October in 25 sentences

Four weeks have passed since I started the 9x9x25 and I’ve been hard pressed to keep up with the pace. In my ideal world, I was going to comment on everyone’s posts, link back to all the brilliance in my network and write my own posts connecting all of it together. But I don’t live in an ideal world, despite everyone’s best intentions. I’m sorry that what follows will read like a required report but sometimes “done” is better than “perfect”.

Since my first post, back in the first week of October:

1. I submitted a super secret nomination package for a colleague for a distinguished career award.
2. I helped make Thanksgiving dinner for 14.
3. I went to Open Education 18 in Niagara Falls which had some incredible keynotes (like Jess Mitchell). Got to play tourist in my backyard.
4. There I added local newspaper information to Wikipedia
5. Other highlights include catching up with the CUNY crew and finding out about their cool Manifold tool
6. Went to many other great sessions but the web annotation was really great, as it’s now baked into eCampusOntario’s Pressbooks (yay!)
7. Learnt about the Go-GN network which makes making a grad student working in OER much less lonely
8. Went to a heated and hilarious session by Steel Wagstaff and Billy Mienke with a treasure trove of follow up reading about use of student data 
9. Got my Catching Air mug from Terry Greene!
10. I also caught up with so many beautiful wonderful people whom I respect and adore.
11. I went to the Digital Pedagogy Institute at Ryerson in Toronto with Sean Michael Morris and Jesse Stommel. This was an intro session and not much was brand new to me, as I closely follow both Sean and Jesse and read Hybrid Pedagogy very regularly but it’s always wonderful to be in the presence of people who care so deeply about learning. Definitely I also signed up for the Digital Pedagogy Lab in March.
12. I presented to Senate Teaching & Learning Policy about OER (much thanks to Rajiv for sharing his slides CCBY). Related, my students in ADED 2P50 Online and Blended in Post-Secondary continued to work through developing their modules and mid-October they watched Rajiv’s talk at Brock from last December. Unsurprisingly, comments ranged from “Wow, what an eye-opening talk” to “I’m going to do everything I can to ensure I use open resources”. Many of my students are college professors in Ontario, so I consider this a huge advancement and very rewarding as a teacher. I can’t thank Rajiv enough for his passionate advocacy, which put him on the UN agenda with other incredible educators and scholars.
13. I went to a terrifying but terrific talk by Dr. Natasha Tusikov about how Toronto is selling off our personal information in the name of Smart Cities
14. Worked with the amazing and wonderful Peggy French to deliver a workshop on open textbook platforms, specifically Pressbooks and Scalar.
15. I gave a drawing workshop for Teaching Assistants on Universal Design for Learning.
16. Gave a similar workshop to senior staff at Student Wellness and Accessibility Services on drawing and UDL
17. Attended a super session by Karen Julien about the Magic of Feedback
18. I presented with my colleagues to Academic Review Committee on how we can help with the curriculum mapping process.
19. Oh, yeah, and I became the Associate Director of Teaching & Learning at the Centre for Pedagogical Innovation.

So it’s been a busy and wonderful time and each of those sentences could have been their own 25 sentence blog post (at least!)