Work
I did the second orientation to ePortfolios for our new UNIV201 Global Challenges course. First-year students, making connections in an interdisciplinary context. They’ve been asked to document their learning, and to showcase their projects for each other, and our ePortfolio platform is pretty much perfect for that. I was surprised, again, that none of the students had edited a web page outside of Facebook. A handful had heard of wordpress, but nobody had every used it. So many things I have taken for granted, absorbed by the modern social web. This is going to take a long time to repair. We’ve lost a lot as a society when our brightest minds have no personal knowledge of publishing and sharing knowledge beyond Facebook posts.
PhD
I’ve started a theme study, getting my head around telerobotics, telepresence, and humanoid androids in an education context. It’s easy to dismiss robots as “HAHA KILL ALL HUMANS” or “REPLACE ALL HUMANS” but there is more to it than that, and I think I have a role to play in figuring out what an embodied presence of a humanoid robot may mean in a social collaborative experience.
Anyway. The robot I signed out was dead on arrival. Working on a backup plan.
Read
Newsblur starred feed items
Audrey Watters: To Mr. White
Coltan Scrivner: Artificially Intelligent, Genuinely a Person
via Stephen Downes: Tips for a PhD defense or viva #phd
Jennifer Sowa: Introducing … the Virtual Reality and One Button Studios
Nancy Chick: Toward an Ethos of Attribution
Clint Lalonde: Adding Creative Commons licenses to Kaltura MediaSpace videos
Rob Beschizza: Roll your own ASMR soundscape
via Stephen Downes: Feds launch networking site for academics, students and public servants
David Hedley: Prime Minister at University of Calgary on Jan. 24
Carl Straumsheim: Study explores efficacy of using digital models to teach anatomy
Saved links on links.darcynorman.net
You Draw It: What Got Better or Worse During Obama’s Presidency – The New York Times – “Draw your guesses on the charts below to see if you’re as smart as you think you are”
The Gauntlet / The rising price of knowledge: University of Calgary cuts 1,600 academic resources – “UCalgary student newspaper gives an overview of open publishing in response to reduced effective funding for commercial resources”
Adding Courses and Inviting Peers – YouTube
SFU Open Access Policy | SFU Library
Listen to Ambient Sounds with Music – Deepfocus.io
A lawyer rewrote Instagram’s terms of service for kids. Now you can understand all of the private data you and your teen are giving up to social media — Quartz – “Jenny Afia, a privacy law expert at Schillings, a UK-based law firm, rewrote Instagram’s terms of service in child-friendly language”
Growing up Digital: A report of the Growing Up Digital Taskforce – “The human-friendly legal interpretation of the Instagram EULA is on page 10. Why on earth aren’t all EULAs written this way?”
Terms of Service; Didn’t Read – “We are a user rights initiative to rate and label website terms & privacy policies, from very good Class A to very bad Class E”
Additional Personal Leave Days for 2017 | Human Resources | University of Calgary
Asmr generator for positive feelings – “ambient soundtrack generator.”
Practical NAO wiki
Baxter Kinect basics – sdk-wiki
Teen courses | Alberta College of Art and Design
Medium recommended stories via RSS
Andrea Gurwitt: Kids With a 3.1 GPA: It’s an Honor to Write a College Recommendation Letter For You
Dave Pell: Ain’t Gonna Play Trump City
Joe Brewer: The Climate “Doomsday” is Already Here
Charles Loop: The Dawn of Holographic Telepresence has Arrived
Chris Newman: Yes, Organic Farming Will Kill Us All
Other
I was blocked on Twitter by a Member of Parliament because I politely asked her for a comment in response to her heckling of a member of the Legislative Assembly of Alberta at a Student Leaders event on campus. I was polite and respectful, and was genuinely wanting to learn her side of it, rather than just assuming the online buzz was accurate. Her response was to block me. That’s data. Classy.
Reclaim Hosting moved my stuff from the soon-to-be decommissioned Ramones server to the shiny new OutOfStep server. The process was absolutely painless and automatic. All I had to do was change my CPanel/SSH login. Easy. Thanks! The new server appears to have some minor CPU issues, but that will get worked out.