Evan and I headed to Sunshine for a ski day while he’s off between semesters. It didn’t work out awesomely - had to head back to town before noon because he wasn’t feeling well. And got a nice speeding ticket en route. Awesome. Still. Sunrise in the rockies ain’t bad. And I got a few runs in to enjoy the whole having-hemoglobin-again thing.
⚙️ Work
A busy week, with 2 big meetings to get/keep my major projects for 2020 moving. The Learning Technologies Advisory Committee’s Processes Working Group had our first meeting, and we made some real progress in describing what kinds of processes can be used to keep pedagogy as the primary consideration when requesting new online tools.
And we kicked off our pilot project to create D2L course sites for the department of chemistry early for the W2021 semester - so instructors can build their course sites over the summer, rather than cramming that in over the holiday break right before the semester starts. Still lots to do there, to make sure accurate data is in Peoplesoft before the batch course creation processes run, but we have a solid plan.
- YuJa (our campus video management / lecture capture platform) now integrates with Ad Astra (our campus room scheduling software). Our classrooms aren’t equipped for lecture capture, but this may come in handy down the road.
- YuJa rolled out an update that included a whole bunch of granularity and hierarchical control over admin privileges. No longer super-admin only - can have faculty-level admins as well. This will be very useful.
🤔 PhD
We had a lunch game session, with a few students (and others) hanging out to play a D&D campaign. It’s been decades since I’ve done that, and I had (good) flashbacks to jr. high school. It’d been almost 40 years since I last played… My goal is to ease back into my grad student role, and to spend some time in various types of games to help plan my research plan.
📚 Reading
- Brenna Clarke Gray: Digital Detox #6: Radical Resistance. It’s important for those with protection to speak out - I find I speak out in different ways now that I’m in the management group, without even union protection…
- Katherine Wu, in Smithsonian Magazine:Scientists Assemble Frog Stem Cells Into First ‘Living Machines’ - simple assemblies of frog stem cells - both heart and skin - designed by an algorithm to try to predict patterns that might exhibit behaviour.
- EDUCAUSE: 2020 Top 10 IT Issues
🧺 Other
- I tweaked the photos section of my site to be a bit more photo-gallery-y. Still some tweaking to do…
🗓️ Focus for next week
- Getting into a regular cadence of weekly 1:1 meetings with my team.
- LTDT group meeting
- MaPS Town Hall - possibly some news about reclassifying my role as faculty? Or not.
- D2L quarterly check-in call
- Hopefully knocking out the last document I’m overdue on delivering…