Summer 2016 1. Growth Mindset!

Although the end of the semester had some moments of intense weirdness and we've had some family challenges (very elderly father-in-law is really having trouble), the summer has gotten off to such a good start. I am really glad that this summer is going to evolve week by week, going in whatever direction seems best! I think I'm going to need that flexibility for family reasons, and I've earned it too, ha ha: the past two summers I spent doing huge course designs (Indian Epics last summer, and Myth-Folklore the summer before that)... plus, I'm on a 9-month year to year contract, so it's not like the university even pays me during the summer anyway! So, this summer is the great SUMMER OF READING, and it's all about regrouping and reorganizing, just seeing what attracts my attention and lets me have fun! I'll be writing up these little weekly notes because the aimlessness (in a good sense) of the summer means that I might even forget what I was doing back in May by the time August rolls around!

1. Canvas. I signed up for migrating my courses to Canvas this Fall, so I am learning about Canvas this summer. I'm not really anticipating anything good about moving my courses, but it's hard to believe it could be any worse than D2L. My use of the LMS is totally limited (quizzes for students to declare their work, gradebook, and homepage), and it looks like my homepage is going to work with the same Blogger solution I used in D2L, so the next question will be figuring out the quizzes (especially changing the dates semester to semester and reusing the same questions across multiple weeks), and then the gradebook. I'm also carrying on with #OU_LMS16 at Twitter, and I Storify that every week: #OU_LMS16.

2. Canvas Growth Mindset Playground. Even though I am not a fan of the LMS, I realize that the LMS migration is a big opportunity for talking about course design, perhaps the last really big opportunity I will have for that in my career at OU. So, I would really like to be part of that conversation, and I want to lobby for two things: growth mindset as a design strategy itself, plus the use of live content in Canvas that is built with real tools on the open Internet (especially Twitter and YouTube). I've built a course in our sandbox, but I just learned that the sandbox will go away, so I'm waiting until our real course space is set up (next week?) and then I will be working on Canvas.MythFolklore.net more intensively. So far, though, I am really happy with the kinds of live content I am able to demonstrate there!

3. Growth Mindset Curation. I am having so much fun (re)organizing my growth mindset content and collecting new materials to share with my students. I reorganized my Growth Mindset Memes blog, and I set up a new blog: Growth Mindset Zone, which is both for the Canvas project but also as a resource center. I also decided that I was doing enough with growth mindset now that it justified having a new Twitter account: @OUMindsetPlay. I am excited about connecting with new people and building a new part of my PLN that is specifically focused on growth mindset. The more I learn about that, the more I want to learn, which definitely sounds like a reason for building a PLN. I've got a good daily routine going on with my blogs, Twitter, Diigo, YouTube, Flickr, and Pinterest so that by the time next year begins, I will have a much broader and deeper collection of resources to share with my students! And more cats, of course.

4. Reading. I listened to Proust and the Squid this week, which was excellent, and on my Kindle I am reading Devdutt Pattanaik's My Gita. I'll be starting a new Audible book today, but I have not picked it out yet. Too many to chose from!

What's up next week... no VCU AltFest but Autumm and I are doing a hangout on Wednesday... Rob and Bucky's learning design webinars start on Thursday... and I think I am going to tackle curating my other video resources this week, based on the great results I saw when cleaning up growth mindset videos last week. I'll report back next weekend when I see what actually happens! :-)