Week 13 and 14 in review

Week 13 and 14 felt short and busy, my time mostly being consumed by a couple of projects rather than lots of little things.

Video:  After the last blog post, Grant Potter at UNBC got in touch and offered to give us a peek of their Kaltura/BB setup. This is immensely helpful and is one of the great reasons for doing these weekly reviews and sharing what is going on over here.

Quality and Accreditation:  I’m on an audit panel doing a quality and accreditation audit for a college in Ontario.  In Ontario, colleges have to periodically go through these reviews/audits which are governed by the Ontario College Quality Assurance Service .  As a general rule, this is not my cup of tea, but I have to say it’s been the best professional development I’ve had in a long time.  I’m part of a great team and to experience the process from the other site of the table is a privilege, albeit quite a laborious one, which will find me spending a couple of days in a small Ontario city in a week or so for a site visit.

Innovative Classroom: The tilt and swing mounts we ordered from Monoprice in the US arrived in less than 2 days.  The stuff we ordered from a local AV vendor still hasn’t arrived.  Perhaps not a fair comparison, but sometimes I wonder.

Mobile learning faculty development project:  Excited about an upcoming co-development week in Guadalajara at the end of the month, and equally excited that a couple of great non-JIBC people are part of the team.  Related–via @cogdog  was introduced to Touchcast.

Thrilled that the BCcampus Open Textbook project won an award.

Read:  Caught @opencontent ‘s post on the Remix Hypothesis  and also enjoyed reading @hapgood ‘s response.   I’m having trouble getting into the latter site today, but I did note that missing for me from the remix discussion is a question of ease, convenience and time. If it’s not easy or convenient, then replace or even creating from scratch becomes the norm.

Things that wow’d me: I keep saying I’ll attend the Eyeo Festival one day and after seeing this solar textiles workshop being offered I really wish I was.  Instead I’ll continue to indulge in Amor Muñoz’s website.