• Interviewed by the SFU student newspaper The Peak on open textbooks.
• Was also interviewed (wearing my Dad gamer hat) by a Wall Street Journal (?) reporter about the Minecraft sale to Microsoft after a reporter there saw a tweet I made about the potential sale. As my daughter would say “that was random”.
• Attended the regional Premier’s Awards for public service excellence where our open textbook was a regional finalist for the award. Even though we didn’t win, it was very nice to have our project highlighted to the pubic service across the province and make it to the finalist stage. They made a video about our project.
• Worked with Amanda and Lauri to develop the final checklist for an open textbook release.
• More working on wording of CC licenses for our derivative textbooks. I have a blog post on the Open textbook site coming soon about the complications of licensing a derivative version of an existing textbook.
• Registered for OpenEd By the way, if you are going to OpenEd and are interested in the logistics of adapting open textbooks in our project, I highly recommend attending Amanda and Lauri’s presentation on our operational procedures around adapting open textbooks. The work they are doing as project managers is really on the ground nuts and bolts get it done stuff.
• Presentation was accepted for COHERE, so registered and made travel arrangements for Regina.
• Worked with Hilda to develop and Open Textbook email newsletter that we can send out to inform faculty once we release the newly adapted Canadian versions of our textbooks.
• Working on some changes to the open site to make it easier to identify books and their child adaptations, and create some way to cross link the two to make people aware that the books have derivative versions.
• Also with open site, we’re adding a “do you want to adapt this textbook?” type link to start opening it up for BC faculty who wish to make their own adaptations of the books. It’s still a manual process for us to set this up (this will not scale!), but we want to start seeding the idea that you don’t need us to adapt an open textbook, and see if we can get some early adopters into adapting a book on their own.
• Continued reviewing new textbook adaptation creation funding applications, although this is primarily handled by Amanda.
• Wrote blog post on 10th anniversary of Wikimedia Commons. Also contributed a couple photos for their Historical Monuments project.
• Attended Amanda’s CCCOER presentation on open textbooks.
• Met with our Equella reps.
• Budgets are going to be a bigger part of my life with the recent org changes. Not a bad thing, but more administrative work as I need to set up a tracking system to keep me on track with budgets.
• Great convo (as always) with Brian this morning that has my head swimming in the clouds in a really awesome way. And also wondering if we can build stuff with Alan while he is in BC this fall.

Random notes on my new productivity systems

My “check email 2x a day” system fell apart this week as I realize that the increased demands of juggling administrative tasks required more email checking. I still am hoping that “11and 3” will work for me, but I might have to adjust as I felt myself pulled into email more than I hoped this week.

And finally

Those who know me know I am a Canadian soccer fan (yes, there are a few of us) and this week was noteworthy because I watched as we ended a 2 year winless drought and won an international soccer match beating Jamaica 3-1.

2 FRIGGIN YEARS!

Even Toronto Maple Leaf fans haven’t felt the pain of going 2 years without a win. Good on ya, boys. And because Getty Images now lets you embed images, I can even include a nice pic of the occasion.

Allez la rouge! That should bring up our FIFA ranking to, oh 120th or so in the world.