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Want to work at the Teaching & Learning Centre? We’re hiring. It’s a tenure track position, working on coordinating our major teaching workshops.

photo by small ape

I didn’t think Calgary was ready for this, but apparently I was wrong. Thanks to an email from Sami, I see that the first ever BarCamp Calgary is scheduled to take place on May 26, 2007, at the University of Calgary main campus. This is a type of event I’ve REALLY wanted to have here in Calgary, and it’s great to see there are a whole bunch of people interested in making it happen. Looking at the list of Campers on the event page, I only recognize a couple of the names. Maybe the Calgary blogosphere is more robust than Ive been guessing?

I’m unsure if I’ll be able to attend (between family work schedules involving Saturdays, and Evan’s soccer games) but I’ll try to at least drop in to see what’s going on.

Very cool stuff.

There’s also a DemoCamp planned as well - TONIGHT, no less. I’m less sure about how cool/uncool that event might be - sounds like a Vendor Fair mixed with The Gong Show… I won’t be able to check this one out, but hopefully someone blogs it.

It’s great to see this kind of unconference stuff starting to happen in Cowtown. Maybe there’s hope for this burg yet…

In a recent project meeting, we were tossing around ideas for workshops to conduct in 2007, and I've taken on a series of topics that could be loosely described as "new tools and strategies". Here's the current short list of workshops I'm planning to develop (and later conduct) through the TLC. Any glaring omissions?

• Creative Commons (copyright and IP in general, and how they affect sharing and reusing available work)
• Flickr. As a source of Creative Commons images for use, and as a potential tool for teaching and learning.
• Google Earth. Basic overview, as well as an intro to some of the cool add-ons (geology, politics, etc…)
• eXe - eLearning XML editor (for ePortfolios or personal websites)
• WordPress.com (setting up a blog for free in seconds)
• weblogs.ucalgary.ca (participating in the blog community on campus)
• Drupal for websites and communities
• Moodle (? this might be counterproductive, given Bb's role on our campus…)
• Social bookmarking (del.icio.us for distributed tagging of resources)
• Google Docs

I've left off a couple of items on purpose because I want to be doing things that aren't already running in full hype mode (podcasting and secondlife are fine on their own). I'm hoping to be showing stuff that might be flying under the radar (at least to most faculty on campus - many of the items on my list are completely taken for granted by tech types)

Last month, while on vacation at a lakeside cabin in BC, I received an email asking permission to use one of my photos on Flickr for a magazine cover. “uh, sure? it’s creative commons, so have at ‘er. Can I have a copy?”

I got my copy today. Is that ever cool. It’s for a petroleum industry magazine “The Negotiator” (sounds like a movie starring Clive Owen or the like), and lo and behold, right on the front cover, is my photograph:

It’s not the first time one of my photos has been used in something like that - I’ve got one in the GifTRAP game, and one in a book about colours and shapes, but it’s still pretty cool to see one of my photos on a magazine cover!

We just launched the new website for the Teaching & Learning Centre at The University of Calgary. It’s been a long time in the making, with heavy use of themes, custom CCK content types, events, signups, views, and a bunch of other Drupal modules and tricks. King worked his usual magic in putting together the CSS for our theme, which uses the same HTML templates as the official www.ucalgary.ca site.

The new site should make it much easier for us to keep content up to date. We’re also planning some potentially cool community features for down the road a bit, once the dust starts to settle after The Big Website Launch.

Also, it’s currently running on our aging PowerMac Quicksilver dual 1GHz G4 server, so is a bit slower than it should be. We’ll be moving it to a shiny new-ish XServe ASAP.

TLC Website in Drupal

I went to the Nickel Arts Museum on campus during lunch today, to explore the Ancient Peru Unearthed exhibit. It's a collection of the first archaologically recovered artifacts from northern Peru, from the Sic�n era 900-1300 AD.

It's a pretty cool story. Until this find, all previous artifacts from northern Peru were recovered through looting. Amateurs with shovels or even bulldozers. No concern for archaelological preservation or documentation. But, the groundwater level in the area was high enough to protect the tomb of the Sic�n Lord as looters couldn't get past the groundwater. In the early '90s, the water level dropped low enough to allow excavation, and the team went to work properly documenting and carefully extracting a ton and a half of artifacts.

Because these artifacts are from the Sic�n Lord, they are chock full of gold. And not just gold leaf, but actual sheet metal, uniformly 0.6mm thick and amazingly crafted.

The mask (pictured to the right) was found on the skull of the Sic�n Lord. It's probably 6 feet tall, crafted with the gold sheet metal and encrusted with jewels. The curve of gold holding the "feathers" is a solid sheet band, 2 metres in length. The face has been shaped and detailed without tearing or creasing the gold sheet. The workmanship is amazing.

