4 day work week this week with Monday being labour day. This week was dominated by 2 events; one at home and one at work.

• At home, the BC teachers strike – which began last June and closed schools down and started summer 2 weeks early for my kids – continued into the fall and looks like it is not going to be settled for quite awhile. On Tuesday, I joined my family for a day of protest on what should have been their first day of school.

• At work, it was announced that my current Director is going to be the Acting Executive Director for our organization for the next 6 months. Our current ED announced 6 months ago that he was leaving BCcampus, so it was no surprise that this was coming. Although with that change means a change in my role as she steps away from the Open Textbook project and focuses on the wider organization. This means my colleague Amanda Coolidge and myself will be picking up more responsibilities on the Open Textbook project, and we spent time this week working on what this will mean to our current tasks and projects.

Some other stuff that happened this week.

• Welcomed my old colleague Tracy Kelly to the BCcampus team. Tracy is going to be working on the Professional Development portfolio at BCcampus. So happy to be working with her again.
• Fixed the output errors and finished our open Geography textbook. Shipped it off to our POD service. Once they process, I’ll be able to add it to the open.bccampus.ca site.
• Did some research on copyright and how it applies to screenshots of products we include in our Database Design textbook (Microsoft spells it all out pretty clearly. We’re all good to go.)
• Got clarification from Creative Commons on the wording of our license for the OpenStax Introduction to Sociology book we are adapting.
• I got VagrantPress working with Pressbooks (thanks to this tip about Apache config changes in Apache 2.4.7). I updated the VagrantPress mutisite install page with the solution I found in case others had this same issue.
• Also upgraded the .Net framework on my PC, which fixed an issue I was having with the GitHub Windows app (in short, it wasn’t working. I was running into this issue. Now it is. Yay)
• Discovered AppOpusBuilder, a tool for converting ebooks to Android apps. Haven’t played with it yet.
• Came across a whack of open textbooks and other OER’s related to Health, Nursing and Emergency Services.
• Worked with Amanda to flesh out some of the tasks for the three Faculty Fellows who will be joining our project for the next year. Think there is an official news release about the fellows coming from our communication people in the coming days.
• After speaking with OpenStax, I’ve changed the covers on the OpenStax textbooks in our collection so they are consistent with their standard brand.
• Decided on how to list adapted textbooks on the open.bccampus.ca repository site. Got some work on the open site to do with Brad to make this happen.
• With Amanda, began reviewing proposals for projects to develop textbooks for health, skills & trades training. Think this will be a big focus of our fall.
• The Open Textbook Summit 2015 edition came up a few times in conversation this week. We’re starting to think about a third annual one in the sprint of 2015.

And finally, going to drink some good, fair and bad beer with Brad at the Great Canadian Beer Festival in a few hours.