Posts on D'Arcy Norman

I'm Hiring - Learning Technologies Specialist

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Wed, 21 Apr 2021 11:33:53 -0600

We have an open position in the Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning, as part of my team. I think it’s a pretty great place to work, with an amazing group of people, doing important work that has the potential to transform the university and improve the teaching and learning experience for the entire campus community.

This is a Learning Technologies Specialist position, with a strong focus on “program innovation” - working with instructors on the development and implementation of new academic programs, providing consultation and expertise on the design and integration of learning technologies to support the pedagogical goals of each program. It’s a full-time, regular position (not a term position), and is a great opportunity to work with the entire team at the TI.

HR removed the salary info from the posting, but:

This is a full time, regular position. The Learning Technologies Specialist (LTS) will work for 35 hours per week, with regular office hours. It is classified as a “Technical Phase 2” position under the AUPE Collective Agreement, with a salary range from $57,894 to $83,811 per year.

The full posting is available on the UCalgary Careers website.

The posting closes on May 5, 2021.

In Media: WSJ Experience Report: Online Proctoring

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Thu, 15 Apr 2021 08:35:51 -0600

I was interviewed recently (via email) by Katie Deighton, from the Wall Street Journal’s Experience Report. She was writing an article on online exam proctoring, and wanted to follow up with me about the categories of proctoring software and to get a university learning technologies perspective.

The article was published yesterday. I’m officially a critic. She wasn’t able to use the entire response, so I’m putting the rest of it here:

Katie:

What are the biggest challenges that online proctoring companies face when it comes to both reputation and customer acquisition? How big of a problem is the user experience, when compared to issues surrounding privacy, security, etc.?

This Educause QuickPoll report (which mentioned your work!) on proctoring services was conducted at the beginning of the pandemic. From what you know about the industry, do you believe the sentiment regarding online proctoring has changed at all now, given the critical media attention and student petitioning that’s occurred since then?

Companies like Proctorio and ProctorU have committed to tweaking the user experience, for instance, by making the set-up instructions easier, improving transparency around where a user’s data goes, improving accessibility, and better educating professors in the various proctoring settings. Do you think these kinds of tweaks will be enough to either bring back lost customers, or improve online proctoring’s reputation at large? Or, do you think security/privacy concerns will still dominate the discourse here, no matter how easy and transparent it is for people to use the software?

D’Arcy:

There is a fundamental problem with how online exam proctoring software is designed. This problem involves issues of power, control, consent, and agency. The concept itself puts students and instructors into an adversarial relationship, with students framed as assumed cheaters, and instructors as police or security analysts trying to catch the students. This can’t be resolved through interface tweaks or streamlined installation processes - the problem is the nature of the software, not the design of the interface or user experience.

Online exam proctoring software is invasive. It installs surveillance software onto students’ own computers. Software which is designed to integrate with their web browser and operating system in ways that would have previously been described as a “root kit” and banned in order to mitigate security vulnerabilities. Once installed, the software relies on active surveillance of students in their homes, using video and audio streamed from their computer’s webcam as well as monitoring the software and data that resides on the computer. Once third-party surveillance software has been installed on a computer, it should not be treated as a trusted device. Even with some transparency provided by the software companies, the trust that a person previously had that enabled secure uses of their computer, such as online banking, personal income tax preparation, or storage of private content and data, has already been compromised. Compelling students to install it on their own devices, compromising the security and integrity of those devices, is problematic.

If online exam proctoring software was strictly used on devices provided by an institution for the sole purpose of completing assessments in online courses, it could be a viable solution. But, even then, the software relies on video and audio surveillance of students in their own homes. There are a number of issues that make that a challenging proposition. Software that uses artificial intelligence and computer vision techniques has been shown to be biased against people of colour because the machine learning software is typically trained using less diverse images and videos to teach it what “cheating” looks like. Software that uses live proctoring - a human watching the student as they take the exam - avoids the problem of AI bias, but adds issues of reliability (do all observers consistently treat behaviours the same way?) as well as privacy, as unknown staff members or contractors engaged by the proctoring company are now compelling students to allow them to watch them for extended periods of time.

At the beginning of the pandemic, there was a strong push to shift to remote proctoring at our institution, but we put together a team with people from various faculties and roles - and included both undergraduate and graduate students - in trying to figure out what was needed. I think the initial hope was that online exam proctoring software would enable online exams to be offered with very little adjustment to existing processes - replacing in-class invigilated high stakes exams with online proctored exams. But that avoids the root issues underlying assessment, which we decided to attempt to address rather than to apply a temporary solution. Our community was very clear that they thought it would be a better investment of university resources (both financial and staffing) to support initiatives to foster a stronger culture of academic integrity, and in the design and implementation of authentic assessment in online and remotely-taught courses. These alternate forms of authentic assessment are more difficult for instructors to create, but also make it more difficult for students to engage in academic misconduct.