It's too bad I wasn't allowed to take pictures. There is a strict "No Photography Allowed" policy clearly posted all over the place. I'd brought my camera, but it stayed in the case for the duration. So, I sprung for the postcard (scanned above) and a poster.

Also, it's so cool to be able to drop by the on-campus museum. In my almost 20 years (!) on campus, this was my first time. The museum isn't optimal (but I've been rather spoiled) but when the new Campus Calgary Digital Library building opens, they'll be moving into new space (along with the TLC, Library, some of IT, etc…) Regardless - it's a great exhibit, well worth the price of admission. I'll go back again before it leaves town.

The UCalgary Flickr Group has really taken to the new Flickr Geotagging feature in a big way. The almost-30 group members have tagged 154 photos of campus already, providing a pretty impressive coverage of the major areas of campus.

UCalgary Flickr Group Geotags

I've been spending the morning doing mind-numbing copy-and-pastery, so I'm going to grab the camera and try to fill in some gaps. I might hit the Olympic Oval, or even as far west as the new Children's Hospital. (the brown spot on the left side of the map above is now the most advanced children's hospital in north america - opened on Wednesday)

I went for a quick walk around campus at lunch, and dragged along the camera to get some shots of the leaves turning colour. Sometimes this campus can be really beautiful. We may not have a rose garden or a nude beach (or any other kind of beach) but it’s pretty nice sometimes.

Apparently, I’m on a quest to become the unofficial UCalgary photographer…

iUofC.com is a community forum site created by students at UCalgary, offering a central off-campus student-managed place for students to share information about classes. It's currently a rather empty shell, with forums created for every class. As students find out about it, it's starting to slowly grow.

iUfoC.com Screenshot

The thing that blows me away about this "web *.0" stuff is that students are willing to take on large scale efforts completely on their own. Set up an open wiki, and students create tons of pages about what's important to them. Open up a forum system, and they fill it with topics important to them. If these tools had been provided by The University, would students be interested? It's awesome that the students don't need to wait for The University - they can come up with solutions as effective (or moreso) on their own. Power to the people. Right on.

I had the pleasure of attending a presentation/workshop by Craig E. Nelson this morning. The Teaching & Learning Centre hosted the event, which brought faculty members from the various sides of campus together to discuss critical thinking and implications on pedagogy.

It was a really interesting session, with Craig telling stories and modelling effective use of the strategies and activities he was talking about (and getting us to talk about). My takeaway points from the session:

1. there are no broken students, only broken pedagogies
2. successful students are the ones who can adapt to repair broken pedagogies for themselves (spontanously forming study groups, connections, etc…)
3. “shut up and allow for processing time” - give students a chance to move stuff from short-term to long-term memory. simple 2 minute pauses and asking questions may be enough to start this.
4. “bulemic learning” - binge/purge of stuff, leading to mental starvation
5. an educator’s job is to educate students, not sort/filter them. The goal is not to enforce the bell curve, it is to maximize grade inflation through effective teaching and learning.

I was there (primarily) to take photographs. I’ve been wanting to record the activities of the TLC for awhile now, and finally just started doing something about it. This was the first “real” event I’ve photographed, so I’m sure I was doing many things awkwardly. But, the end result is something I’m at least not disappointed in. I learned some things:

• for an indoor event, get a long, fast lens. the kit lens won’t cut it. I used the zoom lens from our old D30 on my XT body, with ISO cranked up to 1600. Even at that, the aperture was too small to get decent shots. Fast, long lens is required. Something like this one would do nicely.
• get a big CF card. Or two. Or three. I was using my 1GB card, so left it in JPEG/fine mode. It would have been better to be shooting in RAW so I could adjust white balance properly later. I was afraid of filling up the card too soon, so reverted to JPEG.
• plan shots ahead of time. I was able to get some of the “best” shots by picturing in my head where Craig would have to be standing/looking, and where I’d have to be, in order to take advantage of (or reduce the effect of) background items in the room. It didn’t always work out, but thinking ahead would help reduce background distractions like the overhead projector…
• try not to distract. I found I was being extremely self conscious of the shutter noise, afraid I was distracting the other participants, or affecting the audio being recorded for the session. I refused to use the flash, because I didn’t want the paparazzi effect. Work to find the happy medium between getting the shot and not being noticed.
• I overplanned. I brought in my monopod (which broke on the way in this morning. crap.) I brought 2 batteries. I brought the extra lens from the office’s D30, as well as my XT’s kit lens. I brought lens cleaning cloth and brush. I brought battery charger. I brought vertical grip. I ended up not using the monopod, nor the vertical grip. But they were there just in case.

I wound up taking almost a hundred photos. Many were unusable due to the slow lens producing blurry or excessively grainy images. The survivors are available in a Flickr album.

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