Work

• helping to refine the technology/space plan for the new building. learning lots about the intersection between space and technology - blog post on that brewing. hopefully, time to write it next week.
• head down reading nominations for this year’s University of Calgary Teaching Awards - I get to sit on 3 committees, so there’s lots of reading involved. lots of amazing work on campus.
• piloted the use of Swivl robot camera mounts to record lessons as part of the Instructional Skills Workshop. Previously, they’d used huge, cumbersome, complicated video recording carts. Now, they use an iPod Touch to record good quality video, on an automated robot tracking camera mount. Worked great, and we learned a few things to improve the process.
• working on plans to spin up a new Faculty Design Studio in the office - a place where instructors can come to make stuff to use in their courses. Still early days - haven’t even placed the orders for stuff yet (that’s the plan for the next few days) - can’t wait to get this set up and let people book it to make great stuff to support student learning.
• I’m borrowing a Dell Latitude 7000 2-in-1 tablet/laptop, as a possible alternative to Surface Pro 3. It’s supported by IT, which means it should Just Work™. Early reactions, with about an hour of play time, is that it’s a total turd. Crappy as a laptop. Crappy as a tablet. But combined? Crappy 2-in-1. With Windows 8 Enterprise, so much of the touch-enabled stuff from Pro was turned off by default. I’ll put some more time into trying to convince it to suck less. So far, not impressed. Hard to tell, right?
• my team went on a tour of learning spaces on campus, led by the director of Campus Planning. Saw some horrible and embarrassing spaces, and some absolutely amazing and inspiring ones. We don’t often get into some of these spaces, because there are classes using them (hence the tour during Reading Week). So, the tour was extremely helpful, as we’re working to come up with plans to improve learning spaces across all campuses.

Read

• The Online Photographer: How to improve your photography - practice.
• Michael Feldstein - Wanted - a theory of change

If there is a way forward, that is it. We need to try things together and see how they work. We need to apply our theories and find out what breaks (and what works better than we could have possibly imagined). We need to see if what works for us will also work for others. Anyone who does that in education is a hero of mine.

• via Stephen Downes - Tom Barrett: Micro engagement is killing our edublogging community - Stephen’s response is inline with mine. Insisting that interactions occur solely as comments posted on the original blog post, like we did in the good old days, isn’t helpful. Engaging with ideas happens in different ways, in different places, at different times. Times change. Nostalgia is overrated.
• Marco Arment: Google and Blogs - on the other hand, nostalgia for a time when people did more than retweet gifs is still important. We need to get back there.
• Howard Rheingold: Our Common Core - the first line nails it for me: “What if we trusted students as a default and dealt with transgressions when and if they come up?”
• McGill runs a great Teaching for Learning blog, including this latest post about using online discussions
• Audrey Watters: Horizon - looking at the history of the Horizon Report, and its predictive powers. (the page is down at the moment - GitHub/Jekyll issues?)
• Writing better job postings is important
• Ted Curran - Reflection on 6 objections to technology in higher ed
• Tony Bates: The implications of ‘open’ for course and program design: towards a paradigm shift. An important piece, which will be useful for many projects.
• UofC research on kids' understanding of copyright law
• Audrey Watters - The History of Future Education - teaching machines: then, now, and TEH FUTURE!
• Alan Levine - It’s 2015. I’m going to make a HyperCard stack paging @cogdog ding) - I still miss HyperCard.
• Audrey Watters - Reclaim Your Domain (with Jekyll): Part 1 - using GitHub and Jekyll to generate static websites/blogs/whatnot. I’ll be playing along.
• Stephen Downes - Ten key takeaways from Tony Bates - nice response to Tony’s awesome Open Book Written In The Open: Teaching in a Digital Age
• Perry Hewitt - In defense of screen time (paired with Martin Weller’s No-Screen Room, which I’ve set up in my house as well)
• via Alan Levine: Tweets2OPML - feed it your twitter ‘followed’ list, and it spits out an OPML file with RSS feeds of the stuff they post elsewhere. Awesome.
• via Lukas Wright: Open ProD at UBC’s CTLT – ISW and Flexible Learning

Other

Holy. Week 8 already? Dang.

• Castle Mountain in southwest Alberta closes for the season. In February.
• drink more coffee. OK.