Recent contentin HomeonD'Arcy Norman, PhD
I attended the National AI Summit in town yesterday. It was interesting. Half of the presenters were sharing thoughtful, reflective approaches to using AI as a tool to enhance creativity and learning while fostering (protecting? they said “ protect ” a lot ) humanity. The other half were AI cheerleading, evangelism, and/or thinly-veiled sales pitches. For the more-interesting sessions,…
I’ve been using a digital notebook of some sort since the 1980s, starting with a Casio Digital Diary , then, in the 1990s, a Newton MessagePad 120 . Eventually, iPod Touch, iPad, and the software that they can run. Evernote. OneNote. Apple Notes. Obsidian. I gave up on iPads long ago and have just used my laptop to take and manage notes. I likely spend entirely too much time and energy…
The 2026 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report - Teaching and Learning Edition was just released. I had the opportunity to serve on the “ global panel of experts ” that brainstormed topics and examples to shape this year’s report. The brainstorming activities were done asynchronously, and it was really interesting to see the ideas shape up and connect to examples from various institutions.…
Canvas was hacked this week ( starting around May 1 , so over a week ago now). No details yet, and I’m not going to speculate or make assumptions. My heart goes out to the people at Instructure and the 8,800 institutions who are dealing with this. There are a few lessons from the incident and collective responses: 1. Clear and authentic communication is essential Instructure’s initial…
When Google retired Jamboard, a lot of facilitators lost the tool they’d been quietly relying on. It wasn’t fancy. It just worked in a room full of phones, laptops, and a projector, with people who had no interest in making yet another account. I’ve been building Jellyboard to fill that gap ( well. Claude Code has been building Jellyboard… ). It’s a browser-based…
This was the 10th annual University of Calgary Conference on Postsecondary Learning and Teaching , and it had the highest attendance for an in-person offering of the conference. The theme this year was “ From Disruption to Connection Digital Transformation in Postsecondary Education ” and that turned out to capture a lot of attention and engagement across UCalgary and our broader…
After creating a simple “design system” using UCalgary’s Brand resources , I uploaded a blog post, 2 ppt files, and a word doc with some links to Claude’s new “Claude Design” tool, and prompted: I want to build an interactive online module (as a web page “learning object”) about Digital Transformation based on these files. The module will be…
I’ve been playing around with some ideas for visualizing the notes and connections in my Obsidian vault, and how to go beyond just producing pretty pictures and into something that might be useful to make sense of the whole thing. It’s not quite there yet, but it’s getting close. Vibecoding this with Claude Code has let me take some ideas I’ve had for years, and actually…
Reposting the UCalgary News post I wrote for our TI Newsletter : Digital Transformation (Dx) in higher education has largely been framed as an organizational and IT challenge: enterprise systems, cloud migration, data governance, workforce development. That framing makes sense for the people leading those efforts, and the work is genuinely important. But it can leave a gap for those of us whose…
All of my links for the last few months have been saved in my bookmarks tool , and I’ve been finding that useful. I’ve also appreciated Tom Woodward and Grant Potter and others for sharing their weekly links. My previous attempt - the “ Weekly Reflections ” thing - kind of petered out, but I just implemented a new Section on my site to post weekly linkblogs. The content is…
I’ve been running this site on Hugo for several years now, and for most of that time I used other people’s themes and tweaked things around the edges. A few months ago, I decided to build my own theme from scratch with Claude Code. The theme is called Typeset . Why build a custom theme? The short answer: I got tired of fighting someone else’s decisions. Every borrowed theme comes…
The scenario A mid-sized research university is developing its institutional response to generative AI. There is no single “AI project” - instead, there are dozens of overlapping conversations happening at different levels: individual instructors experimenting with ChatGPT in their courses, departments writing local policies, a provost-level working group drafting institutional…
Leading change in a university involves many kinds of participation at once. In any given week, the same person might chair a committee with real decision-making authority, serve in an advisory role on another, pilot something new in their own teaching, and sit in a conference session absorbing ideas they hadn’t considered before. Each of those is a different kind of engagement, and each…
The 2026 Oscars™ happened, and a questionable “ AI Production Studio ” and “ AI Talent Agency ’s” 1 “ AI Actor ” tried to use the occasion to convince The Academy™ that replacing human actors with AI is actually good , and that they just need to fully embrace it in order to unlock their full potential . The argument was presented in the form of a…
On the plus side, your humble protagonist has finally figured out how to break out of “ the only thing he blogs about is how he uses Obsidian .” Unfortunately, it’s because I appear to be firmly in the middle of a bout of “ the only thing he blogs about is how he vibecodes some half-baked idea into a usable thing .” A blog post in 2 parts: The Course Community…