Week 7 in review: TRU YouShow, faculty development, and slow travel photos

TRU visit: I got to spend a couple of days at TRU this week with Alan and Brian and Irwin and lots of other great people.  I’m pretty sure I got more out of this visit than I gave, but what it also underlined for me was the importance of getting out of your own environment and discussing and sharing ideas outside of your own pond.  We typically frame these kinds of visits in an overly formal way and it got me thinking about how I could somehow makes some visits happen next year at JIBC.  Some things I learned:

• Brian and Alan continue to push Wordpress to be really indispensable ed tech tool for higher ed.  Admittedly, there’s still parts of it I don’t fully get, but I’m paying attention.
• TRU has a really impressive program for supporting the distance instructors for their open learning side of the house (thanks Val!). If we did even a bit of this with our numerous online instructors, we’d be in good shape.
• YouShow is quite a nice approach to faculty development (and so much more)
• We talked about containers, and if there was a way to have a plug and play shared infrastructure for open tools, we’d be able to do so more.  Brian and Alan get this more than I do and have a better sense of where this is happening.  At the end of the day, I would love to have a dashboard of BC supported ed tech tools that I could select and access as an institution, without having to upset our overworked IT department.

On the practical side we filmed this You Show video in only one take.

Guadalajara project:  The UG project is underway with early team members and more to be added once we’ve determined the kinds of instructors we’ll need.  It’s morphed a bit from the earlier proposal into essentially an ambitious faculty development project around student-centred learning and mobile devices.  As a result, there is increasing relevance for this as a faculty development project on our end, and we are looking at piloting parts of the program with our own instructors in April, and may even open that up to others if there is space.

Things that wow’d me:

Sew Wanderlust: Instead Of Taking Photos, This Designer Embroiders Her Travels On-Site: http://t.co/GGoXeooyrp pic.twitter.com/90JZBUf8zG

— Bored Panda (@boredpanda) February 7, 2015

Via  @bored panda this link to embroidery as an alternative to travel photos (by Teresa Lim) truly wow’ed me.  It’s sort of a ‘slow photo’ approach to travel, and I find it fascinating how as things become easier with technology and more disconnected from artisinal making, we are drawn to this alternative.  I’m not sure what the higher ed equivalent will be (the craft of the awesome 3 hour lecture?) but I’m curious.