Weeks 1-5 in review

I stopped doing these in review weekly posts when I shifted most of my institutional focus to leading the Agora project with the University of Guadalajara, combined with a  good long stretch of time off.  During this time I managed a few blog posts about innovation and spent a lot of time (off the devices) painting.  Eventually my kids joined me at the kitchen counter, and now my office gallery wall features a charming monsters series by my boys.  I also joined instagram, discovered that our Senior Web Specialist and photographer extraordinaire (you’ve seen him photographing BCcampus events) is an instagram rock star.

Unlike others who have experienced an agony in going offline, I found that going off the devices (for the most part) and channeling my energy into something creative and non screen based opened up a new space for me to think about ed tech, innovation, and leadership.  I plan on doing a longer post on the latter but much like Mike Caulfield’s federated wiki project, art is important even if it doesn’t always make sense at the time.

I love that the UdG professors are still posting and sharing to the #udgagora hashtag.  In the meantime, the analysis of data of the first Agora cohort begins, while planning for a June 2016 second iteration with another group of professors.

Project planning:  Every quarter, I meet with Deans and discuss the projects that they are bringing to our Centre, and we timeline and resource them.  This is a bit like opening a wrapped gift…I’m always excited to see what they are planning and where we can get creative with what they need to do.  This round cemented a need for some sort of open-ish micro-learning space, a serious plan for classroom technologies, and an increase in simulation scenarios.  This means that instead of having just 2 people in the building who can design simulation scenarios, we need to have at least one person in each School, so some capacity building planning needs to be tackled.

Program development: A couple of years ago, I was part of a great JIBC team designing an online grad certificate in public safety leadership.  This was shelved temporarily, and is now being launched in September.

Praxis Simulation tool/Western Diversification:  we held interviews with 3 excellent candidates for a Product manager for the simulation tool we are in the process of commercializing.  Then our simulation specialist spent the day at UBC Faculty medicine running a big Praxis simulation with a group of inter-professional health students.

BCTLN: I was able to attend my first BCTLN meeting as the member at large for the Institutes.  The planned Festival of Learning is going to be an incredible addition to professional development calendar.

Interesting things that I’m pondering:  In LMS news, Pearson  shelves its LMS , then head over to Leigh Blackall’s blog for a sort of antidote.

Things that wow’ed me: I’m having my students in a grad research methodology course I’m teaching at UBC create an open research methodology manual in TRU’s SPLOT tool.  The first triad posted on the topic of ethics this week and they seriously impressed me with their synthesis and critique.