Reflections on D'Arcy Norman

2021 Week 20

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Sat, 15 May 2021 09:49:59 -0600

⚙️ Work

This is cool. Mohammad Moshirpour (from the Schulich School of Engineering) was just awarded a 2021 D2L Innovation Award, by STLHE.

President McCauley published the latest draft of UCalgary’s Growth Through Focus strategy. A good chunk of it relates directory to the work of the TI.

🤔 PhD

Had a great discussion with Ehud about my plans for chapters 6 and 7. Time to step away from playing with the transcripts and just write and write and write. And then revise.

📚 Reading

UCalgary’s TALON Teaching and Learning Online Network community just posted Issue #24, with a focus on online experiential learning. Lisa Stowe, Kara Loy, and Rachel Braun from the TI’s Experiential Learning group contributed the article.¹

Heilporn, G., Lakhal, S. & Bélisle, M. An examination of teachers’ strategies to foster student engagement in blended learning in higher education. Int J Educ Technol High Educ 18, 25 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-021-00260-3

Maren Deepwell: Leading a virtual team: mental wellbeing for virtual teams

Robert Lewis, in EmergingEdTech: 7 Lesser Known Zoom Features to Improve Remote Learning - the “optimize for video” bit is useful, but he forgot to mention the Share > Advanced: Video tool that lets you directly stream any video file without recording/streaming your screen…² I’ve remapped the mute/unmute keyboard shortcut to use F5, so it’s a quick one-key toggle.

advanced: video">

Labouta, H. I., Kenny, N. A., Dyjur, P., Reid, L., & Cramb, D. T. (2019). An Inclusive, Dynamic and Collaborative Framework for Improving Curriculum Review in a Post-Secondary Program. Transformative Dialogues: Teaching & Learning Journal, 12(1).

Kathryn Dill, in WSJ’s The Future of Everything: WeWork CEO says least engaged employees enjoy working from home.

Waszkiewicz, A., & Kominiarczuk, M. (2021). Towards a Model of Objective-Based Reward Systems. Game Studies, 21(1).

🧺 Other

I upgraded our home internet to Shaw’s Fibre Gig. It’s a gig down, but 100 MB up. Not symmetrical, but still way better than the 15MB up we had on the previous plan… And now my home office is connected with wired ethernet, so no more wifi flakiness.

I’m debating moving our cellular plans to Shaw. It’s sooo much cheaper than the Rogers plans we’re on now, but it sounds like coverage is nonexistent outside of the city, with handoff to roaming not always handled smoothly.

Speaking of which, I have got to get outside of the city. The last time I saw an actual dark sky was 3 years ago in Strawberry, AZ. I have trouble even imagining what this is like in person…

I did get out for a ride on Friday afternoon, which was awesome, but being wind-blown along the side of a highway for an hour and a half isn’t the same as just… being… out of the city.

🗓️ Focus for next week

Hiring committee. Lots of D2L-related meetings. Some planning meetings. And I need to make progress on a website mockup project.

the issues/Letters are posted as pdfs, but are available online. a bloggy thing might work better for this kind of thing? ↩︎
it does need to be a file on your computer, but using something like a Youtube downloader utility makes that easy. And then, you have a reliable local copy that won’t go away if someone decides to do something to the video posted online, doesn’t have ads or tracking inserted while playing, and doesn’t have inline links/buttons… ↩︎

2021 Week 19

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Sat, 08 May 2021 12:45:15 -0600

So… nobody reads blogs anymore. RSS is dead. There are maybe 3 people that I know who read this, in addition to myself. Why do I keep posting these? Because it helps me to document what I’m working on, and to think out loud a little. I refer to these weekly things pretty often, mining them for links or articles etc. And this format is much more useful to me than 250 characters of noise on social media.

⚙️ Work

The posting for the Learning Technologies Specialist position closed on Wednesday. Lots of applicants to review to identify a shortlist of candidates to proceed to interviews with…

The 2021 University of Calgary Conference on Post-Secondary Learning and Teaching was this week.

The conference hashtag was pretty active.

I wound up with several pages of notes from the conference. I need to take some time to think about mentorship vs. supervision (maybe in addition to?) and how I can be more active both as mentee and mentor.

One of the last sessions I went to was on using peer mentorship and game play. This has huge overlap with my PhD topics, so I’ll be following up on a bunch of things they were talking about - including some readings. And many of the readings are from proceedings of previous years of the University of Calgary Conference on Post-Secondary Learning and Teaching…

🤔 PhD

I did some more work on coding the transcripts, and am starting to step back to try to see what that coding says.

