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Week in Review – Jan 24 and 31
As it was bound to happen, I missed getting to last week’s review, but sometimes the things we do don’t fall into tidy week long chunks. One of the things I’ve learned about myself is that I’m a perculator…if I’m working on something complex or something that involves synthesis, I have to think and read a lot before anything progresses to a writing stage. As someone who loves to cross things off a list, this is more than a bit frustrating, but I’ve come to understand it as part of my process. The plus is that usually I don’t have to spend a ton of time on drafts…one or two…
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Imagining LXP-light or the open source alternative
While I was at JIBC we had a demand and a need for unconventional online learning spaces and this pushed us in interesting ways. On more than one occasion we hired Alan Levine – aka @cogdog – to take our ideas and build them. The most well-known application of that are the Mural and Agora sites which combined SPLOTs, the DS106 features, Discourse and a plethora of other things (including his fantastic photography). But there are 2 lesser known JIBC/Alan Levine collaborations that are worth highlighting in our collective struggle to move beyond LMS. Constellations Constellations was the first attempt to move in a significantly new direction in the area…
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Week in Review – January 17
This week in review is coming a day early as I head to Edmonton for the Junior Nationals Olympic Weightlifting competition, perfectly timed with a deep weather freeze. Let’s start with the important stuff. I finished my 2 quilt blocks for #femedtechquilt. First is a rip off/inspired by Effin Birds, using a laser printed photo transfer. This is where you reverse print your image, then apply it to fabric with gel medium. Once dried overnight, you soak it with water and gently remove the paper. The removing the paper part is a bit tricky and you have to have a fair amount of patience (which I don’t have) but after…
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Week in Review – Jan 10
Well, coming back after a couple of weeks off was a bit harder than I thought it would be. First, here’s what the last couple of weeks looked like. I got a new pair of snowboard boots (first pair in 20 years!!), the kind with fancy turny things that tighten them so I don’t have to do up laces. I tried them out on a spectacular – and well timed for lots of fresh powder – week with the family at Silverstar. The RWA (of which I’m a new member) imploded. The romance writing industry has notoriously privileged white, female and straight and the industry and the association has basically…
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Week in Review Dec 20
I took Monday off, so I caught up on some podcasts and painting. I also booked a January (brrr) flight to Edmonton where I’ll see my daughter compete in the Junior Nationals Olympic lifting. I’m hoping for good weather which means nothing worse than -15C. The rest of the week was a lot of going through my lists and crossing things off in anticipation of a nice break. Our team did some more work on our strategic bucket planning, we had an OpenETC meeting and wrapped up our roadmap and budget proposal, I sat in on a great presentation by Selina on the OER findability project here at BCcampus which…
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Year in Review
This year I left my job of almost 10 years. It was surprisingly hard to do but I haven’t really looked back, which is probably the biggest surprise of all. I also: began working with a new team at BCcampus (Learning and Teaching) which will be my new professional home for the next 2 years started and completed a research project and published an article on it finished another article I’d been writing for four years and got it published started blogging more frequently had a transformative visit at the University of Edinburgh with a h/t to Anne-Marie Scott who made it happen presented at the Cascadia Open Summit, OER19,…
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Week in review – Dec 6 and Dec 13
Sometimes one week blends into 2, and I can’t recall why I didn’t wrap up last week but that’s the way it goes sometimes. I’ve been working on a post-conference OE Global summary, which is taking a bit longer than usual since I decided to stay off devices and hand write all of my notes during the conference. This worked really well for keeping me present and properly listening, but it’s not so great for pulling it all together in post conference blog post. Conference proposals: I somehow managed to get proposals in for Festival of Learning, OTESSA, and OER20. This was an epic couple of weeks of proposal writing,…
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Hiding in plain sight – Feminist perspectives of distance learning
Sometimes you read a post that is so insightful that it shifts your entire way of thinking and seeing. I felt this way when I first read Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams and Henry Trotter’s Social Justice Framework for open education and Sarah Lambert’s Social Justice Aligned Definition of Open Education . Both of these articles helped me push through some of the things I was struggling with in relation to open education, namely how do you talk about the relationship between language, power, and knowledge (and colonial consequences) in relation to the goodwill gestures of putting OER out into the world. So when I interviewed this year for a bucket list job…
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Week in Review Nov 22/2019
The big event of the week was heading to Victoria for a one day planning day with the Open Team followed by an all-BCcampus retreat. One of the things that I love about BCcampus is all the exposure I’m getting to how meetings, planning, retreats are facilitated and set up, and of course getting to experience different liberating structures. I’d really love to up my facilitation game so I’m paying more attention to all of the small details. One of the things that I thought worked really well for the Open Team planning day was having each person do a 5 minute lightening talk on what they were working on…
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Week in Review Nov 15/2019
The short week threw me for a surprise – for some reason Remembrance Day does this to me every year. On Monday I got out to my local Remembrance Day celebration at the aptly named Memorial Park, surrounded by neighbours and @levalee who was there with her 95 year old dad! She shared this great article about him and his role in a fascinating piece of Canadian Veteran and Chinese Canadian history. This was followed up by 2 days of planning and strategizing by the BCcampus Teaching and Learning Team, full of liberating structures and buckets. We ecocycled, 1-2-4 all’ed, spiral journaled, and knotworked our way through our current and…
