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I’ve been working on organizing a project I’ve called “Learning Communities” here at UCalgary. It’s still a bit amorphous, but that’s actually part of the plan. What I’m going to do is offer resources and support to any communities on campus so that they can effectively get together and share what they’re doing. I’ll facilitate meetings, find guest speakers, search for resources, organize presentations, or whatever else is needed for these communities to share the interesting things they’re doing (or want to be doing) on campus.

The project has been directly inspired by two existing projects that have been extremely successful. First, is Cole Camplese’s really amazing Community Hubs project at Penn State. The PSU ETS team has rolled out support for 13 communities that have been identified (so far) across the various PSU campuses. The communities share resources in both face-to-face sessions, and through the website created by ETS just for that community. Support and services are provided as needed. And, the activities culminate as sessions in the annual TLT Symposium conference at PSU. I haven’t been lucky enough to attend one of the Symposia, but from all accounts they sound like incredibly powerful events that solidify the physical and tangible sense of community, resulting in a highly effective professional development programme for PSU faculty and staff.

The other primary inspiration has been Jennifer Jones‘ work with Viral Professional Development at Bellingham Technical College. This is an equally inspiring project, where resources are provided and shared, and the professional development activities are really run by the faculty members themselves through a series of “play and learn” sessions. Instructors play with new tools, discuss pedagogy and techniques, and explore together in a safe environment before trying what they’ve learned in their own classes. By putting the faculty members themselves in the driver’s seats, Jen has been able to model and reinforce some amazingly powerful strategies – with a very strong pull from the grassroots levels of the institution.

So, how have these two radically different projects inspired what I’m trying to set up here at UCalgary? I really want to borrow heavily from the PSU model, where resources and support are offered to a wide variety of communities. I love that these communities are primarily face-to-face, and that the discussions are extended through websites provided by ETS. And the annual TLT Symposium is definitely something I’m going to try to get going here as well – taking the learning communities and providing them a showcase to gather and share not only with each other but with others who may be interested.

And, I want to take the grassroots and viral nature of Jen’s VPD work, and try to scale that across a fairly sizable campus. The most direct way I’m going to try this is by not predefining the communities. I’m going to handpick one or two just to get things going, but will work hard to make it easy for faculty members (and staff, and grad students, and possibly others) to identify, create, organize and join their own learning communities on any topic. And I’ll work hard to find resources to support all of these communities. Ideally, these communities will be about more than just technology – I’d love to see learning communities form around topics such as “large enrollment classes” and “storytelling” – with several technology-related topics also forming. I’m hoping to keep things extremely flexible, open, and organic, so there may be overlap between various communities (technologically and/or pedagogically).

Is it going to be successful? It’s way too early to tell. It could fly like a lead balloon. But, I think it’s important to try to put as much of an effort into providing effective professional development for our faculty as is possible, so it’s worth a shot.

There’s a big “Bike to Work Day” in Calgary on Friday, April 11. The University of Calgary is running a special event on campus as well. It’s pretty safe to say I’ll be biking to work that day (and every other day as well ) and am looking forward to seeing how many people get into it.

On campus, they’re going to set up greeting/refreshment stations (with prizes!) on all major entrances, and there’s a workshop being put on by the bike club at the Mac Hall loading dock to show basic bike maintenance.

I think I might even pack the camera as well. Should be fun! I’ve already ridden over 900km this year, on track to hit between 3500 and 4000km by the end of 2008.

Now, if there were more bike-friendly routes (i.e., fewer cycle-homicidal bus & SUV drivers) there might be more people willing to risk riding their bikes to work or school…

Michael Geist gave a talk at The University of Calgary on April 2, 2008, on the subject of copyright. He talked about the need for Fair Dealings, the dangers of the Canadian DMCA, and even touched on the benefits of open access and even open education.

Dr. Geist’s presentation was very compelling, interesting, and engaging. I believe he was able to communicate the benefits of less-restrictive copyright, and am hoping he helped plant some seeds to get an open content movement going here at The University of Calgary.

The video was recorded by Paul Pival, who used his very handy MacBook iSight Inverter Mirror to properly record the session without having to snap the lid off of his laptop. The sound was recorded by a microphone placed on the floor near the podium, so hopefully it didn’t turn out too badly. I thought it was interesting that an event like this wasn’t “officially” recorded, and it was trivially done by an attendee bringing a laptop to the session. The days of requiring enterprise support for event recording and broadcasting are over.

Scott threw a suggestion onto Twitter this morning that has been percolating for a few hours.

It just hit me. CANHEIT is here at UCalgary in June.

I can arrange meeting space here on campus. If anyone’s interested in a face-to-face Eduglu/Social:Learn/Web 2.0 in higher ed meetup, how does The University of Calgary in June 2008 sound? Maybe Thursday June 19th? Something during the conference proper? The week before or after? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

Update: After some gentle prodding from Scott, I realize that an incrementalist approach, which is what a CANHEIT session would be, is not sufficient. We need to kick out the jams in ways that wouldn’t be possible in the context of CANHEIT – even if the session was before or after the conference, it would be coloured by Commercial Enterprise IT agenda. Wrong.