Also, it’s annual performance reporting time…

📚 Reading

From the conference

Held, M. B. (2019). Decolonizing research paradigms in the context of settler colonialism: An unsettling, mutual, and collaborative effort. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 18, 1609406918821574.

Kirkness, V. J., & Barnhardt, R. (2001). First Nations and Higher Education: The Four R’s-Respect, Relevance, Reciprocity, Responsibility. Knowledge Across Cultures: A Contribution to Dialogue Among Civilizations. Comparative Education Research Centre, The University of Hong Kong.

W. Gatti Jr., E. Marasco, B. Kim, L. Behjat. (2020). Supporting design thinking through a game-based pedagogy in entrepreneurship education. Papers on Postsecondary Learning and Teaching.

M. Moussavi, Y. Amannejad, M. Moshirpour, E. Marasco, L. Behjat. (2020). Importance of Data Analytics for Improving Teaching and Learning Methods. in Data Management and Analysis: Case Studies in Education, Healthcare and Beyond. R. Alhajj, M. Moshirpour, B. Far, Eds. Springer, 2020, ch. 6.

E. Marasco, L. Behjat, R. Kelly, S. Maguire. (2019). Creative crossroads: Combining engineering and arts for creative development. Papers on Postsecondary Learning and Teaching.

E. Marasco, W. Gatti Jr., B. Kim, L. Behjat, M. Eggermont. (2017). Curious conversations: Using game-based learning to develop creative culture within technical courses. Papers on Postsecondary Learning and Teaching.

Other

InSpace is an interesting-looking videoconferencing tool, like if Zoom and Jamboard had a baby. They just announced a “toxicity filter” that uses Tensorflow AI to detect shitty behaviour and try to tamp it down. It’s AI, so who knows. ¹

And it’s been snowing and raining, so I’m back to riding my bike in the basement. Hopefully this clears up by next weekend so I can get back out on the roads…

🗓️ Focus for next week

reviewing applicants for LTS:PI
Zoom “business review” meeting

the article for that announcement was in a shiny website that used javascript to load blog posts on a page without exposing the URL to the article directly. I had to use the “tweet” share button to snag the shareable URL, only to have Twitter complain that I need to create an account. I miss when the internet kind of worked well. ↩︎

2021 Week 18

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Sat, 01 May 2021 09:10:12 -0600

⚙️ Work

It hasn’t been officially announced on campus yet, but the Students Union is providing $500K to support a bunch of Open Education Resources development grants over the next 5 years. This builds on what we learned in the OER Pilot that my team led a couple of years ago.

🤔 PhD

I attended a virtual screening of the excellent documentary film Coded Bias, by Shalini Kantayya. UCalgary’s TALON Teaching and Learning Online Network hosted a panel discussion, which was a great (but waaaay too brief) discussion of algorithmic bias and surveillance. Hopefully, there’s a possibility to do a sequel or part 2 that focusses on the relationship between algorithms, surveillance, and education… (also, Maha Bali attended the panel from Cairo)

Dr. Barbara Brown was one of the panelists, and she’s posted her notes from the session on her blog.

Coded Bias Official Trailer from Shalini Kantayya on Vimeo.

🧺 Other

🗓️ Focus for next week

Our conference runs Tues-Wed, so that’s going to be the main focus. And the Learning Technologies Specialist posting closes on Wednesday, so I’ll get to start reviewing applications.

2021 Week 17

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Sat, 24 Apr 2021 12:38:49 -0600

⚙️ Work

We’re getting ready for our annual conference, only a couple of weeks away. I’ll be moderating a couple of sessions, which should be fun.

I’m hiring! We’re looking to add a Learning Technologies Specialist to the team, with a focus on program innovation.

🤔 PhD

The iLab hosted a seminar by Nicolai Marquadt on designing interfaces for cross-device interaction, and sketching, for the iLab. It was the first iLab meeting I’ve been able to attend in over a year…

I made significant progress in coding the transcripts. NVivo is working really nicely. Using stemmed queries to quickly code words across all 13 interviews is kind of amazing. I’m positive there’s a better way to do bulk semi-auto-coding, but starting with queries and then creating nodes from the results seems to work really well.