Fixing the Black Box When Sharing Content in Zoom

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Tue, 12 Jan 2021 13:50:31 -0700

When I use my MacBook Pro¹ to share content in a Zoom meeting, it occasionally seems to get stuck. Sharing the screen works fine, for a bit, then it freezes, and then it gets replaced by a black box. I don’t find out until a minute later, when people politely cough and say “so… we can’t see what you’re doing anymore…”

The first time, I figured something just got crosswired somewhere, with Zoom and YuJa and Sidecar all trying to do things with my display. I rebooted, and the problem went away. Then, it happened again, and I figured I should try to figure out how to prevent it from happening again.

Some googling² turned up similar issues on Windows and Linux laptops, related to graphics cards. And then I saw this page from University of Minnesota’s IT site that lists security permissions and switching the GPU as possible causes.

I checked the security permissions setting, and it was good. So, maybe the laptop decided to switch from integrated graphics to dedicated graphics card while I was sharing the screen, and maybe that tripped up Zoom somehow? There shouldn’t have been a need to switch - the laptop was plugged in, so it’s not an energy saving thing. Maybe Zoom started using the integrated graphics system more, and hit a threshold that moved things over to the dedicated graphics card?

To test it, I went into the Battery settings panel, and turned off “automatic switching”.

That means, when I do unplug, I may want to manually switch back to the integrated graphics? Not sure how to even do that.

About This Mac shows which GPU is currently being used: the dedicated Radeon Pro, or integrated graphics.

Anyway. After testing a few times since, it seems to be solid now. This seems like a stupid thing to have to think about, but here I am…

a 2019 15" MacBook Pro, delivered 3 days before the 16" model was announced… ↩︎
DuckDuckGoing, but that doesn’t sound right. ↩︎

2020 media log

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Thu, 31 Dec 2020 12:00:00 -0700

Trying to track major media consumption throughout the year. I’ve done this for a few years now, but it’s kind of a chore.

Anyway. Here’s most of the media I consumed in 2020.¹

Movies

In theatre

Hah!

On demand

The Invisible Man (2020)
Ford V Ferrari

Netflix

Spenser Confidential
Life of the Party
Game Night
Contagion
A Quiet Place
The Wrong Missy
Just Friends
Ocean’s 8
The Old Guard
It’s Complicated
#ALIVE
I love you, man
The Social Dilemma
The Midnight Sky
Masterminds
A simple favor
The spy who dumped me
Instant family
Erased

TV

Apocalypse Now
Dune (1984)
The Revenant
Interstellar
Spartacus
Monty Python’s Meaning of Life
The Italian Job
Quest for Fire
The Hangover
The Hangover 2
12 Monkeys
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
War Games
The Burbs
Sully
Hall Pass
Enough Said
American Pie
Bladerunner
The Thing (1982)
Jurassic World
Thor
Airplane!
Planes, Trains and Automobiles
Lord of the Flies
Planet of the Apes (1968)
Get Smart
The Heat
Back to the Future (1, 2, 3)
The Last Samurai

Books

PhD stuff

Half-Real - Jesper Juul
Game Research Methods - Petri Lanksoski & Staffan Björk
How to Talk About Video Games - Ian Bogost
Game Design Workshop - Tracy Fullerton
Play Anything - Ian Bogost
(about 1,000 journal articles)

other stuff

Cow Country - Adrian Jones Pearson
The Happiness Trap - Russ Harris
The Churn - James S.A. Corey
Red Moon - Kim Stanley Robinson
Leviathan Wakes - James S.A. Corey
Caliban’s War - James S.A. Corey
Abaddon’s Gate - James S.A. Corey
Cibola Burn - James S.A. Corey
Nemesis Games - James S.A. Corey
Babylon’s Ashes - James S.A. Corey
Persepolis Rising - James S.A. Corey
Tiamat’s Wrath - James S.A. Corey
Exhalation - Ted Chiang
Old Man’s War - John Scalzi
The Ghost Brigades - John Scalzi
The Last Colony - John Scalzi
Zoe’s Tale - John Scalzi
The Human Division - John Scalzi
Vortex - Robert Charles Wilson

TV

Netflix

Shameless (seasons 1-9)
David Letterman - My Next Guest Needs No Introduction
Good Girls (seasons 1-3)
Life in Pieces (seasons 1-4)
Altered Carbon (season 2)
Ozark (seasons 1-3)
Dead To Me (seasons 1-2)
Workin' Moms (seasons 1-3)
Schitt’s Creek (seasons 1-5)
Friends From College (seasons 1-2)
White Lines
Real Rob
Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich
Space Force
Dirty John (seasons 1-2)
Away
Burden of Proof (seasons 1-3)
This Is Us (seasons 1-4)
Nightflyers (stopped after episode 6. So. Bad.)
Ratched
The Umbrella Academy (season 2)
Dash & Lilly

PVR

This Is Us (season 5)

CBC Gem

Schitt’s Creek (season 6)
Workin' Moms (season 4)

