↩︎
it does need to be a file on your computer, but using something like a Youtube downloader utility makes that easy. And then, you have a reliable local copy that won’t go away if someone decides to do something to the video posted online, doesn’t have ads or tracking inserted while playing, and doesn’t have inline links/buttons… ↩︎

Quiet Bearspaw

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Fri, 14 May 2021 15:16:39 -0600

Stoney Trail Pathway

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Tue, 11 May 2021 15:09:23 -0600

This area had been in the middle of a major high pressure natural gas pipeline installation project, so we hadn’t been able to do our usual walking route for the last 6 months. They still have a lot of restoration left to do (to the right of this is a wide area that was scraped bare in order to install the pipeline, including removing a pond that used to be full of ducks and frogs). When this pipeline is operational, ATCO will be abandoning a buried HPNG pipeline that runs a block from our house.

Afternoon Office Space

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Mon, 10 May 2021 16:28:05 -0600

I realized that I can send emails from the back yard patio, so we fired it up to finish off a Monday afternoon:

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2021 Week 19

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Sat, 08 May 2021 12:45:15 -0600

So… nobody reads blogs anymore. RSS is dead. There are maybe 3 people that I know who read this, in addition to myself. Why do I keep posting these? Because it helps me to document what I’m working on, and to think out loud a little. I refer to these weekly things pretty often, mining them for links or articles etc. And this format is much more useful to me than 250 characters of noise on social media.

⚙️ Work

The posting for the Learning Technologies Specialist position closed on Wednesday. Lots of applicants to review to identify a shortlist of candidates to proceed to interviews with…

The 2021 University of Calgary Conference on Post-Secondary Learning and Teaching was this week.

The conference hashtag was pretty active.

I wound up with several pages of notes from the conference. I need to take some time to think about mentorship vs. supervision (maybe in addition to?) and how I can be more active both as mentee and mentor.

One of the last sessions I went to was on using peer mentorship and game play. This has huge overlap with my PhD topics, so I’ll be following up on a bunch of things they were talking about - including some readings. And many of the readings are from proceedings of previous years of the University of Calgary Conference on Post-Secondary Learning and Teaching…

🤔 PhD

I did some more work on coding the transcripts, and am starting to step back to try to see what that coding says.

Also, it’s annual performance reporting time…

📚 Reading

From the conference

Held, M. B. (2019). Decolonizing research paradigms in the context of settler colonialism: An unsettling, mutual, and collaborative effort. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 18, 1609406918821574.

Kirkness, V. J., & Barnhardt, R. (2001). First Nations and Higher Education: The Four R’s-Respect, Relevance, Reciprocity, Responsibility. Knowledge Across Cultures: A Contribution to Dialogue Among Civilizations. Comparative Education Research Centre, The University of Hong Kong.

W. Gatti Jr., E. Marasco, B. Kim, L. Behjat. (2020). Supporting design thinking through a game-based pedagogy in entrepreneurship education. Papers on Postsecondary Learning and Teaching.

M. Moussavi, Y. Amannejad, M. Moshirpour, E. Marasco, L. Behjat. (2020). Importance of Data Analytics for Improving Teaching and Learning Methods. in Data Management and Analysis: Case Studies in Education, Healthcare and Beyond. R. Alhajj, M. Moshirpour, B. Far, Eds. Springer, 2020, ch. 6.

E. Marasco, L. Behjat, R. Kelly, S. Maguire. (2019). Creative crossroads: Combining engineering and arts for creative development. Papers on Postsecondary Learning and Teaching.

E. Marasco, W. Gatti Jr., B. Kim, L. Behjat, M. Eggermont. (2017). Curious conversations: Using game-based learning to develop creative culture within technical courses. Papers on Postsecondary Learning and Teaching.

Other

InSpace is an interesting-looking videoconferencing tool, like if Zoom and Jamboard had a baby. They just announced a “toxicity filter” that uses Tensorflow AI to detect shitty behaviour and try to tamp it down. It’s AI, so who knows. ¹

And it’s been snowing and raining, so I’m back to riding my bike in the basement. Hopefully this clears up by next weekend so I can get back out on the roads…

🗓️ Focus for next week

reviewing applicants for LTS:PI
Zoom “business review” meeting

the article for that announcement was in a shiny website that used javascript to load blog posts on a page without exposing the URL to the article directly. I had to use the “tweet” share button to snag the shareable URL, only to have Twitter complain that I need to create an account. I miss when the internet kind of worked well. ↩︎

2021 Week 18

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Sat, 01 May 2021 09:10:12 -0600

⚙️ Work

It hasn’t been officially announced on campus yet, but the Students Union is providing $500K to support a bunch of Open Education Resources development grants over the next 5 years. This builds on what we learned in the OER Pilot that my team led a couple of years ago.

