I have been working at a large public R1 university long enough – 4 years – to witness steady changes with technology installed in public restrooms. Below is a newly installed automatic paper towel dispenser in our office building. As someone who tends to use 1 paper towel, I was very frustrated by the design that doesn’t keep me – a user – in the loop and forces me to use that much paper.
(This is the second part of a report of the #LAK19 conference. See Part 1 here.) It was the only beginning of many fun conversations when the Main Conference kicked off on Wednesday! Our conference and program chairs delivered an exciting welcome message. LAK is becoming larger, Largest LAK ever & 60% attendees are 1st timers! - shared by conference chair @shoha99 #LAK19 pic.twitter.com/k7C02NGWol — Bodong Chen (@bod0ng) March 6, 2019 but still selective – with a 33% acceptance rate for Full and Short papers.
I just came back from the 2019 Learning Analytics and Knowledge (LAK) conference hosted by Arizona State University. This conference, surely one of my favorites, is inching to its 10th anniversary next year. I still remember when I was in the 2nd year of my PhD in 2010, Chris Teplovs told me about an exciting, upcoming gathering of 60~ people in Banff, Canada to discuss a thing called “learning analytics.”
This week is the Open Access Week 2018. Yesterday we spent some time during a student advising meeting talking about the what and why of Open Access. The Open Access Week website has provided a great list of ideas for researchers to get involved in Open Access. My own institution does have an Open Access policy. Our univeristy library system also provides support for Open Access including an Open Access Publishing Fund, a Digital Conservancy system, a Research Data Repository, etc.
Background stories I value Open Scholarship and have been practicing it for years – both in terms of doing it and learning to do it. Stian Haklev, an OER and Open Access champion, introduced me to this idea. He built a wiki-based workflow system, named researchr, and convinced a few OISE friends, including Cresencia Fong and Alisa Acosta, to share our annotations publicly, in a well-organized manner.