Amazon

The Expanse (seasons 1-4 rewatch, 5)
The X-files (season 1)
The Wilds (season 1)

Apple TV+

Long Way Round

Video Games

XBox One

Forza Motorsport 6 ²

iOS

Bejeweled Classic
Good Sudoku³

Apple Arcade⁴

What the Golf?
Little Orpheus
Hot Lava
Beyond a Steel Sky
Samurai Jack
Creaks
No Way Home
The Pathless

and a bunch of garbage reality tv background noise… ↩︎
but the xbox has been unplugged for much of the year, for non-XBox-reasons. ↩︎
this is a really great implementation, but I don’t play it much anymore because it drains the battery so rapidly. I think it’s running a machine learning solving engine, which is why it’s such a good implementation, but it’s… computationally expensive… ↩︎
With games played across mac, iPhone and iPad. I’ve been playing Apple Arcade games more than others because they avoid many of the “dark patterns” that make recent games so annoying. Buying coins to unlock parts of the game, having to return on a schedule to keep grinding, etc. Apple Arcade isn’t immune to that, but games on that platform seem to de-emphasize the grosser parts of contemporary video game design by lessening the pressure for monetization at all costs. I’ve been playing games less on my iPhone because the battery is degraded so I don’t get much game time before I need to plug it in again… ↩︎

A Letter From Sol LeWitt to Eva Hesse, as Read by Benedict Cumberbatch

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Thu, 29 Oct 2020 12:47:47 -0600

This amazing letter written by Sol LeWitt to Eva Hesse, read by Benedict Cumberbatch.

Hesse was frustrated by a creative block and self-doubt¹. LeWitt would have none of it. I’ve had it on playing on loop.

Get out of your head. Just DOOOOOOO.

you are not responsible for the world. you’re only responsible for your work, so just. do. it.

(via BoingBoing)

which is me, in a nutshell, with my dissertation. my supervisors have been basically giving me this same advice. I need to get out of my head, and just. do. the. work. ↩︎

What's the ROI on a SLAPP Lawsuit Against Your Users?

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Tue, 20 Oct 2020 20:00:28 -0600

Awhile back, Ian Linkletter shared links to videos that Proctorio published to their corporate YouTube account. Proctorio apparently wasn’t aware of how the internet works, nor about what YouTube is for, nor how to manage confidential resources (which may be an interesting tell regarding internet security awareness and infosec practices in the company?). It’s a platform for sharing videos. If you have confidential videos, don’t publish them to YouTube.

Anyway. Proctorio could have said “oops. holy crap. we didn’t realize those were public. sorry! hey - would you mind deleting those tweets?” and delete the videos from their YouTube account. They didn’t do that. Or, maybe they did - after they had a public freakout and sued Ian for sharing links to the videos that they had published on the internet for people to see.

So. Ian is a learning technologist at UBC. He’s part of the group of people that work with instructors to integrate technologies in their courses. He has some valid questions about Proctorio, which were illustrated by these videos. Now facing a potentially expensive lawsuit (I’m hoping UBC Legal is handling this for him, but maybe not? If not, why not?), there’s been a crowdfunding effort to raise funds to cover his legal costs so he’s not bankrupted by a multimillion dollar corporation for the crime of using the internet.

And Proctorio, being worth a few bajillion bucks, has money to throw around on Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation. They have the resources to play all-in bluff poker, forcing everyone else to either avoid playing at the table, or risking bankruptcy to do so.

The GoFundMe campaign hit $20,000 within a few days. It’s now sitting at $25,697, with 387 donors so far. 387 people who are donating their own money to help Ian stand up against this SLAPP lawsuit.

Cory Doctorow shared an epic twitter thread about this, and followed up with a post.

Which got me thinking - what’s the ROI on this? They’ve blown a moon-sized hole in any goodwill their community (and potential new community) may have had for them. Any new contracts are going to be hardfought after this. Back in the olden days, Blackboard’s lawsuit against Desire2Learn was a major part of the shift in sentiment toward the company (on top of a bunch of other factors, but it definitely played a strong role).

I conducted a poll on Twitter to try to see the impact of this lawsuit might be on new deployments. I didn’t vote in the poll, but it’s likely largely represented by folks who are in similar roles at post-secondary institutions, who administer and support campus platforms for online and blended learning.

I mean. Not a rigorous, scientific survey. But that’s a whole lot of mostly-edtech-folks who aren’t huge fans of the company as a result of this…

I’m guessing the ROI is roughly negative-infinity? There were better ways to handle accidentally publishing some videos on the internet.

update: of course, Brian provides a more thoughtful perspective on the company’s real ROI. Projecting power and instilling fear. Mission accomplished.

