EduGlu Sandbox

Yesterday was kind of a sad day for me. My friend and colleague Amanda Harby is retiring from BCcampus. Amanda is the person who first hired me when I arrived in BC, jobless but with hope in my heart and a song on my lips. Amanda (and another colleague, Randy Bruce) are two of the big reasons I took the job at C2T2 - the chance to work with people who had helped grow this amazing grassroots network of ed tech professionals across the province, and frankly, beyond. It sure wasn’t the pay

Those of you in BC are likely well aware of all of Amanda’s contributions in our province. For those who are not, I did a little internet archaeology to try and document some of her many contributions (luckily, Amanda herself is working to collect some of this together; our biggest loss, collectively, will be not just her as a person but her as a witness to and participant in so many projects and developments over the years). Over the years Amanda was involved with:

• The issues affecting the implementation and use of educational technology : B.C. colleges & institutes / Liz Hammond-Kaarremaa, Amanda Harby.
• An apparently recurring theme was “Interactive Video Conference in BC“
• One of a number of sites that seemed ahead of its time in its effort to share and spread best practices, the Cycle of Improved Practice
• advised the Site for Exploring Emerging Delivery Systems site, an early attempt to help orient educators to make good choices in educational technology
• LandOnline (which eventually morphed in Edutools) which is documented both in An Essay in elearning tool categorization and this paper on “On-line Educational Delivery Applications: a Web Tool for Comparative Analysis“

This barely scratches the surface, but you get a sense of a lot of the different things Amanda got involved with. Always with grace, humour and helpfulness.

Amanda, I am going to miss you, a lot. I know I owe you a lot personally, as do many around the province. I wish you the best as you start this new chapter. I wish you lots of adventures, lots of exploring, lots of great kayak trips, lots of song, but maybe not so many renovations

And, I’ll leave you with this lovely recording of Amanda that was made at last spring’s ETUG workshop in a session on Digital Storytelling.

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