Nicholle and I are doing great. We received an invitation to apply for permanent residency, so maybe the Canadians will let us stay in their lovely country long-term, if that’s how things pan out. We are slowly putting the application together and hope it will be successful. If it is, Nicholle will have more (and better) options about how she will spend the next few years.
April 1: Great news this morning. I was awarded the Killam Graduate Teaching Assistant Award, Faculty of Education, 2020-2021. This is a big award and I am really happy with the recognition. The (29-page!) nomination package I put together took a great amount of time, and that itself was only a record of the huge amount of time I have put into my teaching and learning activities since coming to UBC. This contribution was noted, in a second letter, by the Director, Graduate Programs, Faculty of Education:
The 2021 Adjudication Committee for this award in the Faculty of Education included members from all academic units. The Committee remarked on the strength of all applications, and noted that it was difficult to select winners from among such a strong group. They commended your outstanding portfolio of teaching, noting in particular your diverse and exemplary contributions in a range of teaching settings.
In September 2019, my YouTube account was suspended “due to repeated or severe violations of…Community Guidelines“. It was totally my own fault. I had just made my Right To Be Forgotten (RTBF) explainer video and I wanted to promote it so I went to other videos mentioning the RTBF and copy/pasted a note and a link to my video. I only learned afterward that this is considered spamming and hence “severe violations of…Community Guidelines”. Unlike for folk who have posted a lot of content (or “influencers” [uck!]) this was not a huge deal for me at the time. I did, however, make use of the one-time-only appeal process and made my case that this was an innocent mistake: no dice – my account was toast. Since then, I had to use another account to recreate my playlists and to be able to watch videos that required log in.
In February 2021, I decided to chance my arm and I emailed YouTube and asked for them to review my suspension. I spent some time crafting the email and it paid off: a few hours later, my account was reinstated and I had fun looking back at the playlists that I had been locked out of 18 months before.
Feb 10, 2021: Since the start of the year, I have been putting together a list of stories related to the phenomenon of “unpublishing” in newspapers. This is related to the RTBF as it “allows people to petition to have information about them removed from or added to old stories, to have their names anonymized, or to have the stories delisted from Google searches.” I have been keeping an eye on this since 2018 but it took off in a big way this year. Anyway, I shared my webpage list with Stephen Downes (above) and got a shoutout on his webpage. Stephen is kind of a big deal as he and a colleague designed and taught the first MOOC back in 2008.