I was going to share this link with some smart-ass comment like “congrats to the PR geniuses whose over-the-top response is resulting in such great coverage!” But then I thought about it some more…https://t.co/EJSbHHP0UI
— Brian Lamb (@brlamb) October 22, 2020

(but check out the full thread)¹

I remember when Brian used to blog. I mean, vaguely… ↩︎

Zoom Features Wishlist

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Wed, 16 Sep 2020 19:40:21 -0600

We’ve been using Zoom at scale since March, and have learned how to use it well for everything from 1:1 meetings up to classes of 500+ students. Since we launched in March 2020, to prepare for the COVID Rapid Pivot to Remote Teaching™, we’ve hosted 304,776 meetings in our campus Zoom environment. We’ve held 379 webinars. We’ve created over 4 TB of recordings.

In that time, we’ve realized there are a few features that would make life simpler for instructors, especially in these large-enrolment classes.

So. Here are some ideas to improve the Zoom experience.

Better chat

In meetings, people can’t see things that were posted in Chat before they got there. Which makes sense, kind of, I guess, but I’ve been in many meetings where someone gets designated to keep re-pasting an important link or instruction so newly-joining participants know what’s going on. Sometimes, you just don’t want this in the presentation or shared-screen content. You’re in a meeting where 25 people are in grid view so they can all see each other, but they’re also doing something in, say, Jamboard or OneNote or Google Docs or O365 and the link is pasted into the chat. Allow the hosts to pin chat entries to remain visible for newly-joined participants.

And/or allow participants to view chat history for the current meeting session, regardless of when they join.

But allow the host to clear the chat. Sometimes it needs to be flushed, especially in large meetings where the chat can get… frenetic.

And why does full screen view (on a mac at least) put the chat in a window that floats on top of the content, but windowed mode docks the chat to the side of the main Zoom window without obscuring any content? I mean. That just feels backward. In fullscreen, I get to pick which participants I don’t get to see in Gallery view, or which part of the presented content I don’t need to see if I want the chat visible. Or the Participants list. Dock those to the side rather than obscuring the meeting while in fullscreen mode.

Better presentation of video content

Lots of times, an instructor wants to show a video to the class. The way to do that in Zoom is to share your screen. Which basically sucks when playing video. The framerate and resolution of the already-compressed YouTube (or other) video is crushed as the presenter’s computer displays the video in whatever browser window (maybe full screen? maybe on a part of a web page with ads and other crud around it?) and compresses it before streaming it to the Zoom meeting. It comes out looking like a muddy Cinepak video. There has to be a better way to say “hey - let’s all watch this video” and have it stream at full quality to all participants.

Control the horizontal (and maybe the vertical)

In Adobe Connect Meeting (which we used as our campus platform for several years before switching to Zoom) the host can configure the layout of the screen. They can add “pods” with content and functionality that are visible to all participants. They can change the layout of the space during the meeting. Zoom doesn’t allow that, and hosts have no idea what participants are actually seeing. Are they in Gallery mode, with a grid of participants? Are they in Speaker mode, just seeing the person who is talking? Are they full-screen, or in a tiny window? Letting the host actually design their online learning space and set the presentation context is important.

Update: Stephen Downes makes a valid point re: letting people design their own experience. I still think it’s useful for an instructor to be able to set the “mode” for the session - is it an open discussion? Grid view. Presentation? Speaker view.

Break out the breakout rooms

There’s no way for a host to set up content for the breakout rooms. They can’t say “hey - I want each breakout room to work on this document” from Zoom. They can create a bunch of Googly docs and send links to each student and let the students figure out who’s going to share the content in each breakout room. It’s clunky. Something that lets the instructor set up content to be used within each breakout room is important. Even if it’s just letting the instructor set the URL for collaboration in each breakout room.

And, after the breakout rooms end, they can’t easily present back on what they did. An instructor could be able to say “Breakout room 1 was working on the molecular structure of benzene” and then display the content from breakout room 1 to the class. This will be much more complicated than I’ve made it sound, but something to let groups easily share what they did is important.

Panic (don’t panic) Button

What we’ve seen, again and again, is that hosts lacking these tools results in harassment, bullying, and racism. And results in a learning environment where participants don’t feel safe, where hosts feel under attack, and learning can be much more challenging than it needs to be.

Say you’re an instructor in a first year course with 300 students. They’re mostly awesome and wanting to learn. But, some are bored and figure they’ll share the meeting ID and password on a Discord channel to see if someone wants to come troll the class for laughs. Or a student decides they’re really bored and decides to connect from a second or third device using different accounts to hide their identity and route through VPNs to hide their location so they can troll the class themselves. Instructors can do everything right, and it takes just one bored person to violate the trust.

Internet troll culture seems to be right at home in Zoom. So, these less-awesome people do things like grief the class by shouting obscenities into their microphone, or sharing their screen to display porn or other high-shock-value content, or they have an app or adapter so they can stream similar triggering content through their “webcam”.

Remember how the host has no idea what the participants each see during a session? They may not even realize that someone is streaming porn through their webcam. They may not know that people are stuffing the chat with obscene text. And when they do realize, because they don’t see what the participants see, they may take awhile to figure out how to a) stop it and b) reset things to bring the class back after going off the rails.