🤔 PhD

I attended a virtual screening of the excellent documentary film Coded Bias, by Shalini Kantayya. UCalgary’s TALON Teaching and Learning Online Network hosted a panel discussion, which was a great (but waaaay too brief) discussion of algorithmic bias and surveillance. Hopefully, there’s a possibility to do a sequel or part 2 that focusses on the relationship between algorithms, surveillance, and education… (also, Maha Bali attended the panel from Cairo)

Dr. Barbara Brown was one of the panelists, and she’s posted her notes from the session on her blog.

Coded Bias Official Trailer from Shalini Kantayya on Vimeo.

🧺 Other

🗓️ Focus for next week

Our conference runs Tues-Wed, so that’s going to be the main focus. And the Learning Technologies Specialist posting closes on Wednesday, so I’ll get to start reviewing applications.

Windy Bearspaw Road

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Thu, 29 Apr 2021 15:37:09 -0600

You can almost see the wind…

2021 Week 17

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Sat, 24 Apr 2021 12:38:49 -0600

⚙️ Work

We’re getting ready for our annual conference, only a couple of weeks away. I’ll be moderating a couple of sessions, which should be fun.

I’m hiring! We’re looking to add a Learning Technologies Specialist to the team, with a focus on program innovation.

🤔 PhD

The iLab hosted a seminar by Nicolai Marquadt on designing interfaces for cross-device interaction, and sketching, for the iLab. It was the first iLab meeting I’ve been able to attend in over a year…

I made significant progress in coding the transcripts. NVivo is working really nicely. Using stemmed queries to quickly code words across all 13 interviews is kind of amazing. I’m positive there’s a better way to do bulk semi-auto-coding, but starting with queries and then creating nodes from the results seems to work really well.

📚 Reading

5 papers from Nicolai Marquadt’s seminar this week:

Brudy, F., Holz, C., Rädle, R., Wu, C. J., Houben, S., Klokmose, C. N., & Marquardt, N. (2019, May). Cross-device taxonomy: Survey, opportunities and challenges of interactions spanning across multiple devices. In Proceedings of the 2019 chi conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1-28).
Marquardt, N., Brudy, F., Liu, C., Bengler, B., & Holz, C. (2018, April). Surfaceconstellations: A modular hardware platform for ad-hoc reconfigurable cross-device workspaces. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-14).
Zheng, R., Camporro, M. F., Romat, H., Riche, N. H., Bach, B., Chevalier, F., … & Marquardt, N. (2021). Sketchnote Components, Design Space Dimensions, and Strategies for Effective Visual Note Taking.
Antoine, A., Malacria, S., Marquardt, N., & Casiez, G. (2021, May). Interaction Illustration Taxonomy: Classification of Styles and Techniques for Visually Representing Interaction Scenarios. In CHI’21-ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
Greenberg, S., Boring, S., Vermeulen, J., & Dostal, J. (2014, June). Dark patterns in proxemic interactions: a critical perspective. In Proceedings of the 2014 conference on Designing interactive systems (pp. 523-532).

and the reading from our LTDT meeting this week was chapter 4 of:

West, K., Hoessler, C., Bennetch, R., Ewert-Bauer, T., Wilson, M., Beaudoin, J.-P., Ellis, D. E., Brown, V. M., Timmermans, J. A., Verwoord, R., & Kenny, N. A. (2017). Educational Development Guide Series: No. 2. Rapport-Building for Educational Developers. Ottawa, ON: Educational Developers Caucus.

via Stephen Downes:

Ives, C., & Walsh, P. (2021). Perspectives of Canadian Distance Educators on the Move to Online Learning. Canadian Journal of Higher Education.

🧺 Other

I got my penultimate immunotherapy maintenance treatment this week. One more to go - done in July.

