Work
Spent much of the week digging out of the hole caused by being out of the office for 10 days. Emails, voicemails, etc. Mostly caught up now. We're planning the D2L upgrade from 10.3 to 10.4-or-10.5, which will kick in on August 24. It should be a smooth process, with D2L doing the heavy lifting, but we need to build the plan for what we need to test on our end, and to figure out what new features will be switched on. Looking forward to running current D2L versions - 10.3 is 2 years old, and many of the improvements we've seen at Fusion for the last couple of years have been unavailable to us.
We redesigned the D2L homepage to make it actually useful for students, rather than as a dumping ground for administrative links and announcements. Hopefully, students will find it more useful. Early feedback is mostly positive, with one helpful email "I HAVE THREE WORDS: IT F*CKING SUCKS" contribution from a student (but that was more than 3 words, so I'm not sure how to take it).
I'm working on a few proposals, and have put a lot of time into thinking about communities and networks at the UofC. Lots of things going on. An abstract representation is starting to form:
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="1200"]
communities. kind of. more to come…[/caption]
Read
- I'm reading SEVENEVES by Neal Stephenson. Wow. What an amazing piece of work. I can't put it down. Except, you know, the whole work-and-family-and-sleep thing.
- via Stephen Downes
- Phil Hill
- How Student and Faculty Interviews Were Chosen For e-Literate TV Series
- U of Phoenix: Losing hundreds of millions of dollars on adaptive-learning LMS bet
- D2L Again Misusing Academic Data For Brightspace Marketing Claims - My take is that the company is meaning well, but that their marketing people have overreached, and that they don't understand the culture of scholarship in academia. Research data aren't just fodder for marketroids to slice and dice into PR copy. It can't be yanked out of context to tell a different story. But marketing folks may not grok that, and they're going down a path that will cause some severe loss of credibility in the academic community. Which wouldn't be a big deal, if their entire customer base wasn't… the academic community.
- Scott McLeod
- Jim Groom - Reclaiming the bava - The idea of The Godfather of Edupunk being sole sysadmin for the servers my sites run on makes me a little nervous ;-)
- Audrey Watters - The Stories We Tell about Education Technology
- Make Calgary - Big Green Waste
- Harold Jarche - loosening group boundaries
- Michael Berman - Defending the pilot, questioning the adoption curve - great point about the goal of 100% adoption being a distraction. It's not the goal. If a project is aimed at only 20%, that can be a huge success (if it's the right 20%)
- Jason Kottke - Self-driving cars drive like your grandma - interesting take on self-driving cars as being "easy prey" by asshats who know they can cut them off and survive because the software will react to avoid collisions.
- George Siemens - Personal Learning Graphs (PLeG)
- Leigh Blackall - Online identity, work spaces and folios: a celebration of awareness | theteachingtomtom
- EDUCAUSE - 5 Tips for Active Learning Space Design - YouTube
- Vivian Forssman - Exploring leadership issues in educational technology implementation (this interview is being used as part of one of our Education courses, and the blog posts students are posting in response are interesting)
- Grant Hutchinson - splorp/wordpress-comment-blacklist - GitHub - a shared blacklist for spam domains, for easy blocking of asshats via WordPress' Banned Domains setting. Shades of William Gibson's shared killfile in Idoru.
- Mark Luetke- Mother Blogs Made Easier
- Urthecast - See the planet. Open the world. (live HD streams from the ISS)
- Campus Technology - Columbia College Chicago Rolls Out Live, Interactive Virtual Tours
Other
The SSL certificate for my site is about to expire. I'd planned to switch over to Let's Encrypt (which had originally been scheduled to launch in time, but has now been pushed to September 2015 for general availability). I can't justify the cost of renewing a wildcard certificate for a couple of months, so I'm temporarily pulling SSL from my site. Browsers seem to be OK with shifting back to HTTP: rather than HTTPS:, but Firefox seems crankier than it needs to be. Between proposing to deprecate HTTP and in being overly sensitive about SSL certificates, Firefox sure isn't doing the non-corporate web any favours.