This past monday I was fortunate to catch a talk at VPL from the authors of the new book “We Have No Idea” from Jorge Cham ( artist of PHD comics ) and Daniel Whiteson (Physicist). Had some interest on twitter about this sessions so decided to share my sketchnote (below) and use it as springboard to get a few blog posts going. Some big things coming up in October and I could definitely use a warm up.
sketchnote from a talk about the new book “We Have No Idea”
“Every cartoon is mostly blank space, it’s only the lines that are there.” ~ D. Whiteson
The book is fantastic, tackling some of the biggest questions you can imagine (How large is the universe, What is dark energy? etc) and the audience seemed ready to dive into them. For myself however I was more interested in the work itself, particularly its development and the collaboration between “artist” and scientician. This is the crossover I am seeking out. How do academics themselves enter this world, if they are not able to collaborate with an “artist” them selves? If you have been reading PHD comics as I have you know Jorge has a knack for for capturing the tribulations of academic life in a fun and accessible way. One of the unexpected surprises of this talk was also how they used Jorges’ drawings on the powerpoint slides, but also live annoted (or “scribed”) on top of them. Very powerful technique I may steal in the future! 😉
I’m still reflecting on this work, and hope to incorporate these ideas into some of my own teaching soon.
I’m sort of starting from the ground up on this site. I have a new host ( yay hippies! ) and have an updated version of wordpress with no plugins. Taking a page from the @dlnorman playbook my intention is to be more self sufficient here, and rely less on third part services. My first challenge will be photos. For awhile now I’ve been using flickr as my defacto online image sharing service, (and I’m not giving it up just yet) but I want to begin building my own self hosted image collection here. This is an important collection to me that I want to not only share, but maintain and archive into the future, my collection of sketches, visualizations and art. Also, I bought a new scanner!
Liberating structures – Sketchnote
My first entry is a sketchnote I made last week at the ETUG spring workshop. Nancy White was speaking on Liberating Structures, a “disruptive innovation” tool for organizations. I was struggling between participating in the activities (always encouraged at a Nancy White session) and working on this drawing, but most of my energy went here in the end.
I’ve added this image (which was scanned on the new scanner) using the default WordPress Media uploader, and was able to do several of them as a batch. I have noticed WP now has a “gallery” feature which I intend to check out, and also noticed you can do basic editing functions such as crop and rotate right in the dashboard now which I know will come in handy.
Here is the same image, this time photographed with my camera and hosted on flickr. The colours are way more vibrant, although probably not more accurate, but also here I know the image has been viewed over 50 times and favorited twice.
A few questions I’m considering
Should I upload this to flickr as well?
Are statistics about how this image has been used important to me?
How do I create a gallery widget of image ‘categories’ from my own collection?
What plugins are needed to manage a self hosted image library?
Hello #etmooc-ers! Jason here, arriving fashionably late to the party, although I’ve doing my best to pop in on the synchronous sessions, stalk you on the G+, & follow the #etmooc hash tag faithfully, this will be my first, in I hope a series of SEVERAL posts tagged ‘#etmooc’. As with many of us, I’m faced with the challenge of keeping up with the flow of the course and being an active contributor, on top of a busy work/life schedule etc. This week however I have the fortunate timing to be participating in an ISW (instructional skills workshop), and my plan is to repurpose my mini lessons as ‘open educational resources’, or blog posts as they are known to some. I should be extremely well versed in this process, but crazy as it sounds there seems to be so little time allowed for it. I often advise others on improving their online teaching spaces, but tend to not take my own advise when it comes to the site you are reading from now. Time for a change!
The last time I got in here for a facelift was over TWO YEARS AGO, as I entered what would be an epic journey of learning in the ‘not a mooc‘ #ds106… course (?), and I have to say although the blogging has not taken off, I did manage to cobble together a decent foundation upon which to enrol in #etmooc, so much so I almost didn’t even need the first week orientation! (#ds106 foundation 4 life) For my introductory post on that journey, I used an auditory fragment from my past, edited together in Audacity and posted to soundcloud. The thought or ‘re-gifting’ that in this context did cross my mind, but instead I chose to use the visual above to illustrate the typical ‘tools of the trade’ I use in my role as ‘Interaction Specialist’ with the Teaching and Learning Centre at SFU. We have been going through some growing pains in recent years, but are now well on our way to re-visioning both the role of the centre and our place in it. Personally, I have taken the opportunity to embrace one of my passions, DRAWING and inspired by my awesome buddy, integrate that into an educational context through graphic facilitation/recording etc. The workplace has truly never been more exciting and rewarding with this burst of creativity, and acceptance that I need to draw to learn! And possibly teach as well, but we will see if I can push some boundaries this week.
Without getting into a long drawn out explanation of the graphic above “Tools of the Trade”, I’ll just say it was intended to present a set of capacities to my colleauges in the teaching center, who would be drawing (hehe) on them to enhance their projects with faculty. My experience in web development and educational technology have both emphasized the user experience in different ways, but in the end it always comes down to that, and the tools are only what you make of them, as I have heard said from time to time.
I wanted to shout out at this point to say that the #ETMOOC has been OUTSTANDING in the area of user experience so far, and although I am far from fully engaged, the instructors have put together such a vibrant and engaging community that even the small portion of learning and activities I am taking on will no doubt benefit myself and my collaborators tenfold.
To squeeze on last plug in here, I wanted to point to a very rough prezi on the newly formed “Educational Media” group in the teaching center. These are the same folks I will be teaching to and learning from this week in the ISW, and in so doing hoping to generate some valuable contributions to #ETMOOC. I can se another post will be in order to chronicle this process, but for now I REALLY need to get started on my mini lesson due tomorrow right away!
