The Cascadian region where I live has an early summer weather pattern the locals call Juneuary: chilly and wet, like a last gasp of our winter rain season. Canada Day got rained out. Shout out, though, to the determination of the five friends who parked themselves under massive golf umbrellas for their Canada Day potluck in the neighborhood park, alone under a soaking sky. Improvise and adapt.
Status Report
As I was starting to type this my dog came home from her daily walk absolutely covered head to paw in mud, so I'm going to assume it was a good time. I'm glad someone around here is getting out and enjoying themselves.
British Columbia continues to open up a bit, slowly. The travel restrictions inside the province were lifted, so we can now head out for short trips with a clear conscience. It's good to get out a bit. The condo where I live and, now, work is lovely but can get tedious after awhile.
Nothing official has been announced but it's widely rumored up here that the Canada / US border will remain mostly closed until 2021. Polls of Canadians show they support the closed border, by a wide margin, for self-obvious reasons. I get it and agree, but it's hard: my family, many of my friends, and the majority of my co-workers are all in the US. In Vancouver on a clear day, you can stand on top of a hill and see Mount Constitution, one island over from my mother's house. In Victoria you can just about see my mother's house: it's the next island over, about 20 kilometers away. Like looking in a shop window of a closed store. So close, and yet so far.
(I say "mostly" because as usual, there are loopholes. You can't drive south across the border, but you can fly. Your traveler's medical insurance probably won't cover you. When you return to Canada, you have a no-exceptions 14-day quarantine with a $750K penalty if you cross your front doorstep. More burden and risk than I'm willing to accept. I miss my family though.)
Higher Learning
In honour of Juneteenth last month, Ijeoma Oluo gave a talk at Microsoft that was by turns compassionate, direct, and powerful about the need to support and uplift our Black colleagues and other people of color in the tech industry. She's done some work in tech herself so the stories she told and challenges she raised felt very real. I cannot recommend her book, So You Want To Talk About Race, highly enough.
The continuous rolling disaster that is 2020 means that many of the concerns about racial justice and police riots are slipping from the headlines, but they're still so, so important. I keep listening.
Higher Education in COVID
I am in deep sympathy with everyone involved in higher education right now. Everyone is announcing their fall plans in a COVID-19 world, and there just aren't any good choices. Especially in the US, where the COVID case count is up to 50,000+ new cases per day. I keep imagining the conversation:
University admin: We have to open. The revenue we need to run our university is at stake. Students won't come to campus and give us tuition revenue if we're not delivering a campus experience. For some of us our sports teams are massive, multi-million dollar enterprises.
University faculty: I don't feel safe. I'm not comfortable with hybrid and remote learning. I have kids at home who might not be in school. But I need to be paid.
University students: I just want my university experience, and it's hard to do with a mask in public and a laptop in my dorm room.
University staff:
Cait S. Kirby, a PhD student at Vanderbilt, imagined a couple fascinating storytelling scenarios: a day in the life of a student and a day in the life of a professor under COVID. It's a good exercise in empathy.
I keep thinking about what we can do to help. Awhile back at the online EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative conference, I sat in on a conversation with a number of instructional technology team members from universities all across the US. I keep thinking about that conversation. These are the people we need to empower to make university education make sense in a hybrid or distance learning world. They ran a quick poll of what was top priority for them for the fall -
Translating active learning into online 67%
Designing assessments for academic integrity 52%
Designing for accessibility 48%
(I'd have said "inclusion" in place of "accessibility," - the conversation was about access to all regardless of ability or economic background, even in scenarios of limited bandwidth or digital access.)
All three of those are hard, complex problems. We're leaning hard into the research and thought being given to translating active learning into online learning - see some of the links below for examples. We continue to think about both inclusion for those with different abilities (Learning Tools, Accessibility in Office) and, longer term, about digital access for those with mobile-only or low bandwidth scenarios.
