Hello World.

Posted on by Jon K.

I’m back for a spell. Lots of news, and things have sure changed a lot in the last 3 years. I’ve changed a lot. Oh, I’m still frustrated with EdTech, angry at the world, confused like most of you, about what the hell is going on. But I figure it’s time to go public and write this down again as I’ve got some burning things to say.

So, what’s new work wise? Well, I got promoted. I’m not so naive to think I did it entirely on merit, I had, and have, some great allies who believe that I can be a “Lead Learning Technologist”. I know I will struggle with elements of the job, which have some oversight duties – but it’s the sort of job I’ve been working for my whole career. I don’t know if putting an anarchist in charge of things is the safest move, but I’m proud to inhabit the role and defend my colleagues on my team fiercely. I had given up frankly and was settling into the idea that maybe just doing what I was doing would be OK.

But you don’t have a degree, right? Well I do now. And I’m in UBC’s Master of Education Technology program. I was really proud of working at a university without a degree. I got hired because of references, and experience (and the right place at the right time). The degree was underway since 2009, some of the posts here will reflect that. I finished in 2018. I thought I don’t want to do more. I’m not convinced I’m in the right program, but I’m going to make it work as best I can. There’s so many times where I hold back commentary so I’m not the dude who’s always droning on about being in an early MOOC or remembering pre-web 2.0, never mind hand writing HTML in 1997.

What about that music writing podcast thing? It was fun. I’m sad it didn’t really take off. Two years seemed to be as much as I could wring out of myself and I killed it at the beginning of the pandemic. No one cared, so you shouldn’t either.

Other stuff? I didn’t talk about family here, but my son moved out with his husband. My dog died in November. We rescued a new (older) dog in December. My wife, Kate is coping with me being home, and has taken up drums and pottery. My mom, Laurel Kruithof (nee Moverley) died in January 2019. My dad, Johannis Kruithof, died weeks after we buried my mom’s remains in June 2019. My parents and I were never close, but the loss feels heavy sometimes. Not overwhelming like some people experience, but heavy. I don’t want people to say I’m sorry. Don’t sweat it. It’s three years later. I spent most of the winter of 2019 trying to find some Dutch relatives to tell them their estranged brother had died, but no luck. I guess weird family dynamics run in the family. Someday we’ll get to travel again safely and I’ll get to the Netherlands to see what it is like.

So, EdTech is even more full of charlatans and tricksters than ever before, eh? I have got some stories for you. Hope you find them helpful. That’s my plan for the future. For now. I’ll try not to temper my snark and lose my job in the process.

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ETEC 510 – Design of Technology-Supported Learning Environments

Posted on by Jon K.

Oh goodness. Well, my history comes back to life in this course. It’s been a while since I’ve designed something for learning – and then to apply a meta-analysis on top of that… was not easy, but I contributed to the group work well enough and put in some long hours to achieve what I needed to. I will say I was nervous about group work – not that the group members wouldn’t be able to pull their weight, but the way I work (which is deadline focused – and maybe some sort of undiagnosed ADHD-like-thing where I put stuff off until I have to finish it!) and whether I’d be able to pull it all together.

I don’t really recall, however we started building out an H5P object that tried to slim down the choice of EdTech tools out there – using branching logic. Ideally this would be done programmatically – so a simple PHP script to take your answers and give you some suggestions. Here’s an embed of the project:

Now it’s obviously not finished, and with 1555 unfinished stems, you’re more likely going to find holes than not. Remember this was built during the pandemic, and was heavily influenced by pandemic thinking. Give someone a resource and let them use it to help them make a decision. Make it available so that someone could contextualize it by taking it and reusing it elsewhere. However in the process, I think the entire group started getting a little nervous. Who would actually determine what’s best for a given situation? How do we quantify a process that is often part-discussion, part-negotiation? Are we just substituting our opinion and philosophies for instructor agency?

And for me, the major flaw is that there’s no (current) way to inject a human’s empathy into the subject. Empathy is a huge design component for what I used to do, which was consult with people and help them make ethical, compassionate (for themselves and their students) decisions about educational technology. How can we design a tool that eliminates one of the key components?

