Work

I’m forcing myself to work from a Surface Pro 3 tablet for awhile because I need to avoid locking myself into a pure monoculture. I’ve used the thing for 3 (non-consecutive) weeks now, and it’s been an eye-opener. I’ll likely write up something separate with some details. I’m writing this blog post on it. And I’m not sure I’ll finish the post without switching to my real laptop.

Not much noteworthy at work this week - most of the office was away for the EDC conference in Winnipeg. I went to 2 HR workshops. And worked part-way through a stack of award nominations for the 2 review committees I’m sitting on this year. Good times.

Read

• Kelly Walsh: Education Technology Integration – You’re Doing it Wrong - some really good points, which have worked well on our campus.
• Colin Marshall: Why you do your most creative thinking in the shower, car, or bed - by far, my best thinking happens on while riding my bike. But there’s not a good way to write that down, so I forget much of what I come up with. But the act of intensely doing something else frees me up to think. I miss the long rides, and even the commute to work. Can’t wait for spring. My brain feels like mush without the quality thinking time.
• Kyla Sergejew: Reclaiming the West - starring local artist Karen Scarlett! Reclaim all the things!
• Stephen Downes: Becoming MOOC - fantastic piece of deeper thinking on MOOCs, and the differences between cMOOC and xMOOC EIEIO.
• Nicole Mirra: Is the Maker Movement Equitable? - a nice rebuttal to The Atlantic’s piece Why I’m Not a Maker
• via Jason Kottke: The Coming American Megadrought of 2050 - this is some scary stuff. Between this, and the retreat of the Himalayan glaciers, the next 50 years should be interesting. If we thought the oil wars were bad, just wait for the water wars…
• Stephen Downes¹: response to the NMC Horizon Report 2015, Higher Education Edition. I use the Horizon Report as a high level description of trends, but don’t ascribe any predictive power to them. It is definitely not a reliable predictor of future developments, but in a field that changes so dramatically every year, that would be hard. But, airdropping new things in on the 1-year timeline seems a little crazy.
• Justin Reich: Reclaiming Innovation and Ditching the Learning Management System, pointing to another article of his.² See also Stephen Downes' response - lots of interesting bits for follow-up. What actually worked? What did the students say? etc.
• Audrey Watters: It’s gonna take more than a ‘genius hour’. I’ve tried to do something somewhat like this - it’s essential for my team to have time to explore, create, play, discover, etc., and they can’t do that if they’re expected to be “on task” 100% of the time. A big part of our role in the Technology Integration Group is to go deliberately off script, off-piste, and do things that we think are worth trying. Even if (especially if?) it’s not an Official Project. But, it’s hard to sustain when Real Projects and Deadlines loom and suck up all of the available time. So we have cycles. There are weeks where we’re all “on task”, and weeks where we’re exploring new stuff.
• Kelly Walsh: Education Technology Thought Leader Interview – D2L CEO John Baker. It reads like an email interview, so it’s a bit stilted. And the phrase “thought leader” makes me twitch because it has some pretty scummy baggage. But, some interesting links to interesting projects.

Other

Spring skiing in February. Not much snow left in Kananaskis, so we’re likely not going to be able to head back to Nakiska for a couple of weeks - hoping for a series of big snowfalls in the mountains (see the linked article above on the coming megadrought - ski seasons are going to get browner)

Huh. I made it to the end of this week’s Update post still using the Surface, and I only had the urge to throw the damned thing a handful of times. Progress.