Work

• I posted the first episode of what will become a series, pulling from the footage recorded during the Open Ed Reclaim hackathon at UMW. More to come, ASAP.
• plans for the 2015 Design for Learning conference are shaping up nicely. Nearly ready for submissions. This is the key teaching-and-learning event at UCalgary, and it’s going to be another great one.
• quick chat with Brian at TRU about their initial plans for an LMS migration. Just when I thought I was done talking about LMS migrations…
• Spent much of the week debugging slow performance on our application and database servers. Still have no real solid evidence on what’s bringing the servers to their knees, but I sure am enjoying the constant stream of Pingdom “YOUR SITE IS DOWN” notices, and gentle nudges from our IT Operator account that the server is down. The servers hosted by IT. cough Anyway. Using Apache scalp to mine the apache logs, and MySQLTuner.pl to try to figure out WTF is going on. No luck yet.
• Spent the week trying to use a Surface Pro 3 as my mobile device. I tried first last weekend, and after a few hours rage-restored-to-factory-condition and put it back in my backpack. Some people love it. I don’t. I initially thought of it as a big-ass, expensive iPad. It failed miserably at that. Then, I thought of it as a more expensive MacBook Air, but crippled by Windows 8. Yeah. That basically sums it up. So, now it goes into the tech lending library for people to experiment with, and I happily go back to my iPad for mobile stuff, and MBA for desktop/less-mobile stuff.

Read

• UofC Law prof embraces innovative teaching methods
• Tannis Morgan’s notes from her Open Education session on shifting an institution toward Open
• Tony Bates compares/contrasts the Toronto School and Alberta School perspectives on online colloborative learning
• First Monday - the function of buzzwords
• First Monday - is “quitting online stuff” a thing?
• STEM teaching and learning community at UCalgary
• The Conversation - office design should focus on people, not just the work they do
• McGill teaching and learning blog - how to find free, interactive resources for your courses
• Hack Education - Audrey takes on buzzwords
• The Conversation - how to spot a scary mole
• Tony Bates - ed tech hasn’t really changed things in 30 years
• Stephen Downes posted notes from an ePortfolios and Badges workshop at Open Educa Berlin
• Jane Hart on technology training vs. changing training
• a truly annoying rant by an opinionated burnout teacher/network-administrator, condescending to everyone who hasn’t had the urge to compile their own kernel in the last week. This is exactly the wrong attitude for anyone remotely responsible for providing support. Or, you know, interacting with humans.

Other

not much. aside from taking Friday off to go skiing with The Boy™ at Nakiska. Still pretty barren on the slopes, but we still had a blast!

also, I took a stab at resurrecting my b0rked Sigma 10-20mm lens. Figured the worst that could happen is I screw it up so it doesn’t work. more. Anyway. I disassembled it, tapped a piece back into alignment, screwed it back together, and hey-presto! My all-time favourite lens is back in action, and I’m going to be using my DSLR again.