And it’s been cold and/or snowing all week, so I haven’t gotten out on the bike at all this week. Back to the basement rides for now…

I'm Hiring - Learning Technologies Specialist

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Wed, 21 Apr 2021 11:33:53 -0600

We have an open position in the Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning, as part of my team. I think it’s a pretty great place to work, with an amazing group of people, doing important work that has the potential to transform the university and improve the teaching and learning experience for the entire campus community.

This is a Learning Technologies Specialist position, with a strong focus on “program innovation” - working with instructors on the development and implementation of new academic programs, providing consultation and expertise on the design and integration of learning technologies to support the pedagogical goals of each program. It’s a full-time, regular position (not a term position), and is a great opportunity to work with the entire team at the TI.

HR removed the salary info from the posting, but:

This is a full time, regular position. The Learning Technologies Specialist (LTS) will work for 35 hours per week, with regular office hours. It is classified as a “Technical Phase 2” position under the AUPE Collective Agreement, with a salary range from $57,894 to $83,811 per year.

The full posting is available on the UCalgary Careers website.

The posting closes on May 5, 2021.

Penultimate Treatment

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Tue, 20 Apr 2021 17:33:21 -0600

One more to go and I’m done the maintenance immunotherapy treatments. Then, waiting 6 months for my immune system to get back to normal before getting my first COVID vaccine shot…

Cochrane Bearspaw Ride

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Sat, 17 Apr 2021 17:49:41 -0600

It felt really really good to be back out on a longer ride. This was the longest ride I’ve done in almost 5 years.

2021 Week 16

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Sat, 17 Apr 2021 17:35:14 -0600

I’d always intended for these posts to be part of some kind of reflective practice, but they’re basically just “holy crap we have a lot of stuff going on” snapshots. Maybe that’s part of it. Anyway.

⚙️ Work

I was interviewed by Katie Deighton, for an article on online exam proctoring in the Wall Street Journal’s Experience Report. I’ve been very-occasionally interviewed by journalists, mostly for technology-related topics.

🤔 PhD

This week, I’ve been focussing on playing with transcript data. I set it up as fancy DIY wallpaper in my home office and did a few passes through it to try to identify themes. After a prompt from Paul, I realized I’m basically just LARPing NVivo. So I brought the transcripts into NVivo 12 and started coding them there. Files and Cases and Nodes galore. The interface is awkward as hell. So. Many. Clicks. But it’s working nicely… The command-slash shortcut speeds it up a bit.

📚 Reading

Pat Thomson: writing a journal article – identifying “the two paper problem”.

Friesen, S., & Jacobsen, M. (2021). Collaborative Design of Professional Graduate Programs in Education. International Journal of Designs for Learning, 12(1), 64–76. https://doi.org/10.14434/ijdl.v12i1.25778

Phelps, A. M., Egert, C. A., & Consalvo, M. (2021). Hack, Slash & Backstab: A Post-Mortem of University Game Development at Scale. International Journal of Designs for Learning, 12(1), 16–33. https://doi.org/10.14434/ijdl.v12i1.31263

Lo, A. W., Stevens, B., & Willems, S. (2021). World of EdCraft: Challenges and Opportunities in Synchronous Online Teaching. Available at SSRN 3793342. (via Campus Technology)

It’s odd, seeing folks from a “financial engineering” lab and a college of business talk about evolution and learning and attention… Still, some interesting bits in the paper.

Heather Farmer, in EDUCAUSE Review: 6 Models for Blended Synchronous and Asynchronous Online Course Delivery

Mabel Ho, on Dalhousie’s Focus on University Teaching & Learning blog:From Face-to-Face Instruction to Online Teaching: Practical Considerations for Synchronous and Asynchronous Teaching and Learning - discussing Daniel Sanford’s immediacy vs. bandwidth matrix:

Nick Baker, University of Windsor Teaching Online: Overview of Course Delivery Modes. Adapted from Iowa State University’s Course Delivery Modes.

🧺 Other

The Boy™'s high school is shifting to remote learning again. For the third(?) time? Transitions between on-campus and remote learning are brutal.

UCalgary’s Cumming School of Medicine Centre for Health Informatics has been doing some amazing work with visualizing COVID data for Alberta. They’re also doing work with sewage sampling, detecing COVID RNA in wastewater.

