Week 50 in review

Innovation:Pushed along by one of our always keen and innovative instructors, investigated use of drones for Fire and Safety and SARS (search and rescue) training.  This alternately excites me and frightens me, but then again, my job isn’t really about staying in my comfort zone.

Sat in on and learned a lot from Grant Gregson’s (Emily Carr U) TELL session and am ordering a WD cloud.  I’m grateful there are people in the ETUG community that can talk and do the technical, almost IT part of ed tech but still keep it simple for the rest of us.

Reading and Responding:  Responded to Tony Bates’ excellent (and well-timed) post on experiential learning.

Responded to a post on the OERResearch Hub site.

Read an article that resonated, despite it being specific to a developing country context problem. It’s a fun read and I highly recommend it for highered folks:  The impact of managerialism on the strategy work of university middle managers.

Workshops and Demos:  Joined our Marketing and Communications wizard, Richard  Chu, in delivering a Twitter 101 for our Exec team.  Richard pointed us to quite a nice Twitter info graphic cheat sheet.

Delivered a demo of our simulation platform, Praxis,  to some really great Camosun College visitors.

Classroom of the Future:  Our Belkin Tablet Stage arrived, sadly a day after Demofest, but we haven’t yet had time to set it up.

Made arrangements with Valerie Irvine to chat with us about multi-access learning. Since we have 5 campus locations, and many f2f classes that run parallel to online offerings, this method could be a good option for us.

Things that wow’ed me:  I’m a textile nerd, and this 3D printed dress was the coolest thing I saw all week.  Textiles + Technology may be my next career if I can figure out how to make it one.

And because I work at JIBC, this criminal botnet tracker was a close second (via @The_O_C_R) .