Dear Colleagues,
I hope the spring semester is off to a good start for you and your students. Winter has just turned the corner and this month is as good a time as any for renewed love. I'm thinking about the love you have for teaching, a love of learning, and love for our connections with colleagues, family, and friends, and also optimism for the coming bloom in our lovely natural world. Read on for more about:
- Accessibility Tip: Grackle
- Spring cleaning with AI Workshops (along with cautionary insight on the broader ramifications of "soulless" AI)
- Virtual Worlds & VR Update, professional development options, and more!
See the Tech Tips blog for previous issues of this newsletter. Please email me your best tech or pedagogy tips. You know I'd love to share your tips and tricks here!
Bethany Winslow, Director of Online Learning
Accessibility Tip: Grackle
Here's an accessibility tool I wanted to highlight because I know a bunch of my own PDFs in Canvas are flagged as NOT accessible. From the eCampus website “GrackleDocs is an accessibility add-on for Google Docs, Slides and Sheets. When you launch it, it checks accessibility and guides you through remediation. Using the GrackleDocs side panel you can convert your documents to PDFs while adhering to accessibility standards.”
If you regularly use Google docs and sometimes download and share those documents as a PDFs, it's easy to assume that if you're using document formatting correctly that saving from File>>Download as PDF, that they would automatically be accessible. Even though I know I regularly use features like headers correctly, and am attentive to adding alt descriptions to images, I've been dismayed to see so many of my PDFs in Canvas created this way flagged as problematic. From the Grackle interface, however, I am alerted to needed edits for accessibility. Then I can download as a PDF with those edits saved in the PDF version. Check out the links below to learn more. NOTE: there are three different versions of Grackle extensions to add if you use the GSuite; there is one for Gdocs, one for GSlides, and a third one for GSheets.
(Can't say I'm going to love having to edit and replace all those PDFs over time. Oy vey!)
Spring Cleaning with AI
In case you missed it, there was an invitation I wanted to pass along from San Jose State's Office of Faculty Success, University Personnel, the University Library, and the Academic Innovation and Institutional Effectiveness. It's a weekly series on Wednesdays covering a range of topics on how to use AI in our work. I expect to get access to recordings and I'll pass those along in a future newsletter. Register for the workshops from the link below.
ChatGPT: The Soul Eater
Of course I have to follow up the previous plug for using AI, with something to balance out the optimism. Nick Cave nails it. AI can’t ever be what it is to be human, but that’s exactly what makes great art and what makes art so important to soulful (i.e. meaningful) living. (For context: Nick is a musician than answers fan letters on his website, and in this letter he's answering two people who ask him what he thinks about ChatGPT.) I love Nick's insights here and I think they kind of dovetail into all my Burning Man analogies about duct tape and bootstrapping it as we integrate "Art" into STEM. Anyways, it's a five minute hand illustrated video narrated by Stephen Fry and worth a listen (IMHO).
ChatGPT: The Soul Eater (Nick Cave, Stephen Fry, & After Skool)
Virtual Worlds & VR
In this month's virtual worlds & VR section I wanted to fondly remember, and honor, my colleague from our King Library's KLEVR lab, Jon Oakes.
I was heartbroken to hear of Jon's recent passing. The loss to the university community, to the students he mentored in the campus AR/VR club, and to faculty across campus cannot be overstated. I met Jon early on when I was at eCampus, and had started my professional forays into virtual worlds and VR. He quickly became my go-to colleague to geek out with or turn to for advice. He partnered with us at eCampus and we attended tech conferences with him, VR events at the library, and when I worked with the College of Business and their Silicon Valley Innovation Challenge in 2020, during COVID, and they wanted some way to do an innovative coffee break hour, in lieu of using Zoom, and it was primarily Jon's advice and mentorship that gave me the courage to pitch them my (fairly ambitious) idea and then deliver on it. I installed Hubs code and gave 40 student teams their own Hubs rooms for a networking hour that needed to host 300-400 virtual attendees. I wanted people to be able to easily jump in and out of different team's rooms and socialize with the students from that team. Jon joined my small team of students who helped me keep an eye on the event while it was live. Again, it took place across 40 distributed locations that were open concurrently, with people jumping from one room to another! It's one of the things I'm most proud of professionally accomplishing. While I planned the whole thing myself, installed the code myself (!), built the rooms myself, and oversaw the whole thing while it was live, it was Jon's generous confidence in me (and in my vision) that help make it a success.
That's just one tiny illustration of the deep impact one person can have on another. I'm not sure any of us can ever fully know how far a reach we have in the lives of others. I am profoundly grateful to have known Jon, and he leaves a giant hole in my heart and in my professional life.
Professional Development
eCampus Workshops
SJSU’s eCampus offers workshops year round. Click the link below to access details for the highlighted workshop.
- Advanced Canvas workshop: Active Learning and Analytical Insights - Are you using the analytics feature in Canvas? If not, make this the semester that you check this out! There are multiple workshop dates to choose from, the first of which is February 27th. Click on the link above to learn more and register for that or another date.
See the full list of upcoming eCampus workshops. Note that workshop dates are listed at the bottom of each image on the page. You can also request to watch a recording of an eCampus workshop.