2015 Week 33 in review

Work

Super busy week – got the Learning Technologies Support Program kicked off, to start the process of helping faculties hire grad students to work with instructors to design learning experiences and integrate learning technologies.
 
To support that program, I’m hiring a Technology Integration Specialist! We’re looking for someone to act as the community lead for the 16 Learning Technologies Coaches, and to work with folks in the Educational Development Unit and across the University to integrate technologies. The posting is active as of yesterday, and closes August 28, 2015 – to be hired ASAP after that.

We reviewed the Educational Development Unit’s IT Plan this week – some major pieces we need to build up very soon, and hoping to tie into University platforms wherever possible, so we don’t have to build or license our own stuff as a last resort.

It’s been pretty amazing to see the Taylor Institute take form – first as a virtual organization in borrowed/inherited space, and then as a newly designed group about to move into almost-complete newly-constructed space. All of the metaphors!

almost ready

Read

Other

I’m taking another week off next week. Slowly burning off the vacation days that built up over the last year or two. Hoping to stop getting cranky emails from HR soon…

Writing this post on my iPad was the first time I’ve really felt frustrated with using it as my primary mobile computer – the long URLs choked the WordPress editor, and made writing the post a hot mess. I’m really hopeful that some of the rumoured iOS 9 improvements will make living on an iPad as main-mobile-device more seamless1.

I hang my head, because I wound up writing the post in OneNote for iOS, then copying/pasting back into the WordPress interface. Actually, that workflow worked pretty well – I’ve really been digging OneNote2.3

  1. I can’t find any way to sort lines of text on iOS – seems like an important thing, but apps are so extremely streamlined/simplified/babyproofed that features that are essential on the desktop are not available on an iPad. frustrating. maybe there’s another app that can do it? I’ve checked what I have. Shouldn’t have to install an app to sort some text… []
  2. I’m still reconciling my place in the world, with all of the Microsoft software I’m using lately []
  3. I wanted to try the OneNote Publisher for WordPress – WordPress Plugins – It sounds useful, but having tried it on this post, the markup it generates is horrific, it breaks Markdown by helpfully encoding the [] characters. Manually copying the text from OneNote and pasting into the raw HTML editor in WordPress works pretty well, though… []