⚙️ Work
Hiring
We moved to the next stage of hiring a new team member. The posting for the Learning Technologies Specialist - Program Innovation position in my team went live on Friday. This posting will recruit a team member who is able to work on course- and program-level projects to consult on the design and integration of learning technologies in order to support the Provost’s Program Innovation Hub initiative. The posting is up for 2 weeks, and closes on March 5.
Pandemic home office
I got tired of staring at the same wall in the spare bedroom, so did some rearranging. The futon went downstairs. An old chair from my parents' old house (in desperate need of reupholstering) came upstairs. I hung some stuff on the walls. It’s a far cry from a well-designed home office space, but it’s a start. I still need to pick up an actual desk - the 25-year-old Ikea sofa table I’ve been using just isn’t enough.
But, hey, maybe the vaccines are going to get out on schedule and it’ll only be another 6 months of this?
Campus learning technologies
I enabled Zoom’s Live Transcript feature on Tuesday morning. Bracing for strong feedback of both “that’s awesome and now I can actively participate in meetings/class!” and “that’s the worst thing ever and it must be deactivated now because I don’t want text transcripts of what I say!” Possibly from the same people.
The YuJa/Zoom integration was also updated to be able to pull transcripts over, so I got to remove/re-add the integration. It’s seamless, but I always worry that removing an integration will inadvertently delete stuff. It didn’t. I think.
We’ve started thinking about how to design classroom AV solutions so that they’re portable and can be used across campus. Something like this from Harvard’s DCE might do the trick. And here’s a staged demo of what it might look like in use. (thanks for the link, Paul!)
🤔 PhD
My CHI LBW paper submission didn’t make the cut, but I got some great feedback that I’ll be able to incorporate into future submissions and/or my dissertation. The challenge with transdisciplinary work is that it doesn’t fit into categories well, so it’s been difficult so far. But - that’s the challenge. Finding ways to make the work relevant… On the plus side, the feedback on submissions has all been vaguely positive, ala “interesting ideas, excellent writing” and also “but… yeah. don’t think it fits here/yet…” Even so, man, it’s hard not to just feel rejected and dejected.
📚 Reading
- The Secret, Essential Geography of the Office | WIRED - I’m working on a piece of my dissertation that explores the differences between built campus environments and spaces improvised in the home. This fits into that concept nicely.
- this muppetfracker Jack M. Mintz: COVID shocks higher education. Good, it’s about time (no, it’s not good, and higher education has been strained past its breaking point already, you raving jackass.)
- Höök, K., & Löwgren, J. (2012). Strong concepts: Intermediate-level knowledge in interaction design research. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), 19(3), 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1145/2362364.2362371
🧺 Other
Season 2 of For All Mankind. Wow. This show just keeps getting better.
🗓️ Focus for next week
- some D2L stuff
- some family stuff
- some committee stuff
- hopefully get a draft of the robots paper ready for review