Also, the H5P branching logic tool really stops being useful after three levels – you just have too many options to practically do something with. And maintenance would be such a painful piece. With that said, the process that the group worked – without any real forming stage (if you are a firm believer in the forming-norming-performing stages of group development) – basically thrown together and boom, start producing. It worked. I could pat ourselves on the back and suggest we’re high performing folks and of course we’d perform, but I just think it was dedication to the project.

So if you’re not part of the ETEC course or reading this upon reflection, the resource is started, you can clone it and finish it if you’d like.

NOTE: I wrote most of this on January 13, 2022 but tidied up the writing over the subsequent six months. When I was finished tidying I backdated the entry.

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ETEC 500 – Research Methodology In Education

Posted on by Jon K.

This is the beginning of my Master’s work at UBC in the Master of Educational Technology program – which culminates in a project. I’m not sure where that will end up – I would (despite my media background) prefer to do some length of writing around digital literacy, information seeking behaviour online and informal learning communities (and why they are effective). I decided to take ETEC 500 first because it is a core course, and required, and it would provide the biggest challenge to me as it’s one of the few things in the curriculum that I feel is somewhat unknown to me. Like, let’s face it, I’ve been at some level of LMS administration since 2008, supporting eLearning since 2001, and overseeing a team of educational technology folks for just under a year. I’ve read most of the texts that are offered as readings, I know some of the authors’ work quite well. I’ve seen some of the authors speak multiple times, so I’m familiar with the arguments they will put forth. In scanning the curriculum, I’m thinking that I’ll have to be mindful of the amount of commentary with my history, experience as that will limit discussion honestly.

AND that’s why research is a good place for me to start because the novice brain I bring to the subject matter will be truly a novice brain. I love the academic rigour that research demands. I suspect that where I fell down is getting too bogged down in my own machinations and not being clear enough with outlining my thinking about a subject. While I did well, it was hard work. It will be interesting to see how this sticks with me, and while I really enjoyed the process of taking apart research papers to see what makes them tick.

I learned a whole lot about qualitative methodologies – and understand better why education (or at least progressive education) papers typically use quantitative – qualitative are often structured assuming that there is one, or a few, reasons for learning happening. Whereas, qualitative tend to be better at understanding the context of learning. I am absolutely much more interested in qualitative. Maybe that comes from my history of developing media objects – and the subtleties of those projects. Subtlety requires a bit more finesse, and a well designed media bit has some subtlety, whether it be in framing the subject or just working within constraints. A lot of the similarities between the two are immediately apparent to me, working creatively in a media and working with data is fundamentally similar.

The fact that it was unknown territory, and procedurally all different than any previous online course I had taken, was so refreshing, so new. Novelty will wear off, from the program and from the course of studies. Not everything will be new. Dealing with that and making it interesting for me will be a sub-challenge for this whole Master’s. I wonder how folks who have been professionals who have gone back to school for higher degrees in the same discipline manage it?

NOTE: I wrote this back in July. 2021, so I dated it as such, but decided to make this public so that I can add it to my (future) portfolio.

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AirDroid

Posted on by Jon K.

I’d been looking for an app to mirror my Android phone screen to my Windows 10 computers, and after clicking around, and reading a bit, I found AirDroid. Originally the search was to mirror a older Nexus 5 phone (with no active SIM card) with Kodi installed, to a Roku, but scope creep, you know? I will say that it also popped up in a webinar that Barry Dahl was running too, and that prompted me to revisit it after downloading and letting it languish amongst all the other apps on my phone.

So the app on the Android side is constantly running, which can tax the battery a bit. It would be nice to not have a constant notification that AirDroid is running… but for free, it’s a good enough trade off. The Windows side of things are decent, but again, a little clunky to get it to do what I want. If I mirror, and then close the app (it’s still running in the background, by the way) there’s no way to restart the mirror without essentially opening the program again, to receive an error that the program is already running… again, for free, it’s good, but not super elegant.

Why am I doing this? Well, I’ve been asked about Brightspace Pulse a couple of times, and needed to demonstrate it to a group of students. It’s the sort of thing that I thought wouldn’t need introductions, but apparently, does. I’m surprised, because at last count, there was only 3% usage of the app at my institution. Hopefully the outreach we’ve been doing encourages students to try out the app and see if it’s for them. Actually, we need to encourage faculty to put in start and end dates for stuff as well… but all in good time.

