2021 Week 15

⚙️ Work

Lots of work going on to prepare for scenarios for F2021. Lots of work with the hiring committee, filling an opening for a new position on the team. Lots of committee work, with a focus on how to better handle 3rd party tools and integration with existing learning technologies…

🤔 PhD

I’m doing a PhD on experiencing teaching and learning as a game. I was about to do some qualitative coding of transcripts using spreadsheets, as I did for the transcript analysis for my MSc thesis. The exact opposite of game-ness. So. I’m taking a lesson from Dr. Sheelagh Carpendale¹ and will play with the data to see what that tells me about it.

📚 Reading

Jaclyn Broadbent & Jason Lodge: Use of live chat in higher education to support self-regulated help seeking behaviours: a comparison of online and blended learner perspectives

Help-seeking is an essential self-regulatory and metacognitive skill. In the online learning environment, much of the learning is self-directed and there are generally less opportunities to receive help in rea…

Alan Levine, on OpenETC: We Seek Your Stories of OpenETC in Action

What does having your own OpenETC WordPress site, Mattermost Community, or access to Web Apps mean for you? We want to collect these stories to demonstrate the impact an Open EdTech Co-op can have.

Charts and numbers are one way to show this, but personal stories can say a lot more.

Of course, Alan has a great sense of how to engage community members to share their stories. This works for 2 reasons:

1. it makes online teaching and learning visible in ways that rise above just the technology chosen, and
2. it shows that the platform is people. Tools change, but it’s people that do the interesting things.

Pat Thomson: ghosts in the text

Pentimento is the term used to describe the traces of an earlier work glimpsed through layers of paint on a canvas. Marks from the previous composition bleed through the newer surface, a reminder of what went before, a sign of the artist’s corrections and/or new thoughts. The presence of brushstrokes, images and/or forms intended to be hidden is a reminder of the artistic processes that led to the final work.

An interesting take on traces of versions/revisions of a work - including a dissertation as it goes through write/edit/delete/refactor/rewrite/revise processes…

Todd Feathers, in Vice: Proctorio Is Using Racist Algorithms to Detect Faces (yeah, Vice is problematic, but this is a good overview of the current state of AI-implemented racism in learning technologies)

🧺 Other

So, it looks like I won’t get vaccinated until maybe January. I need to wait 6 months after I finish the immunotherapy maintenance treatments, otherwise the vaccine won’t do anything anyway. Awesome.

I’ve joined the Strava 1% Challenge as an every-so-slight nudge to keep moving every day, rather than saving it up for a Big Ride on the weekend. If nothing else, getting out for a quick walk around the duck pond is probably good for my mental state…

🗓️ Focus for next week

The Learning Technologies Advisory Committee meets for the second-last meeting of the academic year. I get to give a couple of updates.

More planning for F2021 scenarios. Will we be back on campus in September? Partially? Or the same as this semester? Each option requires radically different types of supports and planning…