📚 Reading

5 papers from Nicolai Marquadt’s seminar this week:

Brudy, F., Holz, C., Rädle, R., Wu, C. J., Houben, S., Klokmose, C. N., & Marquardt, N. (2019, May). Cross-device taxonomy: Survey, opportunities and challenges of interactions spanning across multiple devices. In Proceedings of the 2019 chi conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1-28).
Marquardt, N., Brudy, F., Liu, C., Bengler, B., & Holz, C. (2018, April). Surfaceconstellations: A modular hardware platform for ad-hoc reconfigurable cross-device workspaces. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-14).
Zheng, R., Camporro, M. F., Romat, H., Riche, N. H., Bach, B., Chevalier, F., … & Marquardt, N. (2021). Sketchnote Components, Design Space Dimensions, and Strategies for Effective Visual Note Taking.
Antoine, A., Malacria, S., Marquardt, N., & Casiez, G. (2021, May). Interaction Illustration Taxonomy: Classification of Styles and Techniques for Visually Representing Interaction Scenarios. In CHI’21-ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
Greenberg, S., Boring, S., Vermeulen, J., & Dostal, J. (2014, June). Dark patterns in proxemic interactions: a critical perspective. In Proceedings of the 2014 conference on Designing interactive systems (pp. 523-532).

and the reading from our LTDT meeting this week was chapter 4 of:

West, K., Hoessler, C., Bennetch, R., Ewert-Bauer, T., Wilson, M., Beaudoin, J.-P., Ellis, D. E., Brown, V. M., Timmermans, J. A., Verwoord, R., & Kenny, N. A. (2017). Educational Development Guide Series: No. 2. Rapport-Building for Educational Developers. Ottawa, ON: Educational Developers Caucus.

via Stephen Downes:

Ives, C., & Walsh, P. (2021). Perspectives of Canadian Distance Educators on the Move to Online Learning. Canadian Journal of Higher Education.

🧺 Other

I got my penultimate immunotherapy maintenance treatment this week. One more to go - done in July.

And it’s been cold and/or snowing all week, so I haven’t gotten out on the bike at all this week. Back to the basement rides for now…

2021 Week 16

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Sat, 17 Apr 2021 17:35:14 -0600

I’d always intended for these posts to be part of some kind of reflective practice, but they’re basically just “holy crap we have a lot of stuff going on” snapshots. Maybe that’s part of it. Anyway.

⚙️ Work

I was interviewed by Katie Deighton, for an article on online exam proctoring in the Wall Street Journal’s Experience Report. I’ve been very-occasionally interviewed by journalists, mostly for technology-related topics.

🤔 PhD

This week, I’ve been focussing on playing with transcript data. I set it up as fancy DIY wallpaper in my home office and did a few passes through it to try to identify themes. After a prompt from Paul, I realized I’m basically just LARPing NVivo. So I brought the transcripts into NVivo 12 and started coding them there. Files and Cases and Nodes galore. The interface is awkward as hell. So. Many. Clicks. But it’s working nicely… The command-slash shortcut speeds it up a bit.

📚 Reading

Pat Thomson: writing a journal article – identifying “the two paper problem”.

Friesen, S., & Jacobsen, M. (2021). Collaborative Design of Professional Graduate Programs in Education. International Journal of Designs for Learning, 12(1), 64–76. https://doi.org/10.14434/ijdl.v12i1.25778

Phelps, A. M., Egert, C. A., & Consalvo, M. (2021). Hack, Slash & Backstab: A Post-Mortem of University Game Development at Scale. International Journal of Designs for Learning, 12(1), 16–33. https://doi.org/10.14434/ijdl.v12i1.31263

Lo, A. W., Stevens, B., & Willems, S. (2021). World of EdCraft: Challenges and Opportunities in Synchronous Online Teaching. Available at SSRN 3793342. (via Campus Technology)

It’s odd, seeing folks from a “financial engineering” lab and a college of business talk about evolution and learning and attention… Still, some interesting bits in the paper.

Heather Farmer, in EDUCAUSE Review: 6 Models for Blended Synchronous and Asynchronous Online Course Delivery

Mabel Ho, on Dalhousie’s Focus on University Teaching & Learning blog:From Face-to-Face Instruction to Online Teaching: Practical Considerations for Synchronous and Asynchronous Teaching and Learning - discussing Daniel Sanford’s immediacy vs. bandwidth matrix:

Nick Baker, University of Windsor Teaching Online: Overview of Course Delivery Modes. Adapted from Iowa State University’s Course Delivery Modes.

🧺 Other

The Boy™'s high school is shifting to remote learning again. For the third(?) time? Transitions between on-campus and remote learning are brutal.

UCalgary’s Cumming School of Medicine Centre for Health Informatics has been doing some amazing work with visualizing COVID data for Alberta. They’re also doing work with sewage sampling, detecing COVID RNA in wastewater.

On the plus side, it’s almost nice enough to be working out on the deck instead of being cooped up in the home office…

And I got out for the longest ride in almost 5 years, thanks to John and Paul.

