Work

• This week was largely about committees for adjudicating the University of Calgary Teaching Awards - I sat on 4 committees this year, with 3 of them convening this week. Yikes. Lots of incredible stuff being done on campus. I was especially impressed by how all of the student (undergrad and grad) reps handled the process - complete pros in every sense. Love it.¹
• Produced another “intro to my course” video, for Ellen Perrault, in Social Work - these are intended to be short, informal videos that put a face to online instructors.
• Went to a talk by Kevin Kee (from Brock), about the “200 million email problem” - turns out, it wasn’t about my inbox. Learned about the rapidly-increasing-by-orders-of-magnitude problem in digital humanities, as everything has become (is becoming) digital, and how important it is to shift from reading everything and summarizing, to filtering, prioritizing, aggregating, and building tools and networks to make sense of things that can’t possibly be understood by brute-force reading it all. Kee outlined some of the changes to research, writing, publishing and communicating scholarly works.
• The first meeting of the EDU Book Club - we’re reading Fink’s book Creating Significant Learning Experiences. I only had time to get through the first 16 pages before the meeting, but it’s already got me thinking about some tangential things.
• We picked up an iPhone 6 Plus to use as a test device, so Kevin can test the stuff he builds on the bigger screen. I’ll be using it as my phone, as well. First reactions: holy. it’s big. Also, that’s kind of great. I take back all of the snarky comments I’ve made to people with giantphones (Brad and Jason - you guys were right). And, this thing is probably the best camera I’ve ever used. As NK would say: aMAZing!

Read

• Quartz: The architectural theory that’s killing personal space at the office - we’re moving to a much more open/communal environment in The New Building™ - less personal space for many (including myself, as I’ll lose an actual office), but I’m looking forward to having everyone sharing space (with enough other spaces in the building for alone-time when needed).
• Audrey continues her guide to GitHub and Jekyll (I haven’t had a chance to catch up, though…)
• a systematic analysis of downtown donair vendors. for science. time to plan a field trip.
• Dr. Barclay is still working on bats and windfarms - back in the day, a friend of mine worked in his lab, and said that it’s not contact with the blades as much as the drastic changes in air pressure that kind of make the little critters explode. yikes. still working on that.
• MediaCore raised some cash.
• Audrey Watters: How Steve Jobs Brought the AppleII to the classroom - on how policy and lobbying does more to spread tech in education than tech or educators do.
• The Conversation: The words that make a successful grant application - developing and understanding new and novel systems.
• Mount Royal University’s updated strategic plan
• Jon Kruithof shares some code he uses to hack data reports in D2L
• Derek Bruff posted an interesting article and presentation on learning spaces at Vanderbilt.
• Campus Technology: How course web design impacts student engagement

Other

• Spock rode a bicycle
• We’re trying a “screen” purge at home. No screens, except for school and work stuff (and we slipped and had a movie night last night). I’m surprising loving it. We went about 3 days with total screen blackout at home, and I was really surprised at how quiet it was at home, and at how much more we all talked. OK - after hitting Publish, this laptop gets put away again.

Only 1 ski day this week - I took Wednesday off to head back out to Nakiska. The silver chair was out of order, and the other side of the mountain was split up by race training and fences running across it. Some actual powder, but not many ways to actually get to it. Still, not a bad way to spend a morning.