Monthly Archives: December 2013
Wintry vistas on University of Calgary campus
Here are some photos from my walk into work this morning.
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- Professional Faculties staircase
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- Administration loading dock
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- View of Mackimmie from Administration
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- View of Social Sciences from Administration
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- Chair outside Professional Faculties
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- Bikes outside Social Sciences
Digital Arts & Humanities (DAH) Colloquium: Call for Speakers
Editor’s Note: This series was later renamed DASHTalks, for Digital Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities Talks. More information is here.
We invite faculty and graduate students engaged in well-defined or -developed research/creation projects in the digital arts and humanities to propose brief and trenchant 5-minute presentations on these projects, for a colloquium to be held in January 2014 (dates TBD). We will accept as many proposals as will feasibly promote the colloquium’s spirit of cross-fertilization among members of the University of Calgary’s Faculty of Arts.
Accepted proposals will explain your research and creation methods in engaging and provocative language. In other words, why is your work important, not just to you but also to the faculty, the university, and the community at large? How might it foster collaborations with them? Presentations will be video-recorded, edited, and distributed widely.
Please submit a 100-word bio and 100-word proposal to the co-organizers, Murray McGillivray [ mmcgilli{at}ucalgary.ca ] and Michael Ullyot [ ullyot{at}ucalgary.ca ] by December 27th, 2013.
Facetime in the Flipped Classroom
What are classrooms for? One answer to that question harkens back to the invention of the university in the European middle ages: for lectures (or lectio), or reading texts aloud in an age of scarce manuscripts. The other component of a good medieval education was oral disputation (disputatio), which we’ve mixed with the Socratic method to design discussion forums and oral exams.
To save higher education, click here
Last month (November 2013) the Faculty of Arts issued a report on “Post-Secondary Education in the Digital Age.” (I was a co-chair.) We gathered information on faculty members’ use of learning technologies, or more specifically, on their
“current e-learning practices, their needs and desires regarding e-learning, any impediments that limited their ability to utilize e-learning in their classes, the means by which the Faculty should support e-learning, and the priorities the Faculty should set for e-learning.”
Finally, we made seven recommendations to foster pedagogical innovations.
MOOCs: Evolution or revolution?
Today I heard a podcast from Radio National (Australia)’s “Big Ideas” program on the MOOC, or Massive Open Online Course, “an online course aimed at unlimited participation and open access.” It gave me the title for this post, and provoked a lot of questions. In sum, its main question was whether this new platform for teaching and learning is going to revolutionize education as we know it, or simply represent the next stage of its evolution. (Whether or not it will go the way of education-by-radio or other past ‘revolutions’ wasn’t one of the options.)
Launching a conversation
Where are all the bloggers in higher-ed administration?
The question sounds strange, maybe because higher-ed administration is veiled in mystery and perceived as mundane. We don’t ask about the blogging actuaries. But maybe that’s why I couldn’t say what interesting questions come up in actuarial science, or just what actuaries do. (Something about pensions, I think.)