🗓️ Focus for next week

Meetings. Penultimate immunotherapy maintenance treatment. Meetings.

2021 Week 15

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Sat, 10 Apr 2021 12:48:27 -0600

⚙️ 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:

it makes online teaching and learning visible in ways that rise above just the technology chosen, and
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…

I had the opportunity to take a course with her on Information Visualization, and it was amazing. ↩︎

2021 Week 14

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Sat, 03 Apr 2021 09:36:23 -0600

⚙️ Work

We’ve got a bunch of learning technologies workshops scheduled for April. (Destiny1 apparently doesn’t like direct linking to months…)

And the next round of workshops in the Blended and Online Workshop Series is coming up. Register early, register often.

I was interviewed (via email) by Katie Deighton for The Experience Report at the WSJ, for an article on online exam proctoring. Wherein your humble protagonist tries to a) say the important things that need to be said out loud about online exam proctoring software and b) not get fired in the process. The article should come out in the next couple of weeks.

🤔 PhD

hah. I’m thinking through some ideas, but haven’t typed anything up for the dissertation for weeks now. yikes.

📚 Reading

Eva Dobler, Jennie Ferris, & Carolyn Samuel, in Teaching for Learning @ McGill University: A Year Since Lockdown: From Pedagogical Solitude to Community Conversations – Teaching for Learning @ McGill University.

Derek Newton, in Forbes: The Worst Of Times For Online Education.

People aren’t loving online learning - but the risk is that online learning is being conflated with remote teaching. We’re still, a year into the pandemic, largely conducting remote teaching - salvaging conventionally on-campus courses by moving lectures to Zoom and quizzes to the LMS. But that’s really really different from a course that’s designed from the ground up to be facilitated online.)

Stephanie Hogan, in CBC News Health: This is your brain on pandemic: What chronic stress is doing to us | CBC News.

Audrey Watters: An Update. Unplugging, offlining, meditating, and trying to focus on self-care. Sounds like a great plan to me.

🧺 Other

I’ve been making a real effort both to be more active and to get into better shape. I’m using Strava as my personal fitness hub, and that’s basically the only social media I use now. According to Strava’s magical algorithm, I’m in the best shape in 5 years? Actually, that’s probably right. I’m still recovering from cancer and chemo, so anything’s an improvement.

And I got out for a decent ride out to Cochrane and back through Bearspaw.

The Province of Alberta released info about their new K12 curriculum. It is bad. It intentionally undoes significant progress made in several areas, including erasing our history of residential schools and further marginalizing indigenous communities. It sets the province back decades. But at least it teaches Grandpa Kenney’s legacy of the Big Band era, for some goddamned reason.

The UCP is, again, actively harming our province to push their goddamned stupid regressive ideology. They burn $billions chasing failed pipelines and trying to reject climate science. They tear up contracts with doctors during a pandemic and then negotiate in bad faith and wonder why doctors reject their proposal. And their response to everything is various versions of “FEDERAL GOVERNMENT BAD! OIL GOOD! TAXES BAD!” It’s exhausting.

Speaking of which, it looks like the provincial salary freeze for managers in post-secondary education will be extended through 2022-2023. While $30M per year is used to fund their literal Ministry of Propaganda. Thankfully, there hasn’t been any inflation since 2015. Not complaining. I still have a job.

Speaking of which, MRU is apparently starting an LMS renewal process. I think they might be the only post-secondary in the city that’s not currently using Brightspace… And Rundle College is looking for a Director of Education Technology.

Anyway. I think I need a couple weeks off.

2021 Week 13

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Sat, 27 Mar 2021 12:05:11 -0600

⚙️ Work

I think I may need to stop having a “work” section for these. So much of the work recently has been fundamentally unbloggable and would cause some pretty big issues if I even hinted obliquely at stuff. Which is an oblique hint to say that there’s a lot of stuff going on, but that I won’t talk about it on the internet for a number of reasons.

I’m still, a year into remote work, trying to figure out the best microphone setup for Zoom calls. I’d been using an Audiotechnica lav mic, which sounded pretty good but was fussy - I had to make sure I was wearing the mic, that the power was on, and then remembering to turn it off afterward and - more importantly - to remove it before walking away from my desk. I’d tried a Snowball mic, but just didn’t like it, and it took too much desk space. So, I’m back to using my el cheapo USB condenser Yeti-knockoff mic, mounted on an el cheapo boom stand. It seems to work well enough, but I need to be pretty close to the mic for it to pick up proper levels, which means part of the mic is visible on camera. Which is kind of dumb.

🤔 PhD

Wound up taking a bit of a break from working on the dissertation. PhD Friday™ turned into a ski day. Worth it.