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Is Everyone an Instructional Designer?

Posted on by Jon K.

This is a re-post of writing that appeared here: https://idigontario.ca/2018/10/28/is-everyone-an-instructional-designer/ as part of the 9x9x25 challenge. Admittedly, I’m not an Instructional Designer, but I am. Here’s the post:

Am I an instructional designer? I work in educational technology, talk to people about using tools and help people design better learning, but does that make me an instructional designer? Educational technology is a place that can often drive pedagogical change, and it’s strange how often it goes unacknowledged as an accomplice in converting people to better pedagogy. How often do you as an instructional designer have a conversation about a piece of technology that forces the person you’re working with to rethink what they’re doing, and how they’re doing it? It may not be the great revelatory exclamation of “Oh my, this is going to change my life!” – but sometimes drastically, sometimes subtly, a change is made.

EdTech forces change.

It’s change that is opted into, by selecting the tool or technology, but it is change nonetheless. I can hear the counter arguments; “that’s not change, it’s choice!” I’d counter, that it’s a choice to change. Often in the adoption of a new tool, you have an opportunity to make large scale changes; most people don’t do that, but they make a smaller, incremental change. Sometimes change stops there. Sometimes, it pushes further, changing assessment strategies, approaches to instruction, facilitation techniques. That’s where you (or I) are able to help.

My role has been traditionally to help people with the how of things; how to set up a gradebook in the LMS, how to use classroom response tools to do things in the classroom – and early on I realized that lots of people really were looking for how-to, but never thought much about the why they were doing things. Sometimes the answer to why was simply, “the department asked me to go online” – but the people who did think about the why ended up much more satisfied. Looking to help in a more productive way I’ve become somewhat annoying in consultations, asking things like “why are you doing this?” and “what do you hope to accomplish with this change?” Those questions are less about technical details, and more about design of learning. It’s been interesting to note how instructional design intersects with media development, technical support, systems administration and of course, teaching. Each of those intersections can be opportunities to talk about how that particular learning experience can be improved. Creating a video? Why, what can that help you accomplish? The questions open up a rich conversation filled with the proverbial box of chocolates. In some ways, that make me, a (looking at my work badge) Learning Technologies Analyst, an Instructional Designer.

It’s unfortunate, that I didn’t know that until six or seven years ago. Honestly, it would’ve made my early career make a lot more sense. So those of you who are working in educational technology, supporting the use of a tool and putting in tickets to bug vendors to fix things, you might be an Instructional Designer.

Jon Kruithof is a Learning Technologies Analyst at McMaster University

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What’s New?

Posted on by Jon K.

Well, another semester start, and still the tickets pour in. Another season’s change and change is in the air. The department I’m in has gone through a self-study, and the results suggest that we’re not great at communicating and we need a strategy. Those are good suggestions and things we can enact. In other news, I’ve decided to apply to begin my Master’s, more on that when I’m accepted. I’m also a part of the Open Education Ontario cohort of Open Rangers, which is exciting and a touch scary. Maybe not scary, but I’m such a novice at open, even though I’m wholeheartedly behind the idea of open.

I think I’ll start blogging again, at least intermittently. There’s so much good going on right now, oh wait…. well not politically. But education is in a place that can really help with some of the struggles online right now.

I’ve spent a lot of time in my own head struggling with what I want to do with my life. I have felt trapped, unchallenged and basically in a rut. I couldn’t do what I’ve done in the past, quit and find something else, because I’ve been the primary bread winner and you know, wanted to keep a house and eating. I’m also 45 in a couple weeks, and that’s weighing heavily on me as well. So instead of trying to start something exciting and new with a significant impact on my life, I decided to stay and try to do something. Admittedly, there’s been some things that have made an pathway forward available, but I don’t want to say more in case the powers that be go in a different direction. Needless to say, if things work out, I’ll be challenged. I also think I’m ready for that challenge.

