» [ETUG 25] Flashback Friday

As ETUG celebrates 25 years, we are taking the opportunity Fridays to dig into our archives and celebrate our 25-year history. Today’s Flashback Friday continues back in time to the years 2015 and 2016.

It’s 2015

The Chair of SCETUG is kele fleming, UBC CTLT and the Co-chair, Emily Schudel, Camosun College. We are headed back to the lovely SFU Burnaby campus for the Spring 2015 Workshop. Inspired by the NMC Horizon Report 2015 Higher Ed edition SCETUG decided on the theme of “High 5: Survey Says”, the phrase borrowed from the popular tv game show. Workshop streams would feature the following topics: Faculty Development, Learning Design, New models/resources and Academic transformation/Experiments/Disruptive technology.

Dr. Simon Bates, UBC CTLT was the opening keynote on the “Anatomy of the 21^st century Educator” and Paul Hibbitts, the closing keynote speaking on “Exploring Learning Ecologies: Models and Experiences So Far”. You can view the keynote recordings and resources here.
Further exciting highlights of the ETUG 2015 Spring workshop and reminisces are detailed in “ETUG, MyHigh5s”. And if you can’t get enough of the artful photos by Dennis Yip, JIBC–we certainly can’t–check these out too!
In Fall 2015, as a result of feedback from community members, we organized a hybrid event that was part workshop, part unconference. We started the day with two plenary sessions: a panel session on the AGORA project, an open blended faculty development experience, and a student led session “Engaging Students in OER and #textbookbrokeBC”. We also organized a tour of the then brand new Inspiration Lab at the Vancouver Public Library as part of our “PRE-tug”, pre-workshop sessions. For a glimpse of how things went you can read comments from participant evaluations and flip thorough these photos.

It’s 2016

For Spring 2016, instead of the usual workshop, we changed things up again and joined a bigger event led by BCcampus and held at The Deltal Hotel Burnaby: The 2016 Festival of Learning. This larger professional development event brought together groups from all of B.C. post-secondary and explored many new and different ways to engage participants. One of ETUG’s contributions to the conference was hosting a “Shift and Share” session where participants moved from table to table experiencing short presentations on projects and ed tech demos. Kudos to Bryan Fair and his team at BCIT who provided the mobile computer workstations and supported this part of the program. Checkout photos from the first Festival of Learning!

It’s Fall 2016 and ETUG is poised to host one the best workshops ever with the sponsorship of Dr. Richard Smith, Director of the Center for Digital Media (CDM) (an early ETUG member) and his amazing team. The CDM Hangar was the perfect setting for our Fall workshop with the oh-so-apropos Halloween theme: “The Little (Work)shop of Horrors.” The program featured keynote Audrey Watters on “The Monsters of Education Technology” accompanied by the DJ talents of Jason Toal, SFU. (Note the workshop logo designed with hints of Pac-man was also created by the multi- talented Jason.)
As the incoming Chairs of the Stewardship Committee (SCETUG), Jason and Janine Hirtz, UBC Okanagan, thanked kele fleming, UBC for her leadership as she stepped down from the Chairship and they announced her induction to the prestigious SCETUG Members Emeritus in recognition of kele’s outstanding service to the community.
Following Audrey Watters’ keynote were lightning sessions by ETUGgers sharing “horror stories” of ed tech and lessons learned. Mike Minions was Master of Ceremonies and master storyteller- knitting together the stories with commentary and entertaining us with his anecdotes. (A few video contributions or “tales of fail” were posted prior to the workshop which are fun to watch.)
After lunch, posters and tables for demos and other “treats” were setup. The SFU TLC’s Ed Media team designed a great session on the “Horrific Hordes of the Hangar” where ETUGgers experienced transmedia through a storytelling game. Cool prizes given to the top team!
The Fall workshop was topped off with a very active and fun session by Patrick Pennefather, instructor at CDM. He led us through a learning activity he does regularly with his students, a “Toobeez Jam”. Through the jam, we learned how nsight is gained from iterative trials, from when we failure and how we can ultimately succeed through persistence and teamwork.
Check out the keynote recording and resources! Included are a time lapsed video of the workshop created by Josh Miller, CDM staff and pics of students from CDM doing graphic recordings of the keynote. Here are photos and here too and a recording of Patrick’s session live streamed on Facebook. In all, I’m sure you’d agree this one was a most memorable ETUG gathering!
For summaries on 2015 and 2016 by the SCETUG leadership see:
“Year in Review” for 2014-2015
“SCETUG Executive Stewards’ Year in Review “ for 2015-2016
“Highlights from the SCETUG Planning Day 2016”