📚 Reading

Stephen Downes, in Half an Hour: Change In Education And What Needs To Be Done.

Derek Newton, in Forbes: Two 30 Year Veterans Discuss The Education Technology Market

Pat Thomson: a very neat hack to avoid repetition and duplication (tldr; a word cloud can show overused words/phrases)

Royce Kimmons & George Velatsianos, in EDUCAUSE Review: Proctoring Software in Higher Ed: Prevalence and Patterns “How common is the use of remote proctoring among North American colleges and universities? Should the higher education community be concerned?" (we don’t use a proctoring tool, and have no plans to adopt one)

Obringer et al. The overlooked environmental footprint of increasing Internet use - HD videoconferencing has a pretty big environmental cost…

Tony Bates: Teaching during a pandemic: a longitudinal study, which points to…

Johnson, N., Seaman, J. and Veletsianos, G. (2021) Teaching during a pandemic: Spring Transition, Fall Continuation, Winter Evaluation. Bay View Analytics: Oakland CA, March 22, pp. 53

Stephen Downes talks about an article by Tom Kuhlmann, on live closed captioning being baked into Chrome. Stephen thinks other browsers should include closed captioning as well. But I think that’s too limiting. Remember the rise of desktop publishing apps back in the 80s, when every application implemented their own printer drivers? Yeah. This is like that. If closed captions (and transcriptions) is important (and it is) it should be baked into the operating system so that all applications can use it. (and then, yes, each operating system needs to build it. but that’s simpler than every browser and every application having to knit it in separately)

So. That’s 2 articles from Velatsianos and another 2 from Downes. They’re both doing great work.

🧺 Other

It’s the start of spring break for Evan, so we headed out to Nakiska for some spring skiing. I’m definitely feeling old and slow, but it was a great day. Maybe the last one of the season?

🗓️ Focus for next week

Yeah. Likely going to drop this section, too.

2021 Week 12

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Sat, 20 Mar 2021 13:14:41 -0600

March 18, 2020. It’s now been a year since shifting to work remotely due to the pandemic.

It’s been 2 years since I started chemo on March 19, 2019. So, in the last 24 months, I’ve spent 17 of them in isolation at home.

It was also 3 years ago, March 19, 2018, that I took a trip to Arizona to hang out with amigos after getting the diagnosis.

I guess this has historically been a big week for me over the last few years…

And, hey. The Province of Alberta says it’s time to move back to campus for the fall semester. The university is planning for a few scenarios.

🤔 PhD

I submitted a paper to RO-MAN 2021. And continued work refactoring the dissertation.

📚 Reading

The future learning environment, pedagogical and technological perspectives - a collection of articles, edited by Simon K. S. Cheung, Lam For Kwok, Kongkiti Phusavat and Harrison Hao Yang.

Cheung, S.K.S., Kwok, L.F., Phusavat, K. et al. Shaping the future learning environments with smart elements: challenges and opportunities. Int J Educ Technol High Educ 18, 16 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-021-00254-1

Taylor, K.L., Kenny, N.A., Perrault, E. & Mueller, R.A. (2021) Building integrated networks to develop teaching and learning: the critical role of hubs, International Journal for Academic Development, DOI: 10.1080/1360144X.2021.1899931

Steven Mintz, in Inside Higher Ed: Reimagining the LMS.

🧺 Other

I got out on the bike on the first day of spring!

🗓️ Focus for next week

Lots of HR stuff - annual reviews, and continuing on the hiring process for the new Learning Technologies Specialist position.

2021 Week 11

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Sat, 13 Mar 2021 10:09:42 -0700

⚙️ Work

We’re looking for a new CIO again. I think that’s 7 CIOs I’ve worked with so far.

🤔 PhD

I spent some time refactoring the whole dissertation. Collapsing chapters. Scrapping chapters. Expanding chapters. The new outline feels good. I need to let it steep for a bit more, but it feels like progress.

📚 Reading

Scholz, K. W., Komornicka, J. N., & Moore, A. (2021). Gamifying History: Designing and Implementing a Game-Based Learning Course Design Framework. Teaching & Learning Inquiry, 9(1), 99–116. https://doi.org/10.20343/9.1.9

Janik, J. (2020). Negotiating Textures of Digital Play: Gameplay and the Production of Space. Game Studies, 20(4). http://gamestudies.org/2004/articles/janik

Mary Grush interviews Gardner Campbell in Campus Technology: Augmenting the Learning Dialogue Online: A Q&A with Gardner Campbell

A Jisc survey of 27,069 students on their experiences and feedback on digital learning in higher education (via Stephen Downes)

Gardner Campbell, on his media production workflow. It’s not just “record zoom and be done with it”. He reviews and edits. He treats Zoom recordings as “dailies” that are source material rather than as the final product. This is a much richer and deeper and human process than just clicking Record and moving on.

