The Catch: Issue #10

What’s happening in technology enabled learning this week?

Photo by Ray Hennessy on Unsplash.

Welcome to the 10th issue of The Catch. Take note of where you are right now so you can tell your grandchildren later. This week we are introducing a new category: The Sandbox Scoop! Read on for the world premiere.

Sandbox Scoop

In a sandbox, possibilities are limited only by the imaginations and messy, creative work of those in them. In our ed-tech sandbox, and with 19 college and university partners, we’re exploring three of them – in open badging, virtual simulations and experiential learning. We’ll feature some of the digging and excavating going on here each week.

eCampusOntario is tapping into Riipen as part of the EdTech Sandbox experiential learning exploration. Riipen is a technological platform that connects faculty and students with industry and working professionals.

And speaking of tapping, one of our three Riipen PSE partners, the University of Windsor, is matching students in their Extension Science program with projects with local vintners, brewers and distillers as well as the local pharmaceuticals industry. Even more coolness is evidenced through the building of a dedicated lab on campus to allow for students to do the analytical work necessary for these projects. You can read more about their plans in this recent article from the Windsor Star.

Ranger Report

Typically, the world experiences 12 months in every year. 2018, however, has so far only experienced one full month and a little bit of another. It remains to be seen whether we will hit our target. As opposed to 2018’s dearth of months, we have already seen FOUR eCampusOntario webinars! Two of those were with the Ontario Open Education Ranger Webinars. Open Rangers from across the province, college and university-employed alike, joined each other on the virtual ranch (i.e. a Zoom video chat) on January 12th and 15th to discuss Open Educational goings-on in Ontario. The parleys were held so that the rangers can better serve their Ontario PSE citizens. One trend that seems to be emerging is that some institutions are striking open education working groups to formalize and organize their efforts. If you’d like to learn more or would like to discuss how an open working group might help your institution, we can help! And we really want to! Email open@www.ecampusontario.ca.

The Cutting/Trailing Edge

The other two aforementioned eCampus webinars were new iterations of the Bento Box Webinar series. Most recently, Open Ranger Claire Coulter from the University of Guelph, hosted by Peg French, showed us the wondrous technology-enabled learning world of web annotation via Hypothes.is. Claire offered up another annotation tool, vialogue, too! It’s a video annotation tool and it looks pretty cool. Here is a round up of notes and links from the show, by Peg French. Stay tuned for the recording because, if memory serves, not all of you were there for the live event.

Just a fortnight before Claire’s webinar was round two of the Bento Box Battle of Tech Tools between Joanne Kehoe and Terry Greene. We are both sad and happy to report that Joanne is now up 2-0 in the series on the strength of Joanne’s wonderful take on how useful Timeline JS can be. See her notes here. Also, have a gander at Terry’s second place slide deck on how screen-recording Gyazo GIFs might be useful, too! Stay tuned for the recording!

Check out our webinar page. There are webinars there.

Network Connectivity

The Network Connectivity section is designed to help you connect into various networks. So the name is no mere coincidence. This week, we extend an invite to you to contemplate helping us form a new network of educators who share their technology-enabled teaching and learning journeys. We want you to think about joining a cohort of Ontario Extend this spring!

On February 6th from 12:15 to 12:45 we hosted a Q & A webinar to discuss these plans. A before-party if you will. If you’d like to view the recording, add your name to this form and we will follow up with a link to the webinar. If you’d like to chat about, say, what kind of swag may be offered, email thecatch@ecampusontario.ca.

The Catch is a weekly blog post on ecampusontario.ca curated, created, and collaborated on by the eCampusOntario Program Managers: Terry Greene, Peg French, Joanne Kehoe, and Jenni Hayman. Other contributors include… you? Let us know if you have something that you think would fit nicely in here by emailing thecatch@ecampusontario.ca with the subject heading “Catch This!” or whichever subject heading you want to use, really.