Description

Over the course of my career, I have used, explored, researched and evaluated numerous education technology products beginning with media production and distribution platforms that were a staple of my day to day work life as an educational radio producer in the late 1990’s, to complex open education publishing ecosystems, Learning Management Systems/Virtual Learning Environments (LMS/VLE), content management systems, database platforms, synchronous tools and social media platforms commonly used in education today.

The Learning Management System (LMS)/Virtual Learning Environment (VLE)

Like many education technologists, my career has included much work with LMS/VLE’s. In 1997, thanks to our proximity and close relationship with the University of British Columbia and the original developers of WebCT, Camosun College was an early adopter of WebCT, one of the first commercially available Learning Management Systems. Much of my work in the late 90’s involved the dual role of supporting instructors in using the LMS as well as technically administer the system. In 2006 I was a key member of the LMS evaluation team charged with finding a replacement at Camosun College for WebCT after it was purchased by Blackboard. Our evaluation led to the choice of Desire2Learn (now Brightspace) as the primary LMS for the institution, and I spent the next 2 years as a member of the institutional rollout plan for a new LMS which included converting content from one platform to another, scaling up training for instructors, and working with members of the I.T. department to integrate the new LMS with existing institutional platforms.

In 2010 I accepted a position as the Manager of Learning Technologies at Royal Roads University, a primarily online course based University that used a highly customized version of Moodle as their institutional LMS. In my position I was the institutionaly designated business owner of Moodle and was responsible for all maintainence and technical development of the platform. My first duty upon arriving at the institution was to upgrade Moodle from the 1.8 platform we were currently on to the new 2.0 platform. Because of the nature of the extensive ad-hoc customizations that had been done over the years at RRU on the Moodle platform, the first order of business I undertook was a technical code audit of the platform comapring the RRU code to a vanilla Moodle codebase of the same version. The resulting audit uncovered an vast number of undocumented code changes that had occured to the platform over the years. As a result, I led a development team in the task of abstracting code changes away from core Moodle code and developing a standardized manner in which custom code could be developed, deployed and, most importantly, tracked for future upgrades. As well, RRU did not have a standard update schedule for Moodle updates and i developed a systematic upgrade schedule to ensure the institutional instance would never be more than a year out of date with the current stable core version.

WordPress > Pressbooks

I was an early adopter of blogging as network building activity. I began experimenting with blogs in 2001 and first started blogging about education technology personal blogging in 2004, which transitioned to professional blogging about education technology in 2007. blogging in 2004, first personally documenting my life as a new father and then professionally in 2007  and then, in 2007, professionally. My first blog post from May 2007 reflects my early interest in copyright and fair use, which has continued to be a theme throughout my career.

Because of this, I developed numerous technical skills that I still use to this day, including setting up and managing web domains, deploying various web-based technologies, and writing & refactoring various flavours of technical code. I have worked extensively with WordPress over the years and, to this day, continue to use WordPress for many web based projects, including in the graduate level courses I teach in the School of Education & Technology at Royal Roads University.

At Camosun I led a small development team charged with the task of replacing our standalone web site publishing tool (Microsoft Frontpage) with a new web publishing platform for instructors who did not want to use the LMS. Working with IT services, I research and deployed WordPress muti-site at Camosun and supported a small number of instructors who used the platform to publish web content.

In 2012 when I joined BCcampus to work as the Technical Project Lead on the British Columbia Open Textbook Project, my first order of business was to find a publishing platform that would support open textbook publoishing among instructors in the BC post-sec system. My previosu work with WordPress drew me to a WordPress plugin that was under early development called Pressbooks. Pressbooks turned a WordPress multisite instance into an open book publishing platform. As outlined in previous sections, Pressbooks was ultimatley the paltform I recommedned and deployed to support the project. Until 2017 I led a development team who’s primary task was developing and contributing code back to the Pressbooks base. Pressbooks is currently operational in the province of British Columbia and supports open publishing among hundreds of instructors from across the BC post-sec system.

In 2019, I began to work on a project to extend Pressbooks from an open textbook publishing platform to an open courseware platform with the inclusion of H5P interactive activities.

Media Production

My work in media production begins at Camosun College where I was the institutional administrator and developer for our first media streaming servers (Flash and RealAudio) : Flash and RealAudio, and continues to more current methods of medai prodcution and streaming, including Kaltura.

Social Media

Finally, my technical knowledge would not be complete without a mention of my use of Twitter as a professional development tool.

Zoom/Collaborate Ultra/ BlueJeans

Reflection

As I think back over my long career in education technology, I have come to realize the complexity involved with deploying and using any educational technology, and the impact that technology can have on teaching and learning, both positive and negative, both intended and unintended.

While I could reflect on many positive lessons I have learned, I think there is great value in reflecting on what I consider one of my biggest failures in using.

My work with Moodle and Pressbooks has taught me valuable lessons on worjing with open source communtiies, and the important role that open source technologies have in supporting open educational practices.

Evidence

RRU CTET