Lee Skallerup Bessette - Stop Ignoring Microaggressions Against Your Staff (it’s paywalled though. our campus VPN lets me in) - on small ways that institutions can marginalize the role and contributions of staff. I think our university does a LOT of things really well in this regard, but I need to step back and think about this some more.

Gatlin, A., Kuhn, W., Boyd, D., Doukopoulos, L., & McCall, C. (2021). Successful at Scale: 500 Faculty, 39 Classrooms, 6 Years: A Case Study. Journal of Learning Spaces, 10(1). Retrieved from http://libjournal.uncg.edu/jls/article/view/2032 - we’ll be discussing this paper at the Learning Technologies and Design Team meeting next week.

🧺 Other

I’ve been using NetNewsWire for my RSS reader for awhile now, and it’s really great. But the latest build includes iCloud syncing, making it even greater.

And I’ve been trying the Edge browser for awhile, but haven’t been able to keep it as the default browser until now. A Chrome-based browser without any Google-fu? (Yes, I’ve tried Brave, but it’s not quite there yet)

🗓️ Focus for next week

Kicking off the hiring committee for the Learning Technologies Specialist position. That’s going to be a major focus for the next month or so.

2021 Week 10

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Sat, 06 Mar 2021 10:30:00 -0700

⚙️ Work

Brightspace quizzes and “no backsies”

Lots of work over the last week to put together resources about setting up quizzes in Brightspace. Turns out, instructors were trying to prevent cheating by turning off the ability to “go back” in quizzes. Some students had been doing speed-runs of quizzes, sharing the questions in Discord, and then going back to take the quiz. And other hijinks. So some instructors disabled “go back” in quizzes. Except that’s not an awesome experience for the 99.9% of students who weren’t cheating. Anyway, this is a side effect of our decision to not offer online exam proctoring - some instructors come up with DIY solutions that have unintended consequences.

🤔 PhD

Hah! Oh, man. I think I’m in trouble, timeline-wise. I mean, not in trouble, but it’s now March and I’ve only written a few pages of the dissertation so far in 2021. At this rate, I’ll retire before finishing the damned thing…

📚 Reading

Alex Usher: The Alberta Budget - HESA

Q: Is it over yet?

A: Nope.

Tom Woodward: VCU: The Long Goodbye (Patterned but not Standard) – Bionic Teaching - especially the Continuum of Complexity diagram…

McSweeny’s Internet Tendency: Okay, Let Me Just Share My Screen… Ah, Nope. Okay, You’re Looking At My Savings Account Now. That Is Not Good. - McSweeney’s Internet Tendency

🧺 Other

There’s a massive COVID outbreak at The Boy™'s school, so he’s back to school-from-home for 14 days. Heading out to get him swabbed for a COVID test now… Awesome. Can’t freaking wait until the vaccines get here. Apparently, a bunch of kids had a big party during a pandemic for some damned reason.

But. We’re in false spring now, so J and I have been heading outside for longer walks again.

🗓️ Focus for next week

Prepping the committee and process, and preliminary scheduling for the LTS:PI position.
World’s Challenge Challenge prep and final presentation. Looking forward to seeing how the group’s presentation has been refined.

2021 Week 9

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Sat, 27 Feb 2021 11:50:00 -0700

⚙️ Work

Queering Zoom, and preferred names and pronouns

Paul Pival has a great post on the need for being able to modify displayed names and pronouns in Zoom.

This goes beyond Zoom, of course, but is especially noticeable in the virtual classroom videoconferencing platform that displays a name card over each person’s video or avatar image, and in the Participants list. We’d initially set it so that anyone could change their names in Zoom at any time. Because that’s a thing that should be possible because we’re all grown-ups and why on earth wouldn’t we leave that setting enabled? ¹

And then we got a bunch of reports of misconduct and harassment because people were changing their names to something crappy to “have fun” in class. Or changing their name to their instructor’s name or other students' names and then posting “hilarious” garbage into the chat, resulting in panicked people thinking their accounts had been hacked.

So, we had to turn off the ability for people to change their Zoom names. Which means the names come from our campus authentication platform. Which means staff and students have different abilities to change their names. Students can change their names within our Student Centre portal. Staff currently have no way to change their name within Peoplesoft, so they get to open a ticket with IT to have it manually changed. And that may get pushed into other platforms, each of which handle names differently. Which is a crappy user experience for everyone.

