Badging
We're working on a couple of badging-related projects in the EDU. Kevin's looking into Mozilla's Open Badges platform/framework, and we're exploring what it means for a department/faculty/university to issue (and accept) badges as microcredentials. Lots of really great discussions on this. Looking forward to seeing what we come up with!
Committees and Reports and Bears Oh My!
Yeah. Making sausage. Mmm. Sausage.
Learning Object Repository
Seriously. I'm having flashbacks. But, we have faculties who need to be able to share files within the context of their online courses, and public websites aren't appropriate. So, LOR in D2L is being spun up. Thankfully, this time around, it's just a bunch of checkboxes instead of having to build a platform and implement IMS LOM and other fun bits. I've enabled a University-wide repository, where anyone can push content to share with the whole campus. We're also working with the faculty of Veterinary Medicine, to figure out a good way for their folks to share learning resources across courses in the program.
Open Access Week
Some really good projects going on. Our library supports open access journals in a bunch of ways, including paying the publishing fees for UofC researchers so open access isn't ironically cost-prohibitive. We also buy copies of every textbook to put on reserve, so students don't have to spend $1700/year on books. Instructors are strongly encouraged to select less expensive (or free, or open) resources to help reduce the costs to students.
We are working on spinning tup OER and open textbook projects in the province and on campus, but I'm really interested in discussions we've started on post-print course resources. We shouldn't be thinking just of save-as-pdf-or-ePub. What can learning resources be in 2014? How can we better support learning? Dead trees, or their electronic analogues, aren't it. OER as a logical consequence of a high quality learning experience, not as the ultimate goal itself.
Also, Zygote Quarterly. A really interesting open access online magazine focussing on the intersection of science and design. Lots of stuff on biomimicry. Fascinating. And co-published by one of our engineering profs. Awesome.
Business/Consultant Speak
I've been catching myself speaking non-human consultant/management-speak. I don't like it. Must work harder on not getting sucked into that world. Part of it is a side effect of the New Role, but it's spewing out more often lately. Stahp.