Oh, I started a music blog and podcast called General Admission. It’s only a monthly thing as a “creative” outlet (which involves buying media toys like lavalier microphones and podcast hosting) that really talks about punk primarily. If you only want to sample the best, check out Podcast #2, which talks about a similar riff throughout several different genres of music.  I hope to get to that level of thought and interest for every episode, but admittedly, if you’re not as into the New Bomb Turks, or The Dicks (forthcoming episode) then you might find that not every episode is to your liking.

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I’m Not Dead

Posted on by Jon K.

Life is really, really busy, and I’ve neglected the blog. I apologize to myself, mostly, because that’s what this is for. I’ve been hit with a bit of malaise, a bit of wanderlust, and well the doldrums of the work EdTech workers do – which can be somewhat satisfying, but unchallenging. I haven’t been asked to think or be creative in a long while, and that’s a bit taxing.

I thought that EdTech was something that I still wanted to do, but I’ve realized it’s just the job I have. And that’s OK. I keep telling myself that anyways. But more and more, EdTech is not OK. We’re beholden to someone else’s due diligence, someone else’s decisions, and someone else’s fuckups.

I’ve been an EdTech worker for 15 years, and probably will be one for many many more (such is the way society is currently structured). Maybe this doesn’t need to be written. But I’m in a spot where I can’t advance, and there’s no specific career path. There’s nothing up, or forward. There just is. I had ambitions; I still have ambitions periodically, but I can’t see a way to achieve them.

I’m faced with the reality that maybe this isn’t what I wanted.

When I started it was just after the gold rush – with education moving resources online, on websites, and yeah, into portal sites. There was a freedom, because none of the problems were solved. None of the solutions standardized. Systems were malleable, and could be broken in the most beautiful ways. Every challenge had some sweat and maybe tears before it was solved.

It was really beautiful because it was human. Now, things are so homogenous, and so bland in EdTech.

So I’ve taken my creativity elsewhere, and some of my thinking too. That’s why I can’t be bothered to write about the drudgery of administration of systems. Or EdTech in general.

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Dead Drop no. 3

Posted on by Jon K.

More Bots

http://pushpullfork.com/2017/09/botnet-cometh/

I’m following the public facing war between disinformation and the public. Yes, this is not a conspiracy theory, but an actual war, on social networks, aided and abetted by profiteering conspiracy theorists who want to make millions (in some cases) off paranoia. It’s fascinating because it really means the end of being online as a non-combat participant. Everyone is involved in this.

https://moz.com/blog/chat-bot

https://tutorials.botsfloor.com/opensource-ai-chat-bot-framework-with-natural-language-understanding-and-conversational-abilities-7c6b71e2c461

One of the important aspects of successful bots are the natural chat sophistication. Mapping conversations is part of that. Also, this open sourced framework for conversation construction is going to be extremely helpful.

https://booking.design/7-things-you-need-to-know-about-designing-a-chat-bot-4f07886d3fd0

Amazing how Medium is taking over from where WordPress used to dominate. More tips about chatbot design. Really interesting stuff here, some of it straight forward and obvious, but I really dig reading about how other people made decisions.

https://github.com/google/bottery

Google’s chat engine/bot framework.

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Dead Drop no.2

Posted on by Jon K.

A second hodgepodge of things I’ve found on the Internet.

How to Build a Twitter Bot

http://www.zachwhalen.net/posts/how-to-make-a-twitter-bot-with-google-spreadsheets-version-04/

https://www.labnol.org/internet/write-twitter-bot/27902/

https://www.fastcompany.com/3031500/how-twitter-bots-fool-you-into-thinking-they-are-real-people

The third article is the most interesting because it’s from 2014 (remember Klout scores?) and really shows how little (and how much) has changed in the Twitter bot universe. Essentially the heart of the strategy is the same, but mixed with a way to learn (through AI, or natural language processing which is clearly being done at some more sophisticated campaigns) and adapt depending on where we are, I suspect that we are on the cusp of what the future looks like when everyone you meet online could not actually be a person. My Philip K. Dick collection became a lot less sci-fi and more prescient.