I’m withdrawing my offer to host a CANHEIT session, in favour of a standalone event wherever – it could still be at UCalgary if that works out, but it sounds like things would be much more radical and powerful if we were able to impose on Brian’s hospitality at UBC:OLT.

I worked with our Faculty of Education to build a community blogging website for use by after-degree student teachers as part of their personal/professional development, reflection, and collaboration process, as well as to collect materials for use in ePortfolios. They had a set of pretty simple constraints. Because the student teachers would be writing about activities in the K-12 classroom, and likely would be posting media (photos, videos, etc…) they needed to restrict access to the site – there could be no public access to this content. Additionally, they needed to control with a fairly fine granularity which individuals within the community would be able to see specific pieces of content. Because of these constraints, we couldn’t just load up WPMU and set them free, nor could we just point them to WordPress.com or Blogger.com. What to do…

Drupal, of course. It’s got a blogging module available out of the box (it takes a checkbox to enable it). OK. Blogging is taken care of. Members just have to click “Create content” and select “Blog post”. Easy peasey.

Want to allow members of the community to create their own groups? Organic Groups. It’s amazingly flexible, and has an added bonus, in this case, of also enabling access control to content based on group membership (after enabling Organic Groups, go to the settings page for the module and enable “Access Control”). Meaning that the student teachers could create as many private group contexts as they like, and then grant access to their content to any of their groups (and only those groups) if desired. Very powerful stuff.

OK. So now we have a bunch of student teachers blogging their brains out. That’s a lot of content to keep track of. Their professors and practicum teachers need to keep up on all of the relevant posts, and provide feedback in a timely manner. How to provide tools to let individuals track content that they’re allowed to see, that they haven’t seen yet, and that they need to respond to… Views. Drupal’s Views module is killer for this. It’s basically a database query generator, where you can provide a set of criteria to filter content, and create a display on the website. So I created a couple of handy views to help people keep up.

The first view was a simple “all content that has been posted to any of your groups, sorted in reverse chronological order” – this is the “river of news” display, which meant that members didn’t have to go hunting through their various groups (some had over a dozen group memberships) to find new content. It’s all merged, sorted, and presented to them on the front page of the site. This let members keep their fingers on the pulse of the community – they could see at a glance what was being published in all of the groups they cared about. This view also displayed the number of comments (and any new comments were flagged) so people could easily follow up on conversations.

The second view was intended to help members keep up with new content – essentially an “inbox” to be used by professors and teachers. This view was a clone of the first “river of news” view, but only displayed unread items. As a professor viewed a blog post, it would get dropped out of this view for them.

We also used the Book module to create documentation on the site (how to use the site, as well as pages with links to other resources, an FAQ, etc…) and we enabled the Forum module to create a separate non-blog discussion board within the site (but this never really got used much…)

That’s really all there is to it – Drupal just handles the rest, and once it’s configured it takes very little care and feeding.

Here’s the stuff we used (the site was built a year ago on Drupal 4.7, but I’m listing what would be used as of the current Drupal 5.3):

• Drupal 5.3
• Organic Groups module
• Views module
• LDAP Integration module (current 5.3 branch borks on UCalgary’s LDAP, so you might have to play a bit)
• Insert View module (for embedding the views on the front page)
• TinyMCE module (for a rich text editor while creating/editing content)
• Anarchy Media Player (non Drupal – add the Standalone JS version as a block in your site theme’s header and all media will be embedded automatically)

I’ll try to revise this post to clarify stuff as needed, but this is the basic recipe. The best thing to do is just start downloading and playing…

I was just in a meeting with some folks in our campus IT department, where we were trying to figure out what the official University of Calgary supported podcasting solution would be. We were basically trying to decide if we should jump onto iTunesU in a big way, or roll our own service.

iTunesU is a really strong choice, in that all of the infrastructure bits are handled. No drive space to worry about, no backups to remember. Everything just works.  But, it’s outside of our control, and is rather  strongly Apple-branded. Even though it’s not an exclusive arrangement, and the content can/should be in multiple formats, it’s hard to sell that combo to people who are either

1. still thinking of locking content within Blackboard (i.e., iTunesU is too open)
2. wanting to adopt Open Source (i.e., iTunesU isn’t open enough)

Which left us with our second option: roll our own service.

So, over the summer, we’ll be putting together an official campus podcasting solution, hosted using Drupal essentially out of the box (but we’ll eventually add modules like Audio.module, Views, CCK, etc…)

One thing that really impresses me about how our IT folks approach problems is that they don’t react with fear. When we were discussing authentication and restricting access, things that are offered by iTunesU, the response was “we’ll figure that out, and here are some ideas of how we could do that…”

We’ll be, er, inspired by the podcasts.*.edu/.ca websites that are already running. Despite what the press release says, UCalgary is not the first, nor the biggest, podcasting institution…

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!

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