A “panic” button would help. A lot. With one click:

Take a screenshot (and, if the session is being recorded, save a flag at the timestamp)
Turn off all video
Mute all audio
Stop all content sharing
Turn off the chat. Clear the chat if needed (after saving a copy)
Notify the account owner - for an institutional account, send the screenshot, chat log, and metadata about the meeting including the Quality of Service report so IT’s security team can intervene. For cases where horrific content has been shared and laws clearly violated, loop in the Zoom security team to pull logs so the jerks can be stopped. Currently, it’s basically just anonymous laughs, leaving behind participants who are genuinely traumatized by this garbage.

Maybe there are a couple of levels of this. It might start with a “STOP IT!” button that just does numbers 1-5. Maybe it asks the host if they think it’s a serious incident that needs to be documented, in which case it moves on to number 6.

Rebuilding safety and trust

In an ideal world, we wouldn’t need tools to manage internet trolls in our online learning spaces. But, the internet is a thing and while most people are awesome, there are enough non-awesome people that make this stuff necessary. Currently, instructors and students don’t feel safe in Zoom. Things can be going well, and then out of nowhere comes the trolls with their stupid attempts to shock people to laugh at their reactions.

All of the encryption and security features are useless because they’re designed for a different threat model.

The call is coming from inside the house. It doesn’t matter how good the lock is.

So, to build trust, you need to build a safe environment. Which means providing effective tools for instructors (and all hosts) to quickly stop this garbage when it happens, and to help the rest of the class to recover and get back to learning.

Territorial Acknowledgement in Online Learning Spaces

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Tue, 01 Sep 2020 08:53:23 -0600

The University of Calgary has been developing a strategy, ii' taa’poh’to’p, to help guide the university toward reconciliation. This is incredibly important and we are all working to understand and to learn. One of the first steps involves acknowledging that indigenous peoples have been living on this land long before european settlers arrived. We make the territorial acknowledgement in ceremonies and large gatherings - but now that we are all participating from our own homes it has become more important for us all to acknowledge the First Nations, and the treaty that we are all part of.

One simple way to make this acknowledgement is to display it in online spaces. We’ve just added a widget in Brightspace so that any instructor can add it to their course. It’s a very small step, but making this visible within a course is an important message to share both with indigenous and settler students.

It may also serve as a prompt - not everyone will be participating from the same region, and this provides an opportunity for a discussion about the indigenous context of our homes and workplaces.

A Brightspace course, showing the new Territorial Acknowledgement widget

the widget comes in 2 forms - singular (for one instructor - I) and plural (for multiple instructors - we)

The content for the widget was produced by our Office of Indigenous Engagement, and shared through the cultural protocol page on their website. The Brightspace widget just removes a few steps for instructors who want to add it to their courses.

Candidate

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Sun, 30 Aug 2020 09:07:17 -0600

On Friday, I finished my PhD candidacy exams with an oral exam of my thesis proposal. It was an incredible discussion, with a group of people who I admire as much for their approach to their work as for the work itself. Each committee member was recruited because they are the best person at our university in their respective field. I mean, to the point that if I blew it, I’d been half-joking about having to quit my day job because I work regularly with many of them in other committees and projects. An amazing committee, and they gave me valuable feedback and guidance to refine the thesis plan and get to work.

Doing this kind of thing during a global pandemic is kind of a surreal experience. We met in Zoom. Signatures happened via emailed PDF documents. I didn’t go to campus to give my presentation in person - I presented from a spare bedroom in my home. It didn’t feel much different than any other pandemic workday. It’s taking awhile to sink in as a result.

But. I’m now a PhD Candidate. I was reminded to change my email sig to include the (c) designation rather than student. I’m not a student anymore¹.

I’ve got 9 pages of notes from the oral exam discussion to go through, and a couple of follow-up meetings with committee members who have more feedback to help me refine my plan. I’ll be starting work in September, developing a framework to incorporate research methods from the study of video games to describe teaching and learning. And then I’ll “play test” the research methods to see if they’re useful. And then I’ll write a bunch about it.

ABD sounds closer to being done than this is. The D part is the real work, and saying I’m done (except for doing the work) is confusing. This is maybe the halfway mark, not the final lap.

Anyway. A surreal but important milestone.

yeah yeah. Student of life. Always. ↩︎

Resources for Podcasting in Courses in 2020

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Thu, 16 Jul 2020 09:27:18 -0600

I’d explored podcasting several years ago - looking at educational uses of podcasts and making my first attempt back in 2004 when the term was first coined - but, everything about “podcasting” has changed since then, and the term has become a genericized label for “I want to share some media”. We’ve been getting requests from instructors who are interested in using podcasts (or “podcasts”) in their courses - whether as part of the instructional materials, or for students to produce media as part of their learning. So. Here are some current resources and links. I’ll update this page with any suggestions.