More Bots (Cisco Spark/Microsoft Teams):

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/botsconversation

https://developer.ciscospark.com/bots.html

Both Cisco Spark and Microsoft Teams are available where I work. Both have vague collaboration mandates, both can be used for communication. At this point, Spark might be more advanced with third party enhancements and bots. Teams might end up being the platform of choice if students are involved. I’m hoping to build a chatbot to handle common sorts of requests that our LMS support team get (ie. the stuff we have a predefined reply in our ticketing system, which isn’t attended to after 4:30 PM).

Natural Language Processing:

https://research.google.com/pubs/NaturalLanguageProcessing.html

https://medium.com/@jrodthoughts/ambiguity-in-natural-language-processing-part-ii-disambiguation-fc165e76a679

https://chatbotsmagazine.com/the-problem-with-chatbots-how-to-make-them-more-human-d7a24c22f51e

Natural language is key for the chatbot above, and of course the first attempt will be ruthlessly primitive I’m sure.

Chatbots in General:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/sep/18/chatbots-talk-town-interact-humans-technology-silicon-valley

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D2L Fusion 2017 Recap

Posted on by Jon K.

Every year it’s a bit different; some new faces appear, some old ones disappear. Jobs and roles change, focus changes. Las Vegas is a place that exemplifies an absurd demonstration of capitalism at its most consumer-driven absurdity. With the event happening in Las Vegas, I thought that D2L might be subtly telling us that they were taking a gamble. Turns out, that the gamble is not a big, all-in shove to take the pot, but perhaps a less-sexy gamble of shying away from glitzy announcements, to a more mature, iterative approach.

People talk about Las Vegas light shows being spectacular, but the one over Oklahoma City was pretty dang cool.

Flying Near Lightning from Jon Kruithof on Vimeo.

Usually in my recaps I’ll talk about the sessions I attended and what I learned. This year, was like every other, the sessions were well done, interesting, and useful (although maybe not immediately useful in my case). I won’t break down each thing learned, or really talk about what the learning was, instead I’ll reflect on the conference as a whole and maybe some of the underlying things that were interesting.

My focus this year was to really better understand two things, API extensibility and the data hub (Brightspace Data Platform, or BDP, which is awful close to ODB). I think I did that. I attended one session that described how they use the API to scrape everyone’s course outline, which was cool because that’s something that has come up periodically at McMaster, and I’ll have to get in touch with them to see how they handled ownership and other matters. It’s that fine line that admins run up against, where they can do things, but should they? We often fall on the no, we shouldn’t side.

I didn’t really pay attention to the keynotes – John Baker’s become quite a good speaker – but I’ve heard it before. I’ve been working at D2L clients now for almost a decade. I’m probably as intimately familiar with the product as many of the people working at D2L. Ray Kurzweil is interesting as a person, and I appreciate some of his theories, I don’t think the singularity will happen (we may approach it, but never achieve it) and I don’t really dig his speaking style. The talk (for me) really circled around the changing nature of work and that is a reality of my everyday.

I did a session about the work we’re doing badging faculty for skill in LMS use, more in another post about that.

I saw echoes of what I’ve done around faculty training in other presentations (which I stole from others whom I’ve worked with and talked to). More importantly, I walked around chatting with folks I know, wondering if this was still right for me? Is EdTech still the thing that I want to be working in? I’ve been in this field since 2001 (or 2003, or 2005, depending on when you want to mark my start – whether as a computer programming co-op student looking after a language lab, or when I graduated or when I first started working in higher education relatively uninterrupted). That’s a long time. I’m still energized by seeing the exciting things that other people are doing. And almost to a person, whenever I say to those people, “hey that’s awesome” or express my interest, there’s the same, humble responses of surprise that anyone would want to talk to them about what they’re doing. I don’t know if that’s a Fusion specific thing, or an EdTech person thing, or just my humble radar forcing me to talk to those people.

It also reminded me that any interesting work was extending the LMS –  using Node.js to create an Awards Leaderboard, doing data analysis for LMS wide analytics using the Brightspace Application API. Hell, even understanding what the Discrimination Index means in the Quiz tool.

My personal underlying theme was that there’s more that can be done with the LMS if you extend it’s capabilities. I think we’re on the cusp of doing just that. 

Once again, it was a fun after the conference experience. Hanging out with some of my favourite people (and recognizing the posse from just a few short years ago is just about gone!).

 

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