Work

• boxes are still arriving for the Faculty Design Studio and Technology Lending Library. We need to get it all sorted, set up, and configured before we can open things up. Need to set up an inventory tracking system for the lending library items, so they don’t walk away without a trace. Once things are ready, both projects will have a home on the about-to-be-relaunched elearn.ucalgary.ca website
• annual review season. basically, best. job. ever. and with such an amazing team, too.
• continuing work on some classroom redesign projects - can’t wait to see these learning spaces take shape. We’ll have a lot of work to do as a unit to support instructors as they shift to more active learning strategies, and that’s going to be a lot of fun.
• shot another Instructor Intro Video™ - this one was completely different from any of the others I’ve done before. The instructor wanted to try something different, and read a storybook to share and model for her education students who are heading out to do their practicums. practica. whatever. The goal of these videos is to do fast intros for instructors, ideally in their offices/classrooms/wherever, rather than having a High Production Value™ professional marketing video. Seems to be working well so far.
• met with our privacy, copyright, and com/media folks to try to figure out the process for documenting consent to record and broadcast various types of sessions on campus - everything from public events such as convocation, to registrar classes, to workshops. Each has different requirements from policy standpoint, and it’s confusing about what’s needed in order to record them. Hopefully some clarification coming soon on the relevant websites.

Read

• Audrey Watters: (Why) Does Your Education Website Collect Information about Visitors? - we all need to think seriously about what we track, why we track it, what happens to that data, and who has access to it. And, when that data needs to be shredded. This stuff becomes Big Data Permanent Records for students if we’re not careful.
• Jared Stein: Why I Only Read Half the Things I’d Like To (and Remember Less than Half of Those I Do) - info vs. knowledge, in an info-glut world.
• Tony Bates: Rethinking learning spaces in a digital age: an example from Singapore
• Chris Nelson: Gaming reaches into far corners of academic world as U of C builds huge collection - on Dylan Tetrault and the awesome video games collection at UCalgary.
• SFU’s EdMedia Studio is open - sounds similar to what we’re planning with the Faculty Design Studio. Convergent evolution.

Lots of other stuff to read. Not sure if this part is worth doing a recap. There’s the “Shared Items” from my FeverËš RSS reader, and links.darcynorman.net for other stuff. Holy. This part takes forever to put together. May need to figure out a way to streamline this.

Other

last gasp of winter. too warm in the mountains to ski (a ski season that was just over 2 months long. crazy.).