Today was the second day of the 2025 Virtual CIRPA conference.
There were some stand out highlights of the portions of the conference I was able to attend.
I think the biggest highlight was all the discussion at our Annual General Meeting.
CIRPA is doing a pilot project for institutional membership where a Canadian Post-Secondary institution can pay one fee to cover all staff memberships.
To do this even for one year requires approval from the membership.
There were a lot of thoughtful questions and discussion.
The motion passed, so CIRPA will test out the institutional membership.
The other highlight for me was the pair of interactive sessions from Thompson Rivers University on a game to help with strategic foresight.
When we started planning the conference, we called for creative submissions -- something a bit different from the regular session format.
It makes a big difference and lets the attendees really interact with each other.
Yesterday was the first day of the Canadian Institutional Research and Planning 2025 virtual conference.
The conference is for professionals who work in Institutional Research and Planning.
We are people who count students, report to the public and the government, support data-informed decision making, run surveys and other things.
I am the Program Chair of the conference this year, the first time I'm doing anything quite like this.
I really have to thank my co-chair Emily helping me when I stumbled and making sure everything got done.
We have had record setting attendance this year and the first day was filled with amazing engagement from attendees.
A virtual conference is a little different, since you can't see the rooms filling up.
But when we judge by the attendance at each session and number (and quality) of the questions, we know people are there and engaged.
We also had really well attended networking sessions.
Our opening keynote from Madeline Bonsma-Fisher on understanding cycling network access using data really got our attendees in data frame of mind.
I approached her to speak at the conference because I wanted to have someone talk about using data in a different domain than we usually do, to get people thinking about the possibilities.
She also brought it home for me by showing the importance of infrastructure crossing the Humber River, where my employer's main campus is located, to providing safe cycle networks to destinations on both side of the river.
I have started saving up for a cargo bike.
I have to give a shout out to all our speakers on the first day.
I didn't get to see all your sessions live, but I'm looking forward to watching the recordings.
Based on the discussions from the volunteer team, they all went wonderfully.
I always learn a lot at CRIPA, and yesterday was no different.
Doing a virtual conference is a bit different, and I do miss connecting with my colleagues in person.
However, as Dr. Nicole Johnson of the Canadian Digital Learning Research Association pointed out in her talk:
people may not always prefer online learning to online, but often it's not a decision between in-person learning and online learning.
Often it's a difference between online learning and no learning at all.
This year, I probably would not have been able to attend an in-person conference.
I was lucky to be able to go to last year's conference in Fredricton, New Brunswick.
I'm not sure I would be able to do that this year.
I am going to try to make it work for next year's conference, through.
I'm looking forward to seeing all of our conference participants tomorrow.
One of the reasons the web is really the best platform is the ability to inspect the HTML behind every page.
Because the content has to display in a web browser and that browser has developer tools,
you can get the HTML behind any page fairly easily.
While my work is primarily about analyzing data, my role sits well within higher education administration.
As an administrator, many of the tools that I use have a front end that is a web application.
Even our email, documents and presentations can be accessed through a web interface.
I'm sure none of this is surprising or news to anyone.
Everybody uses these tools and probably doesn't think about it at all.
But it does mean you can always get at the data being displayed to you.
I was faced with a web application that had exactly the data I wanted,
but no way to download it. So I immediately open the web inspector and discover that it's not a table.
Instead, it's using CSS Grid to create a table.
However, the cells each have a particular class so it's easy to use Beautiful Soup to find all those tags.
The one wrinkle I learned pretty quickly was that not all the data is loaded into the web page.
I think the entries are dynamically added to the DOM as you scroll to them.
That meant I had to run my script several times, scrolling through the list.
That meant I had several csv files named dataX.csv where X is an integer.
These files could also contain duplicate entries, which I wanted to get rid of.
I found the following command that worked perfectly:
The head command grabs the header from the first file.
(Because they were generated by my script, the files all have the same header.)
The tail command strips out the header from all the files.
Then we sort and remove duplicates.
I was honoured to be asked to be the Program Chair for the 2025 Canadian Institutional Research and Planning Association (CIRPA) conference.
It's a chance to work on a great conference and with a wonderful co-chair and volunteer team.
Naturally, I accepted immediately.
This year's conference will be held virtually.
Many of my colleagues working in Institutional Research and Planning do not get to attend our annual conference due to high travel expenses.
This has been exacerbated lately due to a lot of cuts to professional development budgets.
The CIRPA board decided to try bringing a virtual conference into our geographical rotation.
We had virtual conferences in 2020 and 2021 and we resumed in-person conferences in 2022.
The virtual conference is a great opportunity to bring people together from across the country.
That's one reason I decided a theme of Cross Canada IRP would be appropriate.
This project has been in the works for almost a year now.
While this is a simple site, I had never set up an actual website before.
I needed to set up another simple website, so that had me setting up servers,
learning how to configure a web server and set up certificates.
With that done, there was no reason not to set up my own site.
My goal was always to own, understand and control the technology stack of my website.
I now understand why so many people use the existing platforms.
There is so much that goes into setting up even a simple website
and if your goal is to get your writing out to the world,
fiddling with all the little details will just slow you down.
I'm hoping this blog will give me a chance to write about my interests
in higher education, data, board games, tabletop role-playing games and other pursuits.
My goal is to be a part of the smaller web and try to take back some of that technology for my own purposes.
As always, the views expressed here are my own personal ones and don't reflect those of my current employer or any past employer.