On the plus side, it’s almost nice enough to be working out on the deck instead of being cooped up in the home office…

And I got out for the longest ride in almost 5 years, thanks to John and Paul.

🗓️ Focus for next week

Meetings. Penultimate immunotherapy maintenance treatment. Meetings.

Early Deck Office

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Thu, 15 Apr 2021 14:44:02 -0600

Might be pushing it a bit, but it’s so close to being nice enough to work outside on the deck…

In Media: WSJ Experience Report: Online Proctoring

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Thu, 15 Apr 2021 08:35:51 -0600

I was interviewed recently (via email) by Katie Deighton, from the Wall Street Journal’s Experience Report. She was writing an article on online exam proctoring, and wanted to follow up with me about the categories of proctoring software and to get a university learning technologies perspective.

The article was published yesterday. I’m officially a critic. She wasn’t able to use the entire response, so I’m putting the rest of it here:

Katie:

What are the biggest challenges that online proctoring companies face when it comes to both reputation and customer acquisition? How big of a problem is the user experience, when compared to issues surrounding privacy, security, etc.?

This Educause QuickPoll report (which mentioned your work!) on proctoring services was conducted at the beginning of the pandemic. From what you know about the industry, do you believe the sentiment regarding online proctoring has changed at all now, given the critical media attention and student petitioning that’s occurred since then?

Companies like Proctorio and ProctorU have committed to tweaking the user experience, for instance, by making the set-up instructions easier, improving transparency around where a user’s data goes, improving accessibility, and better educating professors in the various proctoring settings. Do you think these kinds of tweaks will be enough to either bring back lost customers, or improve online proctoring’s reputation at large? Or, do you think security/privacy concerns will still dominate the discourse here, no matter how easy and transparent it is for people to use the software?

D’Arcy:

There is a fundamental problem with how online exam proctoring software is designed. This problem involves issues of power, control, consent, and agency. The concept itself puts students and instructors into an adversarial relationship, with students framed as assumed cheaters, and instructors as police or security analysts trying to catch the students. This can’t be resolved through interface tweaks or streamlined installation processes - the problem is the nature of the software, not the design of the interface or user experience.

Online exam proctoring software is invasive. It installs surveillance software onto students’ own computers. Software which is designed to integrate with their web browser and operating system in ways that would have previously been described as a “root kit” and banned in order to mitigate security vulnerabilities. Once installed, the software relies on active surveillance of students in their homes, using video and audio streamed from their computer’s webcam as well as monitoring the software and data that resides on the computer. Once third-party surveillance software has been installed on a computer, it should not be treated as a trusted device. Even with some transparency provided by the software companies, the trust that a person previously had that enabled secure uses of their computer, such as online banking, personal income tax preparation, or storage of private content and data, has already been compromised. Compelling students to install it on their own devices, compromising the security and integrity of those devices, is problematic.

If online exam proctoring software was strictly used on devices provided by an institution for the sole purpose of completing assessments in online courses, it could be a viable solution. But, even then, the software relies on video and audio surveillance of students in their own homes. There are a number of issues that make that a challenging proposition. Software that uses artificial intelligence and computer vision techniques has been shown to be biased against people of colour because the machine learning software is typically trained using less diverse images and videos to teach it what “cheating” looks like. Software that uses live proctoring - a human watching the student as they take the exam - avoids the problem of AI bias, but adds issues of reliability (do all observers consistently treat behaviours the same way?) as well as privacy, as unknown staff members or contractors engaged by the proctoring company are now compelling students to allow them to watch them for extended periods of time.

At the beginning of the pandemic, there was a strong push to shift to remote proctoring at our institution, but we put together a team with people from various faculties and roles - and included both undergraduate and graduate students - in trying to figure out what was needed. I think the initial hope was that online exam proctoring software would enable online exams to be offered with very little adjustment to existing processes - replacing in-class invigilated high stakes exams with online proctored exams. But that avoids the root issues underlying assessment, which we decided to attempt to address rather than to apply a temporary solution. Our community was very clear that they thought it would be a better investment of university resources (both financial and staffing) to support initiatives to foster a stronger culture of academic integrity, and in the design and implementation of authentic assessment in online and remotely-taught courses. These alternate forms of authentic assessment are more difficult for instructors to create, but also make it more difficult for students to engage in academic misconduct.

Refueled

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Sat, 10 Apr 2021 15:19:36 -0600