Unless you don’t login via campus single sign-on and use your own Zoom basic account, because then you can still change your name to whatever.

There was a huge IT project under way, to develop a process to properly manage preferred names for everyone across all campus platforms. It got deferred due to budget cuts.

Provincial budget announced

Province of Alberta: “a modest decrease” in Advanced Education (on top of several years of “modest decreases” and more projected to come…)

President McCauley’s note to campus:

Yesterday, the Government of Alberta tabled its 2021-22 budget which includes a $25.0m reduction to the University of Calgary’s operating budget (-6%) and an increase of $8.6m to infrastructure maintenance funding. Since 2019, UCalgary’s operating budget has been reduced 18%, forcing difficult decisions by the campus community.

CBC News: Alberta budget puts off reckoning, and big personal impacts, to another day

Where “no big personal impacts” means “continued deep cuts to post-secondary education”…

Funding for post-secondaries will fall over the next three years and a portion of base funding will be allocated based on performance metrics outlined by the government. Government officials said Thursday those metrics could be released in the near future. Missing targets means less money for a particular school.

and

The government plans to cut its spending on wages by about $800 million this coming year through negotiated settlements, attrition and eliminating jobs.

The biggest impact will be in post-secondaries, where 750 full-time positions are expected to be cut in 2021.

The government said it could not answer questions on the types of positions to be axed or where the jobs losses would occur.

Calgary Herald: Budget 2021: Post-secondary sees further cuts, 750 job losses

“For a government keen on supposed jobs creation, they’re certainly good at getting rid of them,” Finley said.

Live video, from the provincial Budget War Room™…

🤔 PhD

Revised a paper for submission to an IEEE conference, adding more photos to make it more clearly robot-y. Now to shift gears back into dissertation mode for a bit…

🧺 Other

I finally picked up a new whiteboard and mounted it on the wall in my home office.

And, thanks to Jason Kottke’s link, I’ve been playing these as background noise while working. I mean, it’s looking like I’m never going to have a mountain fortress of solitude, but this helps.

I’ve also been listening to George Stroumboulopoulos' STROMBO radio show on Apple Music. Sure, it’s a bit pop-y, but it makes for good background music and talk while working. The way Apple Music handles episodes and back catalogs of its shows is pretty dumb, though.

🗓️ Focus for next week

Preparing the process and hiring committee for the new Learning Technologies Specialist - Program Innovation position.
Campus online learning platforms - several meetings to talk about Top Hat, Zoom, Brightspace, and third party tools.
Mentoring a group of amazing students as they prepare to represent UCalgary in the World’s Challenge Challenge.

When we launch a campus learning technology, I always start with it configured as openly as possible, so that people can do the things they need to without intervention. This almost always eventually blows up in my face once people actually start using it and find creative ways to be crappy to each other. But I refuse to start by locking things down Just In Case™. ↩︎

2021 Week 8

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Sat, 20 Feb 2021 12:00:00 -0700

⚙️ 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

2021 Week 7

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Sat, 13 Feb 2021 08:34:51 -0700

⚙️ Work

Participating in the campus “congress” engagement sessions. Interesting…

I’m still trying to track down the cause of Zoom screensharing sometimes just being black boxes on my macbook pro. Zoom support thinks it might have to do with UDP vs. TCP connections, so I’ve switched to the TCP screensharing for now. The problem has been intermittent, so maybe it worked? Who knows. I’d bet that the issue isn’t related to TCP/UDP, but has something to do with the dual GPUs in this laptop and automatic switching freaking Zoom out somehow.

I’m starting to think this whole COVID thing might not blow over right away. Maybe I should do something about the home office - I’ve been staring at a wall for almost a year now…

🤔 PhD

Gah. So far, I’ve had approximately zero productive hours this week… I’m debating pulling the plug on the paper I’m working on for submission, and just using it in my dissertation instead. It’s a sole-author paper (so far), so no issues there…

I really really need to get back into a cadence of writing, rather than this burst/pause pattern I’m in now. Maybe a first draft in five minutes a day? | patter

PhD Friday™ this week turned into mostly a work day. Trying to get some writing done over the weekend as well. update: I managed to write 4 pages (so far) on saturday. Progress!

