2015 week 18 in review

Work

What a week!

• I met with a prof who wants to build animations and simulations to help students explore cellular biology in context. Lots of great ideas. I had some flashbacks to 1993, when I was building a Hypercard stack to do this (but, with 1-bit graphics, and tiny non-Retina screens)
• The app for our 2015 Postsecondary Conference on Learning and Teaching went live - for iOS and Android. It’s the first app built by the EDU to be released, and it’s going to come in really handy for people coming to the conference. Lots of ideas for future apps to support the activities of the EDU, and other fun projects…
• We visited the TFDL Visualization Studio - the largest high resolution screen in Canada. It’s about 35 million pixels, spread over 16 feet of wall. Amazing.

That’s 35 million pixels of Google Earth, with me checking out Paris. Amazing.

• We added a graduate research assistant to the team for the summer, to help document the state of learning technologies on campus, and to prepare resources to describe the current literature and practices. We’re also about to hire an undergraduate research assistant, to do similar work with a focus on learning spaces. Really looking forward to seeing what we come up with, and I’m excited to be able to bring students into the process as well.
• Preliminary discussions about the renovation of the Downtown Campus bookstore space on the second floor. Some seriously prime real estate is now available, after the bookstore was removed. We’re looking at options to make into an awesome active learning space.

The empty bookstore space, overlooking a park downtown. Prime real estate for an active learning space.

• We launched the rebuilt elearn.ucalgary.ca website - so much better now, and we’re just getting started. Over the summer, we’ll be rewriting much of the content, cleaning things up, and shifting to focus on showcasing awesome teaching and learning.

Previous website on the left, awesome new knowledgebase website on the right. Ah. Better.

• The team presented at the Werklund School of Education’s IDEAS 2015 conference, to showcase our work on badges.ucalgary.ca as a platform for professional development. They did a fantastic job on the presentation, and we had a really deep and interesting discussion about how it could be adapted for K12 PD as well as for use within the context of courses.

Read

• Robin Mueller - Exploring a “yes/and” approach to workload management in educational development
• via Jason Kottke: A tour of Antartica by drone. When individuals can shoot stuff like this, without needing to mount a National Geographic or federally-funded research expedition, things have already changed.
• via Quartz: GoPro is getting into virtual reality . And things will keep changing to let individuals make cooler and cooler stuff.
• via Bruce Schneier - Remote Proctoring and Surveillance. Some seriously creepy and error-prone stuff going on with online proctoring tools.
• Clint Lalonde - The burden Canadian copyright law is placing on higher ed institutions
• George Siemens (et al) - Preparing for the digital university.¹
• via Daniel Christian - Eric Mazur’s 2014 presentation on active learning at Auburn University

Other

Not much time for “other” this week. I took part of a morning off, intending to go for a bike ride. But I wound up feeling lazy and tired, so didn’t even get to that. Gotta get back out on the bike - haven’t even hit 100km yet this year, and it’s MAY already. Holy.