I’ve had the opportunity to watch a few great videos from Vimeo’s film school and I got some great tips on producing great footage with low cost tools.

Interesting article from EDUCAUSE called Libraries as Enablers of Pedagogical and Curricular Change by Joan Lippincott, Anu Vedantham, and Kim Duckett. Here is the abstract:

Key Takeaways
Academic libraries are increasingly adding multimedia production facilities and other technology- and service-oriented spaces as part of overall structural renovations.
Although such remodeled spaces offer tremendous opportunities to support an institution’s pedagogical objectives and its faculty’s desire for innovative course assignments, how these opportunities can be realized is seldom discussed.
As examples from two institutions show, academic libraries can both spur and support innovation in pedagogy and curriculum by actively linking these innovations with library spaces, technologies, services, and staff members.

This is great insight into what libraries can stay relevant with developments in technologies.

Here are sources for finding information about Montréal’s economy and industrial make-up. I refer to subscriptions at Concordia University where I work.

– Passport GMID from Euromonitor
This is a system we have under subscription at the Library. It now provides top line reports of major cities around the world, including Montreal. Please access the system via this link:
http://clues.concordia.ca/record=e1001087~S0
(click on the database name and provide your netname if asked)
After accepting the terms of use of the system, just type Montreal in the search box on the top-right corner of the page. You will get many reports, but you are looking for the “Montreal City Review” in particular.
Video on using Passport: http://youtu.be/Wpotf4vcJmE?list=PLaqfn26UOsX-OJGT_W_UTOWzvAA5Kb3tG

– Montréal en statistiques
This city of Montréal website provides various reports about the city:
http://ville.montreal.qc.ca/portal/page?_pageid=6897,67633583&_dad=portal&_schema=PORTAL
In addition to the various reports, themes and other data available therein, I noticed this very recent economic portrait of the city:
Profils économiques : un portrait à jour de la dynamique économique montréalaise
http://ville.montreal.qc.ca/portal/page?_pageid=6897,68131631&_dad=portal&_schema=PORTAL&id=10396&ret=/pls/portal/url/page/mtl_stats_fr/rep_nouvelles/coll_nouvelles
Looks very interesting.

– Montréal International
This is the international development agency for the city. There are a lot of high-level glossy reports and data on this site, but in particular their publications:
http://www.montrealinternational.com/publications/
(This agency is one of the few I recommend you build a long-term, low volume but high impact relationship with)

– MEIE, Québec Government
The Ministère de l’économie has a portal devoted to each administrative region of the province, this is the Montréal page:
http://www.economie.gouv.qc.ca/pages-regionales/montreal/
Make sure you click around in the “Portrait régional” box, which is located on the bottom left-hand section of the page. You get a one or two page report for each theme.
(This agency is one of the few I recommend you build a long-term, low volume but high impact relationship with)

– Conference Board of Canada
I am sorry to report that we do ** not ** have access to the Conference Board of Canada’s e-library, but I did want to mention that they provide detailed forecasting reports at the city level.

This new release from the good people at EDUCAUSE seems interesting. It is called the Learning Space Rating System (LSRS) and only covers formal spaces (e.g. classrooms) for now, but will eventually will allow the evaluation of informal learning spaces, such as libraries.

I am listening to a podcast of a 2005 EDUCAUSE session at their annual conference entitled How E-Learning Policies Can Reduce Faculty Workloads and Keep E-Learning Courses Running Smoothly.

The speaker is Shirley Waterhouse, the Executive Director,
Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. Their website also showcases many projects and initiatives pointing to best practives. She also is the executive director of
eLearningGlobal (this site provides details about her book).

7 Policy topics (from the podcast, toward the end)
– Daily routine: exchanging with students, email notifications, submitting assignments
– Students privacy: consent and sharing information with 3rd parties
– Email policies: answering emails, manage students expections wih regards to answers, discussion policies (will the instructor read everything)
– Assignment policy: when due, format, etc. (do it beforehand)
– Tech help policy: where and when to get it (e.g. what happens if the LMS is down when I want to subit my assignment)
– Code of conduct: student discussion, etiquette, netiquette, innapropriate, etc.
– Intellectual proprety issue: copyright, ownership, sharing

Her book and articles cover these topics in greater detail. These items seem more like the kinds of things a course outline or general procedure would cover. But they are interesting nonetheless.

Recommends the copyright resources from Indiana University.

From our friends at the University of Sidney down under:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oa66AxTbjxA&w=560&h=315]

The Library Instruction Round Table (LIRT) or the American Library Association has announced the opening of two award nominations, one for a librarian and another for a library. Deadline is January 15th 2014.

A must read: Clay Shirky’s verbose and well argued post on “Why I just asked my students to put their laptops away”. Clay Shirky is an author and academic interested in digital and social media.

In the same line of thought, I really liked this podcast (in French) of Montréal tech journalist and consultant Martin Lessard with Sébastien Wart who works for the Montréal school board as a technologist. They refer to the SAMR model (aka: Substitution Augmentation Modification Redefinition Model) for employing effectivee technological tools in the classroom. According to the Technology Is Learning website (where Martin Lessard point to), the SAMR model developed by Dr. Ruben Puentedura  :

Substitution Augmentation Modification Redefinition Model

I really enjoyed this short clip from the good people at Educause about 4 ideas to reshape higher ed:
[vimeo 105581244 w=500 h=281]
This is the gist of the talk:

I also really enjoyed this paper about three possible futures for higher ed: one where universities are either virtual or blended; one where digital technology offers a kind of renaissance of creation where storytelling, game design and social media seamlessly integrate into a learning experience; and the one where health care takes over (I didn’t like that one so much).

Beyond being a simple object of desire, the announced Apple Watch will be in classrooms around the world soon enough, as Rebecca Koening from the Chronicle of Higher Education points out.

I love some of the comments made by the experts she interviews, in particular Teresa Fishman, director of the International Institute for Academic Integrity at Clemson University as well as David M. Levy, a professor in the Information School at the University of Washington, who teaches a class called “Information and Contemplation.” Both advocate for a shift in teaching strategies.

And, yeah, I really desire an Apprle Watch althought I am not certain I would effectively use it in my daily life. And of course, you’re always better off waiting for the secound iteration of any Apple tech, you wouldn’t want to pay a high price to debug their device… this is the cost of Apple love.