Podcasting for teaching and learning

University of Michigan, Sweetland Center for Writing. (2020). Scaffolding Your Podcast Composition Assignment (via Gavan Watson’s 3 Teaching Things newsletter)

Drucker, S. (2020). Audible Networks: Podcasts and Collaborative Learning

Taylor Insitute for Teaching and Learning. (2020). Alternative online assessments: Podcasts.

Ferrer, I., Lorenzetti, L, & Shaw, J. (2019): Podcasting for social justice: exploring the potential of experiential and transformative teaching and learning through social work podcasts. Social Work Education, DOI: 10.1080/02615479.2019.1680619

Kaziewicz, J. (2012). Podcasting in the Classroom.

Sample podcasts

Podcasts produced by the UCalgary community

Other podcast examples

VoiceED Radio - education-related podcasts on a wide range of topics
The Cult of Pedagogy
The Puerto Rico Connection

Producing podcasts

Third party (free, ad-supported, or commercial) services are also available to use separate from the University:

The Case for Video Games

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Sat, 11 Jul 2020 12:39:09 -0600

I’ve been working on my thesis proposal, preparing for candidacy this summer. This explains why I’ve been pretty much silent here on the blog, and why I’ve been trying to reduce my social media time¹.

Much of my research will be on using the lens of video games as a way of describing classroom teaching - in fancy-talk, developing a model that adapts research methods developed for the formal analysis of video games to the description and analysis of teaching and classroom activities. I’ll be sharing much more about that over the next year as I get into data collection and writing the dissertation…

In the meantime, this is a really good video from Sarah Urist Green’s The Art Assignment - looking at video games from the perspective of an art historian:

well, that, and the whole “2020 is a radioactive festering clusterfork that keeps snowballing and mutating and metastasizing and everything is on fire and nothing seems to matter” thing…) ↩︎

Self Hosted Searching in Hugo

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Tue, 09 Jun 2020 16:38:14 -0600

I’ve been using DuckDuckGo’s site-specific search as a way to make this site searchable, after moving from WordPress to Hugo. Since static websites don’t have a database, searching is more difficult so I’d let that go and had just used an embedded search form that fired off a DuckDuckGo query.

Which worked. Mostly. But it also got results from other subdomains at *.darcynorman.net, and didn’t sort them too well. So it was not as useful as the WordPress Relevanssi search plugin had been.

I’m working on my thesis proposal, and am building it as a website. A bunch of markdown text files, with the website generated by Hugo using the Hugo Book theme. It’s shaping up nicely. And, Hugo Book comes with a javascript search engine built in. When compiling the site, it saves a search index javascript file.

It works great on my relatively small thesis website, but I doubted that it would scale to handle my blog with over 8,000 posts going back over 18 years. Surely, the index would be ginormous, and would take hours to generate.

I needed to shift gears to clear my head after some meetings, so took a stab at adapting the Hugo Book search into my blog to see a) if it would even work, and b) how much overhead it would add to generating the site.

About half an hour of tinkering later, and it works. It works quite well. Searches are fast, and much more relevant than the DDG searches were.

I basically copied the search.js and search-data.js files from Hugo Book’s assets folder into the assets folder on my blog (these files are then processed when building the website), added some javascript to the header, some css to handle the search results, and added the Search page.

And, it only adds a few milliseconds to generating my blog website. If I run it a few times, the variation due to other stuff running on my computer is larger than the difference between non-indexed and indexed. Awesome.

But. The index is rather large - there are 2 files, 1 just over 5MB, the other just a few KB. So, searching means the browser has to download those index files so the search runs locally. Not ideal, but back when I was running WordPress, it wasn’t unusual to have every single page weigh in at that order of magnitude in size. Now, the entire website is much leaner, and the search index will load only if I actively go to the Search page.

There’s still a bit of tweaking I want to do with the layout, but it’s working well enough to replace the site search. I’ll want to delete older search index files from the server - they’re all given unique-ified names to avoid browser caching, but that means they will collect on the server with each site build. I don’t want to use rsync –delete, because there are a bunch of files on the webserver that aren’t on my local computers and that would delete them. Which would be bad. Maybe an easy script to run nightly, deleting older search index files…

Update: Easy fix for preventing the search index files building up on the server. Just added a line to my publishing script, deleting the search index .js files before rsyncing the fresh copy of the website into place:

#!/bin/sh

figlet "Hugo PUBLISH"

echo "Running hugo to generate blog website"

cd ~/Documents/Blog/blog
time hugo --cleanDestinationDir

echo "Starting rsync publish of blog website to server"

# delete search indices
ssh darcynorman.net 'rm sites/blog/en.search*.js'

# upload generated site via rsync
time rsync -az /tmp/public/ darcynorman.net:sites/blog

echo "Rsync publish completed"

figlet "Complete"

Cheating and Online Exam Proctoring

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Tue, 05 May 2020 10:33:12 -0600

I’ve been doing a lot of reading and learning about online exam proctoring, to prepare to act as the “business lead” for an online exam proctoring project that ramps up this week, aiming to have a pilot in the summer and a tool available for use (as a last resort) in the fall.

