The Catch: What’s Happening in Technology-Enabled Learning this Week…ish

Are you among the target audience for this blog? Let’s see… Are you involved in academic work for any of Ontario’s 45 universities and colleges? If so, then you are most definitely right in the bullseye! If not, well we really have no way of stopping you, so just go right ahead and do your thing.

Welcome to The Catch! It’s a new, weekly-ish blog series curated and collaborated on by the four eCampusOntario Program Managers: Peg French, Joanne Kehoe, Jenni Hayman, and Terry Greene. We call it The Catch because it will share some of the stories we are able to catch in our nets as we help Ontario’s colleges and universities pursue great technology-enabled learning.

We’ll dole it all out in bite-sized categories and ask you incessantly for your ideas and contributions. If an idea that would fit here pops into your mind as you read, email it to thecatch@ecampusontario.ca. Don’t be afraid to humblebrag about something you are working on yourself. Here we go!

Read It and Tweet

Reading things and then weeping is so last year. Now it’s all about reading things and tweeting. In other words, in each issue we are going to suggest an article that has a little something to do with technology-enabled learning and we will ask you to tweet your thoughts as you read. Add the hashtag #eCampusRT to your tweets. The appropriate amount of tweets per article is any number above zero. Follow the hashtag here.

Here’s this week’s article: A Personal Cyberinfrastructure, by Gardner Campbell. It’ll take you under 10 minutes to read and is about learning on the open web. We chose this article to start because it is a short, sweet, classic article about open pedagogy.

The Cutting/Trailing Edge

In this section we might highlight someone’s amazing use of a cutting-edge technology. Or, we might look at a completely new idea for using a trailing-edge technology. Either way, these stories will help cut a trail towards great technology-enabled learning.

This week we suggest you participate in a tool talk discussion at 12:15 ET on October 5th, 2017 via the Bento Box series. eCampusOntario Program Managers Joanne Kehoe and Terry Greene interview each other about cutting and trailing-edge uses of content creation and presentation tools. We promise banter. Hopefully some of it witty.

Trickle Up

The trickle down strategy didn’t really seem to pan out for the economy. So why not try a trickle up approach to learning about some of the awesome things that students are doing? This will help us all keep pace with those rascally, limit pushing students. In this section Chris Fernlund, eCampusOntario Student Design Lab (SXD) Project Lead lets us know about one of those things.

Here’s what he had to say this week:

“Currently, SXD Lab students are in the process of prototyping designs for their projects. The purpose of the lab is to stimulate student-led innovation in Ontario with project designs that will become openly-licensed outputs. These are led, designed, and built by students with the support of eCampusOntario. Projects will then be developed by eCampusOntario or shopped out to industry or institutions for piloting. Students have been hired to take part in this four-month experiential learning opportunity that empowers them to take charge of designing their education. SXD Lab is providing a platform for students to innovate through design thinking methodology. For more information, please visit: https://sxdlab.ecampusontario.ca.”

Individual project descriptions can be found here: Co-Creating Virtual Reality Content, Free the Learning, My Meaningful Life, Exponential Learning, Measuring Success and the Research Squad. We will dig more deeply into these projects in future episodes of The Catch.

What are you DoOOing?

If you or your students are out their blogging or building web-sites in your own space on the open Web, then you are DoOOing it. Domain of One’s Own (DoOO) is a wonderful way to take open ownership of your learning and teaching. In this section, we will share something from a student or faculty domain out there in the Ontario PSE blogosphere. It could be yours! This week, we share a post written during Fleming College’s New Faculty Experience by one of their Teaching & Learning Specialists. Have a look at Mary Overholt’s post Shiny, Happy People.

Network Connectivity

We’ve all had enough network connectivity problems in our lives. So now how about some solutions! Here we are going to help someone in our community supercharge his or her professional learning network. You’ll learn a bit about someone’s work and how to connect. This week, if you read the previous section, you’ve already met her! Let’s all follow the aforementioned Mary Overholt. Mary is a Teaching & Learning Specialist (a.k.a. Pedagogical Therapist) in Fleming College’s Learning Design & Support Team. Follow her on Twitter @mary_overholt and say hi!

Who do you think deserves to be swarmed by new followers the next time we do this?

Email names and Twitter handles to thecatch@ecampusontario.ca (self-nominations accepted!)

Open Treasure

In this category, we will share treasures that we have found in the OER-o-sphere (Open Educational Resources). And… don’t tell anyone, but the lovely thing about open educational resources is that the treasures aren’t just for the person who finds them first. They are for everybody! Download your own copy. Download it twice! Why not? This week, we feature an itty bitty little treasure that we’re quite proud of called the eCampusOntario Open Textbook Library!

Adoption Announcements

Here we will share the good news of Open Textbooks and other OERs that have found themselves a new home. We’ll start things off with a bang with this pretty little infographic with some big numbers that we want to get bigger!

Thank you for making it this far through the first catch post! Categories may come and go episode by episode as their popularity and efficacy reveals itself. Have ideas for the next episode of The Catch? Email us at thecatch@ecampusontario.ca and let us know your idea or if something you’re working on should be shared. Again, humblebrags are welcomed.