📚 Reading

All of the corona virus on earth would fit inside a coke can. That’s just mind-boggling.
I have no mind’s eye: let me try to describe it for you | Psyche Ideas (via Stephen Downes). I had no idea that aphantasia was a thing. I mean. People can literally see things? That sounds exhausting.
MetaHuman Creator - digital human actors in Unreal Engine (via BoingBoing). Amazing.
Pandemic privatization and digitalization in higher education | code acts in education
The Benefits of Captured Lectures and Lessons in Traditional Classrooms - YuJa Official Home Page - they pull out the “your brain processes visual information 60,000 times faster than text!” bullshit. I mean. Text is visual information. And [citation (still) needed]. Alan’s still looking for the origins of that one…

2021 Week 6

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Sat, 06 Feb 2021 10:12:35 -0700

⚙️ Work

Getting ready to enable “live transcripts” in our campus zoom environment, going live during reading week later this month.

The profile for our new Learning Technologies Specialist - Program Innovation position is under final review by HR. I’ll get to post that ASAP, likely early next week. Looking forward to the hiring process and growing the team.

Some details of the new Program Innovation Hub initiative are outlined in the president’s Congress website. I’ve been working on some strategic planning projects, and I’m guessing things are going to change substantially as the president’s campus engagement ramps up and our new provost starts. Probably best to pause some of this planning and refocus on participating in these engagement activities…

🤔 PhD

I have a draft of a paper that I’ll be submitting to an IEEE conference later this month. It grew from “hey - you have a draft of a paper ready, just tweak it and submit it” to “hey, this paper needs to be completely rewritten for the new venue”. Which means pausing work on the dissertation for a bit because I only have so many productive hours to go around. And I should hear back on the CHI-LBW paper in a couple of weeks. Gulp.

📚 Reading

Correia, A. P., Liu, C., & Xu, F. (2020). Evaluating videoconferencing systems for the quality of the educational experience. Distance Education, 41(4), 429-452.¹

Zhu, M., & Basdogan, M. (2021). Examining Social Learning in an Active Learning Classroom through Pedagogy-Space-Technology Framework. Journal of Learning Spaces, 10(1). Retrieved from http://libjournal.uncg.edu/jls/article/view/2025

Ling, C., Balcı, U., Blackburn, J., & Stringhini, G. (2020). A first look at zoombombing. arXiv preprint arXiv:2009.03822.²

from Ling et al:

Our findings indicate that the vast majority of calls for zoombombing are not made by attackers stumbling upon meeting invitations or bruteforcing their meeting ID, but rather by insiders who have legitimate access to these meetings, particularly students in high school and college classes. This has important security implications, because it makes common protections against zoombombing, such as password protection, ineffective. We also find instances of insiders instructing attackers to adopt the names of legitimate participants in the class to avoid detection, making countermeasures like setting up a waiting room and vetting participants less effective.

Yup. Exactly in line with what we have been seeing as well. Sure, there were a handful of legitimate external Zoombombing incidents (maybe a couple dozen meetings with real zoombombing, out of 743,469 meetings³ hosted in our campus Zoom environment over the last 12 months - and most of those were people invited into the session by students who are in the class), but almost all reported incidents were actually just students being shitty to each other and to their instructors for laughs. And no password would prevent that. We could have locked the platform down so far that it would have been essentially a lecture-only tool, which wouldn’t have been useful for anyone. And by treating people as adults and expecting them to treat each other well, some folks will take advantage of that to salve their boredom or frustration or whatnot.

“But just disable anonymous access!”

We can’t. There are valid reasons for allowing people to join without having to authenticate, so we get to continue this fun little dance.

For kicks, I checked my O365 calendar. In 2020 (well, the online portion… March-December 2020), I was in:

554 Zoom meetings
161 Microsoft Teams meetings
8 WebEx meetings

and probably a bunch of other ad hoc meetings that weren’t set up in the calendar.

That’s a lot of people in little pixellated boxes squished into a screen.

🧺 Other

The Boy™ was accepted to his first choice program at SAIT! He’ll be starting the Information Technologies diploma program in the fall. He’ll be amazing at it.

Season 5 of The Expanse. Wow. Wow. I mean. wow.

World Cancer Day. I’m kind of anti-cancer, myself…

We had some morning visitors - 8 young deer checking out the ravine behind our house.

and… it’s coming⁴…

Jason Kottke linked to Life Lessons From 100-Year Olds. I’ve been thinking a lot about aging this year, after the shitty last few years my parents have had.

🗓️ Focus for next week

Hopefully posting for the LTS:PI position. At least, setting up the hiring committee and designing the interview protocol.
Working with my team to start planning how we’ll coordinate participating in the president’s campus engagement process.

via Tony Bates ↩︎
via Ars Technica ↩︎
I just checked our Zoom Dashboard for the campus environment. That’s the legit number of meetings hosted within our campus account over the last 12 months. Mind boggling. ↩︎
no weather-tweets, so this is for Alan… ↩︎