Still figuring things out

⚙️ Work Students set up a protest on campus, expressing concerns about genocide and apartheid in Palestine. I walked around the protest area Thursday afternoon, and everyone seemed to be respectful, orderly, and engaged in activism.1 DISRUPT SOMETHING. NOT LIKE THAT! YOU’RE DISRUPTING IN AN UNAUTHORIZED MANNER! A few hours after I took that photo, the protestors were forcibly removed by police. They came back the next day, without tents. I note that our Premier said: “I’m glad the University of Calgary made the decision that they did....

I finally, after almost a month off the bike, got back on the fancy indoor bike for an easy-ish ride. I’m hoping my excuses to not ride get less valid, and I’ll be able to get outside on my real bike soon. My cardio is about the worst it’s ever been. I’m in horrible physical shape, and it’s affecting my general wellness. ⚙️ Work Our D2L reps came to campus for a visit with our team, to help plan ways to improve the experience for instructors and students....

⚙️ Work Still sick. Not wanting to be “that guy that keeps coughing and blowing his nose in the office”, I took some sick time and worked from home. I’m not contagious anymore, and need to be in the office next week. Hopefully my respiratory system cooperates. While preparing for our conference presentation, we collected some links to a couple of videos to support the description of the course. Jana (one of the students in the course) had published one of her video game demos as a video on YouTube - it’s a remarkable example of using video games to foster reflection on architecture, experience, and teaching & learning....

⚙️ Work Meetings. Finance. GFC TLC. Learning Technologies & Design Team meeting - the focus was a “listening tour” by Natasha and Sue to visit with the team to learn about what we’re working on, what’s working, what could be improved, etc. It was a really good discussion, and I’m honoured to be part of such a passionate, engaged, and creative team. The April Learning Technology Advisory Committee went pretty well....

I (finally) got outside on an actual bike ride, just straight out to Cochrane and back on 1A. That felt great, but sssssslllllooooowwwww. And an hour in zone 5 is probably not ideal. My VO2Max is still “below average” so I’m aspiring to make it up to average this year. ⚙️ Work Tyson led a great discussion in the Learning Technology Forum, gathering questions from instructors and staff about their use of edtech....

⚙️ Work A vendor came to campus to offer sessions for instructors and staff on how to use their product. The product has changed pretty significantly from when we adopted it several years ago, and we’ll need to figure out if those changes are things that we as a community care about. Otherwise, they’ll become the de facto platform for that other stuff, short-circuiting a lot of strategic planning that’s already in progress....

Hugo is the static site generating content management system that I use to publish this website. It works really well, and has some deep functionality that I’m not even touching. For instance, it can parse data files while generating the site - including JSON and XML - and can use the content of those files to display information on web pages. I was going to follow some recipes that I found online, but they involved converting the OPML file into JSON to be read by Hugo....

My theme song this week: ⚙️ Work Completed annual performance review discussions with all Learning Technologies Group staff. What an absolutely incredible team - and what an honour to have the opportunity to work with them all. Planning a potential on-site visit with our D2L representatives. Preparing a conference presentation about the architecture course from F2023. 📚 Reading Kurt Vonnegut: Harrison Bergeron (newly typset by John Gruber). “The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal....

⚙️ Work In the D2L Steering Committee, we planned a transition of authentication systems from the deprecated CAS to the new standard Entra ID for this summer. It should work better and more reliably, but we’ll lose the ability to allow prospective students (who login using eIDs, which are not supported in Entra ID) into D2L courses. I decided to stop tracking license renewals for campus platforms. I’m not responsible for them, don’t own the contracts, don’t have signing authority, and haven’t been successful in helping to nudge people to get renewals done before it becomes a last-minute panic....

⚙️ Work From the “do stuff until someone says no” school, I took a shot at rewriting big chunks of the draft genAI operating standard document, including renaming it. I think it’s better, and will be more useful to our community. I wonder how many of my edits will survive to the final version of the document… I mean… If I get edit privileges on a document, I should contribute as fully as possible1....