I’m an educational technology developer at the Teaching & Learning Centre, which is a service department at The University of Calgary. My current primary role lets me play with new technologies and work with faculty to implement tools for blended learning. I am/was a developer on the Pachyderm project. I also spend a fair amount of time thinking (and rethinking) about the concept of control and copyright, and how they might affect academia (What happens when a professor uses a wiki? a weblog? What would be the worst case scenario if someone that wasn’t a registered student in a class and session was able to access the online resources for that class?)

I’ve been doing stuff with “learning objects” (whatever they are) for about a decade now (holy cow! a decade? yikes…) and have been involved with the design and implementation of a couple of small custom commercial learning management systems.

In the last few years (since I joined the Learning Commons back in 2001), I have been involved with the creation of CAREO: Campus Alberta Repository of Educational Objects, where we basically experimented with a few concepts related to learning object publishing and sharing. We made a few wrong turns as well, and now we’re all trying to build parts of a next generation of digital asset sharing for teaching and learning, building on what we’ve learned so far. The new applications based on this learning include APOLLO and Pachyderm, which are designed to give individuals as much control as possible over how they use their content.

I have been weblogging since around May of 2001, and my current “main” weblog is darcynorman.net. I also help to run the weblogs.ucalgary.ca, ucalgaryblogs.ca, and wiki.ucalgary.ca initiatives, hoping to get students, faculty and staff to start using the internet as a read/write medium instead of a lame copy of broadcast media.

I live in Calgary, Alberta, Canada - a beautiful city near the rocky mountains. I’ve got an insanely active 5 year old at home, so I get to spend most of my non-geek time hanging out with him, and a wonderful and understanding wife who is thankfully technophobic, so I don’t have to talk shop at home