It’s a complicated solution to a complicated problem. Not all courses are able to adjust assessment away from high stakes exams, and those don’t translate online in all contexts without some form of proctoring. Yes, it’s better to redesign a course to use more interesting forms of assessment. Yes, high stakes exams are problematic on their own. Yes, the concept of surveillance makes me twitch. And the idea of pushing that surveillance into our students' homes is the stuff of privacy nightmares.

Proctoring itself isn’t the problem - we have high stakes exams with in-person proctors or invigilators all the time. We fill gymnasia with rows of desks, with students being monitored by staff members who patrol for signs of cheating.

The problem is when it gets pushed into students' homes, on their own computers. And, for the most part, our students didn’t sign up for this kind of course - they signed up long ago for face-to-face courses, without being able to meaningfully consent to this kind of surveillance or to providing access to their own technologies (assuming those technologies are even available). And they have no real way to trust the surveillance technologies - they can’t see what is on the other end of the webcam, or know what happens to the video and other data. They have to take our word that we’ve worked with vendors to ensure their privacy (which we have), but asking people to just trust that it’s all ok is not enough.

Rebecca Heilweil, writing at Vox recode: Paranoia about cheating is making online education terrible for everyone:

Some students seem to hate these services, and social media is chock-full of their grievances, from criticisms of the software to objections that the tool is just plain annoying. And some, such as Raza, have turned to their campus newspapers to express their privacy objections. Earlier this year, students at Florida State University started an online petition to protest their school’s use of Honorlock, and over 5,500 have signed it so far. The University of California Berkeley has already banned online exam proctoring, with some students saying they may not have the high-speed internet connection or living situation to make remote exams happen effectively and equitably.

I mean. It’s pretty straightforward to think of ways that creative students could work around remote proctoring. The majority of students will continue to be honest, a smaller minority of students will continue to be dishonest. Technology doesn’t change that. But it might take away the temptation for casual cheating - we’ve heard from students who say they would feel pressured to cheat because they know some students will and they need to not be penalized for being honest. But that’s not a technology problem.

I’m hopeful that we will be able to avoid proctored online exams as much as possible - we finished Winter 2020 without it, and will be running Spring 2020 without it as well. If we can work with our instructors to shift them to other forms of assessment - projects, open-book exams, etc - then the temptation to rely on surveillance technologies will be reduced.

Automating Creating New Content in Hugo

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Tue, 05 May 2020 09:33:39 -0600

I’ve been using Hugo for about 6 months now, and it’s been working really really well for me. But the one thing that’s been bugging me is how clumsy it is to create new posts.

For example, here’s the command line stuff that would have created this post:

cd ~/Documents/Blog/blog
hugo new posts/2020/2020-05-05-Automating-Creating-New-Content-in-Hugo.md

All posts are plaintext markdown files, organized in folders within a content directory. The Hugo application has a command line tool to create content - but, almost every single time, I need to look up the syntax so I don’t goof it up. It’s a trivial command, but the syntax doesn’t seem to stick in my brain for some reason. Did I goof up on the date format? Did I get a dash in the wrong place? Typo in the file path? Accidentally left a space in somewhere and it breaks?

Once the content file is created, Hugo hands it off to the really good Macdown app for editing. But the creation of the file itself is awkward.

So. I needed a quick break from reading about online exam proctoring… Some googling and trial-and-error later, I now have a simple shell script that reads the content types I’ve set up in my archetypes directory, lets me pick one of them, and prompts me for a title. It then generates the file and sticks it in the right directory, then opens up Macdown for editing.

Here’s the script. It’s likely very very kludgey, and I probably need to build some better sanitation on the title/filename. But it works well enough for my use now. I have it saved as “new content.command” on my laptop, so it’s double-clickable¹.

#!/bin/sh

# cd into my Hugo directory for my blog. Change this to your own directory path.
cd ~/Documents/Blog/blog

# read the files in the archetypes directory, stripping the .md extension.
echo "type?"
types=$(ls -1 archetypes | sed -e 's/\.md$//')
i=1

# display the archetype selection list
for j in $types
do
echo "$i. $j"
file[i]=$j
i=$((i+1))
done
echo "Enter content type #"
read input
type=${file[$input]}
echo $type

# what should we call it?
echo "title?"
read title

# strip out spaces, replace with -s. (maybe needs more sanitation?)
title=${title//[ ]/-}

# get date for filename prefix eg. 2020-05-05
postdate=$(date +"%Y-%m-%d")

# get year to keep things in an organized year directory within the content type
postyear=`date +'%Y'`

# tell hugo to take over. it will hand off to the configured editor when done.
hugo new $type/$postyear/$postdate-$title".md"

Running that command prompted me for the info:

