Work

Super busy week - got the Learning Technologies Support Program kicked off, to start the process of helping faculties hire grad students to work with instructors to design learning experiences and integrate learning technologies.

To support that program, I’m hiring a Technology Integration Specialist! We’re looking for someone to act as the community lead for the 16 Learning Technologies Coaches, and to work with folks in the Educational Development Unit and across the University to integrate technologies. The posting is active as of yesterday, and closes August 28, 2015 – to be hired ASAP after that.

We reviewed the Educational Development Unit’s IT Plan this week - some major pieces we need to build up very soon, and hoping to tie into University platforms wherever possible, so we don’t have to build or license our own stuff as a last resort.

It’s been pretty amazing to see the Taylor Institute take form - first as a virtual organization in borrowed/inherited space, and then as a newly designed group about to move into almost-complete newly-constructed space. All of the metaphors!

Read

• Alan Levine:
  • The UDG Agora Challenge Bank- Newest Iteration of DS106 Assignment Bankenstein
  • The Web Feels Fine to Me
• Andrew Whitehouse, Winthrop Professor, Telethon Kids Institute at University of Western Australia: Don’t panic, the internet won’t rot children’s brains
• Audrey Watters
  • And So, Without Ed-Tech Criticism…
  • Teaching Machines and Turing Machines: The History of the Future of Labor and Learning
• Beth Holland: Using Design Thinking to Bridge Theory & Practice with Digital Portfolios
• Brett Spencer: Showtime in the Classroom: Seven Ways Streaming Video Can Enhance Teaching
• Edsurge: Do I Own My Domain If You Grade It?
• Harold Jarche: cooperation for the network era
• Jeffrey Nyeboer: “What is the Most Profound Leadership Statement?"
• Jim Groom: Digital Pedagogy as Empowered Choice
• JISC: Publish or be damned? Starting a university press - the perks, pitfalls and benefits
• Jon Kruithof: Work = Life = ePorfolios
• Joshua Kim: The 3 Orthodoxies of Educational Technology
• Make Calgary: HOW GREEN IS CALGARY
• Marco Arment: The ethics of modern web ad-blocking
• Michael Simmons: The No. 1 Predictor Of Career Success According To Network Science - Life Learning - Medium
• Patrick Hogan: Second Life college campuses: A tour of abandoned worlds | Fusion
• Peter Bright: Windows 10’s privacy policy is the new normal
• Stefan Popenici: Universities can’t, and shouldn’t, educate to suit employers
• Susan Cannon: Instructors in science pilot ‘teaching square' model in classes

Other

I’m taking another week off next week. Slowly burning off the vacation days that built up over the last year or two. Hoping to stop getting cranky emails from HR soon…

Writing this post on my iPad was the first time I’ve really felt frustrated with using it as my primary mobile computer – the long URLs choked the WordPress editor, and made writing the post a hot mess. I’m really hopeful that some of the rumoured iOS 9 improvements will make living on an iPad as main-mobile-device more seamless¹.

I hang my head, because I wound up writing the post in OneNote for iOS, then copying/pasting back into the WordPress interface. Actually, that workflow worked pretty well - I’ve really been digging OneNote². ³