Designing assessments for academic integrity is a discussion near to my heart as I worked with the Microsoft Forms team for awhile on formative assessment scenarios. It's a subject that tends to cause some embarrassed coughing with some of my colleagues, because we're often asked to empower summative, high stakes assessments. Forms isn't really meant for that, and several thought leaders at Microsoft don't like the reliance on intrusive proctoring that most of the summative assessment solutions used last spring.
I'd love to hear from higher education folks on what your campuses are planning and what your concerns are. DM me on Twitter or drop me a comment here.
TweetMeet
A few weeks ago I participated in a TweetMeet, organized by my colleague Marjolein Hoekstra and her skilled team. It's a Twitter event sponsored by Microsoft Education, with guests hosts and contributions from the Microsoft Innovative Educator Expert community and beyond. Great conversations and surprising insights about remote learning (mostly for K12) packed into a few short tweets. Some highlights:
On feedback and connection:
On student experience:
On the importance of self reflection:
The behind-the-scenes was fascinating. TweetMeet is a tightly run operation with OneNotes, daily schedules, marketing plans and collateral, host conversations and planning, and more. I've never worked in a pure social media manager role -- I can hear Marjolein and a few other colleagues saying "yes, we noticed," -- so the planning and execution phase was instructive.
Things I'm Reading (K12 edition)
Becky Keene and Kathi Kersznowski's Sail the 7 Cs with Microsoft Education reads like one of the best teacher demonstrations I've ever seen: a practical, lucid guide to all the tools in the Microsoft education portfolio, and how a K- 12 teacher might use them in the classroom. The strength of the book is in its real-world examples, each drawn from a different educator, each with a unique spin on how they've used the tools with their own students. I appreciate (and hope to borrow) the approach of kickstarting creative classroom ideas with inspiration.
For Teams specifically, Matt Miller, the author of Ditch That Textbook! has released a simple and clear instruction guide for Microsoft Teams, free of charge: https://ditchthattextbook.com/teamsebook
Microsoft has been working with UNESCO for awhile on a series of papers on creating resilient education systems that can adapt to COVID restrictions through technology-supported distance learning. Good strategic tools for those thinking at a district or ministry level about how to create more sustainable distance learning going forward:
Resilience and Transformation for the Future of Learning https://aka.ms/resilientlearning
Hybrid Learning on O365: https://aka.ms/HybridLearningO365
Modern Teaching & Learning Teacher Training for Remote Learning: http://aka.ms/MSFTTeachingLearningTrainingPlan
Technology Blueprint for Distance Learning: http://aka.ms/MSFTTechBlueprintDistanceLearning
Distance Learning Strategic Plan http://aka.ms/MSFTDistanceLearningStrategicPlan
Resources (HED edition)
Earlier I talked about the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative conference. One of the topics that got mentioned there a few times was the concept of Hybrid-Flexible (HyFlex) teaching. The bit I like about this is that it predates the COVID emergency and reflects some experimentation and thinking from when times were calmer and the pressure was less high. The original report on Hybrid-Flexible Course Design is available.
This page just keeps getting better and better: Microsoft Teams University.
My colleague Greg Milligan in Toronto reminded us the other day of the Microsoft365DSC open source tool. It's intended for IT admins who are organizing configuration settings across many environments and, importantly, detecting when settings have changed from a known good state. Good stuff.
Most higher education institutions aren't just part of a larger community. They often include community involvement in their mandate and strategic goals. I liked this special report from the Chronicle on ideas for serving communities in COVID times by local universities. (That one might be paywalled.)
Inspiration
Island sunsets give me life. This is Gabriola Island's Silva Bay.
Onward
Hockey goalies, I'm told, mentally divide the game into five minute increments (or sometimes even shorter): I will block all shots in the next five minutes. Distance runners do the same thing, if they're grinding. I will maintain pace until I get to that next bridge.
2020 is all about that pacing. Don't worry about getting to the end of the year, or how many days are left until the next US presidential election. One goal at a time. Keep to your pace. Eventually we'll get there. Meantime, be good to yourself this weekend. For the Americans, happy Fourth.