Last login: Tue May  5 10:06:19 on ttys003
 _____             ____    __  __               ____   ___ ____   ___  
|_   _|   _  ___  | ___|  |  \/  | __ _ _   _  |___ \ / _ \___ \ / _ \ 
  | || | | |/ _ \ |___ \  | |\/| |/ _` | | | |   __) | | | |__) | | | |
  | || |_| |  __/  ___) | | |  | | (_| | |_| |  / __/| |_| / __/| |_| |
  |_| \__,_|\___| |____/  |_|  |_|\__,_|\__, | |_____|\___/_____|\___/ 
                                        |___/                          
 _  ___     ___   __    ____  _   __  __ ____ _____ 
/ |/ _ \ _ / _ \ / /_ _| ___|/ | |  \/  |  _ \_   _|
| | | | (_) | | | '_ (_)___ \| | | |\/| | | | || |  
| | |_| |_| |_| | (_) | ___) | | | |  | | |_| || |  
|_|\___/(_)\___/ \___(_)____/|_| |_|  |_|____/ |_|  
                                                    
➜  ~ /Users/dnorman/Documents/Blog/new\ content.command ; exit;
type?
1. asides
2. default
3. page
4. phdnotes
5. photos
6. podcast
7. posts
8. reflections
Enter content type #
7
posts
title?
Automating creating new content in hugo
/Users/dnorman/Documents/Blog/blog/content/posts/2020/2020-05-05-Automating-creating-new-content-in-hugo.md created
Editing posts/2020/2020-05-05-Automating-creating-new-content-in-hugo.md with "macdown" ...

and created the file at the right location at:

~/Blog/blog/content/posts/2020/2020-05-05-Automating-creating-new-content-in-Hugo.md

on macOS, the super helpful security stuff will break the double-clickableness of this .command file if I use BBEdit to edit it, so I use nano in Terminal to avoid flagging the file as insecure or dirty or whatever. ↩︎

Projects and Squiggles

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Fri, 01 May 2020 18:43:41 -0600

When we talk about processes, there’s a balance between traditional Project™ “waterfall” approaches - dependencies, critical paths, charters, etc. and what happens in practice - rapid prototypes, DIY experimentation, communities and networks, and emergent designs to support practice.

LMS Upgrade Plan Gantt

a traditional project management overview of the steps involved in implementing a learning management system

compared with

Damian Newman: The Design Squiggle

The Process of Design Squiggle by Damien Newman, thedesignsquiggle.com

There’s a place for both, but tension arises because people (I think) tend to think more like Damien Newman’s Squiggle¹, but Project Managers™ think in Gantt charts. They aren’t always easily compatible.

The work I do straddles both worlds - campus-wide platforms require an approach that attempts to ensure reliability of service and protection of data. And the innovation that happens around the edges of a university is much more squiggly. We get to try to translate between the two approaches in order to serve the needs of the community.

Projects™ are hard - how do you really respond to changing needs, new ideas, prototypes, false starts, and failures?

Squiggles are hard - how do you estimate how much to budget for something like that? How many people are involved? What’s the sustainability model? Who supports Squiggly things?

It’s not one or the other approach. They need to fit together somehow - and that’s a challenge because the languages and concepts and responsibilities are so dramatically different.

This becomes even more challenging when faced with a funding crisis and the loss of the IT Partner role on campus - which was designed specifically to help bridge the worlds of Projects™ and Squiggles.

I’ve used similar doodles to show this non-Project process flow before, but John Gruber just posted a link to The Design Squiggle, and it resonated again. ↩︎

Posts on D'Arcy Norman

I'm Hiring - Learning Technologies Specialist

In Media: WSJ Experience Report: Online Proctoring

Katie:

D’Arcy:

Fixing the Black Box When Sharing Content in Zoom

2020 media log

Movies

In theatre

On demand

Netflix

TV

Books

PhD stuff

other stuff

TV

Netflix

PVR

CBC Gem

Amazon

Apple TV+

Video Games

XBox One

iOS

Apple Arcade4

A Letter From Sol LeWitt to Eva Hesse, as Read by Benedict Cumberbatch

What's the ROI on a SLAPP Lawsuit Against Your Users?

Zoom Features Wishlist

Better chat

Better presentation of video content

Control the horizontal (and maybe the vertical)

Break out the breakout rooms

Panic (don’t panic) Button

Rebuilding safety and trust

Territorial Acknowledgement in Online Learning Spaces

A Brightspace course, showing the new Territorial Acknowledgement widget

Candidate

Resources for Podcasting in Courses in 2020

Podcasting for teaching and learning

Sample podcasts

Podcasts produced by the UCalgary community

Other podcast examples

Producing podcasts

Starting a podcast:

Software:

Publishing & hosting podcasts

The Case for Video Games

Self Hosted Searching in Hugo

Cheating and Online Exam Proctoring

Automating Creating New Content in Hugo

Projects and Squiggles

LMS Upgrade Plan Gantt

Damian Newman: The Design Squiggle

Apple Arcade⁴