2017 week 3 in review


Work

I did the second orientation to ePortfolios for our new UNIV201 Global Challenges course. First-year students, making connections in an interdisciplinary context. They've been asked to document their learning, and to showcase their projects for each other, and our ePortfolio platform is pretty much perfect for that. I was surprised, again, that none of the students had edited a web page outside of Facebook. A handful had heard of wordpress, but nobody had every used it. So many things I have taken for granted, absorbed by the modern social web. This is going to take a long time to repair. We've lost a lot as a society when our brightest minds have no personal knowledge of publishing and sharing knowledge beyond Facebook posts.

PhD

I've started a theme study, getting my head around telerobotics, telepresence, and humanoid androids in an education context. It's easy to dismiss robots as "HAHA KILL ALL HUMANS" or "REPLACE ALL HUMANS" but there is more to it than that, and I think I have a role to play in figuring out what an embodied presence of a humanoid robot may mean in a social collaborative experience.

Anyway. The robot I signed out was dead on arrival. Working on a backup plan.

Read

Other

I was blocked on Twitter by a Member of Parliament because I politely asked her for a comment in response to her heckling of a member of the Legislative Assembly of Alberta at a Student Leaders event on campus. I was polite and respectful, and was genuinely wanting to learn her side of it, rather than just assuming the online buzz was accurate. Her response was to block me. That's data. Classy.

Reclaim Hosting moved my stuff from the soon-to-be decommissioned Ramones server to the shiny new OutOfStep server. The process was absolutely painless and automatic. All I had to do was change my CPanel/SSH login. Easy. Thanks! The new server appears to have some minor CPU issues, but that will get worked out.


comments powered by Disqus