Week 52 in review

Last one of this year, and a bit light since I’m technically on holidays…

Big New Projects:  In January, we will be kicking off a big project with and for the University of Guadalajara. Although it’s going to occupy a huge chunk of my time in the new year, it’s exciting for us to be developing an Instructor Development Certificate in Experiential and Digital Learning for UG, of which a focus will be mobile learning.  It’s a nice opportunity to be part of something that really draws on JIBC’s strengths.

SSHRC discussions:  We had 2 meetings about separate SSHRC proposals for the new social innovation funding pot for colleges and institutes.  No shortage of important ideas, but that March deadline is a tough one to meet.

Multi-Access:  Valerie Irvine did a web conference with a group of us at JIBC around multi-access learning.  This was a really great session that answered a lot of my questions, and I’m pretty sure we will be trying it out this year.

Conferences and awards:  We submitted a couple of projects for the Horizon Interactive awards, and also got some proposals in for the CAUCE-CNIE conference and College Canada conference.

Things that wow-ed me:  Part of my masters degree was in geolinguistics, so this language network map of language influence is pretty fascinating to me.  Basically, it gets at why Spanish has potentially greater reach as language than Chinese, despite numbers of Chinese speakers, and why conversely Dutch has greater reach than the much larger population of Arabic speakers.  From what I can see it doesn’t get at the language power component of language politics (e.g. economic, or role of official languages), but it does at least try to capture  the role of the internet in language networks.

For the record, I never went into geolinguistics because I was told there were no jobs in it by my grad supervisor, but had the internet and data viz been a bigger thing at the time I guess my life path would be a bit different <sigh>.

And for fun, I was introduced to Alvvays this week, and this song is pretty catchy.