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Shall I Google That For You?
[social_share/] [social-bio] A vital skill for faculty and students alike is to make effective use of search tools. Google is used millions of times every minute yet most folks are using only a tiny fraction of Google’s ability. In particular, when we wish to use Google for supporting our scholarly work, there are particular strategies, tactics, and features that everyone ought to know. I recently came across a blog post at LifeHacker.com on “Google tips and tricks every student should know” The best part of this post was the 41 minute video resource (embedded below) on making effective use of Google Scholar. A default Scholar search results are normally sorted by relevance,…
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Indigenous Voices Program is Built for You
By Tereigh Ewert A ground-breaking program, almost unique to post-secondary institutions in Canada, is offered through our own Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching Effectivness: Indigenous Voices. In its final of three years of PCIP funding, we have been able to develop, pilot, and now deliver campus-wide this staff and faculty program, free of charge. The 14-gathering program was developed in consultation with Elders, Knowledge Keepers, community members, and Indigenous and non-Indigenous faculty and staff, and they continue to introduce learners to a variety of topics that challenge common misconceptions about Indigenous peoples, colonial structures and practices within education (decolonizing), and to Indigenous cultures, ways of knowing, world views, and histories…
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Catching a Falling Star or Lost in Outer Space? That’s what feedback is for!
[social_share/] [social-bio] By Carolyn Hoessler What would it be like to wait for 31 months before finding out if you were on your way to success or have burst into flames? The European Space Agency had such a wait to hear how its Rosetta space mission to study a comet is going, hearing this week for the first time from their spacecraft that had finally travelled close enough to the sun to have solar power to wake up. In comparison most 4-year undergraduate programs are 32 months (e.g., September 2013 to April 2017 not counting summers) – a long time to wait for student feedback on their orientation and…
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Finding Our Footing With Our Communities
[social_share/] [social-bio] With Susan Bens Some time ago our Centre received a suggestion to tailor one of our increasingly known and appreciated Course Design Institutes specifically for those aiming to incorporate community-engaged learning. A team of us came together to begin that process and it’s fair to say we struggled to find our footing. After a few meetings, this led us to ask the question: “Do we really know what is needed by faculty with respect to community-engaged learning?” Our honest answer to ourselves was at best, a “maybe”. Since “maybe” isn’t good enough when planning a high-impact learning experience, we decided to take a few steps back in order to…
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What Do We Mean by ‘Open’?
[social_share/] [social-bio] As I wrote about in an earlier post, the GMCTE is launching what we believe is the first “open” online course from the University of Saskatchewan. Introduction to Learning Technologies is being offered simultaneously to both a small blended cohort (mostly online, with five face-to-face sessions) and a much larger open group of participants. This course is designed for faculty, instructors and grad students who wish to learn more about effective uses of learning technologies. Participants will explore pedagogically-informed use of blogs, podcasts, social bookmarking and a host of other tools, in addition to considering the implications of copyright and Creative Commons, digital citizenship and digital literacy for…
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Thanks GSR 984: Thinking Critically
[social_share/] [social-bio] By Colleen George I am a graduate student. Like many graduate students, I spend my days in front of my computer writing, editing, analyzing, and checking Facebook. Working to complete a graduate thesis has taught me many things: self-discipline and commitment, organization, and writing skills; but I found that as I moved further through my program I was not exposed to opportunities that would help me advance many of the professional skills that I felt I needed both for my own personal development and to market myself after my degree. Because of this, I began to look for these opportunities on campus. That is when I found the…
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Curriculum of Fractal Beauty
[social_share/] [social-bio] By Carolyn Hoessler What image of our discipline are we sharing with students or with colleagues as we start a new term? Are we sharing glimpses of the beauty that intrigue and motivate us? Just as lecture is a piece of the course, each course is embedded within a program, and each program within the ongoing history of a discipline. The transformative concepts and essential knowledge, skills, or values of the discipline are embodied within the program, enacted within the course, seen within the lecture activities, readings and assessments. These central features thus appear as more than just a single layer of foundational ideas. Instead, our programs…
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Supporting Your Flipped Classroom with Open Resources
[social_share/] [social-bio] We’ve talked about flipped classrooms in this space before. In a nutshell, flipped classrooms involve taking the regular lecture style content out of the classroom and assigning it as homework prior to coming to class. The majority of the time, this involves having the students watch videos, often created by the instructor, to prepare for class. Recently I came across the Open Learning Initiative (OLI) and have considered how it would couple with a flipped classroom. The Open Learning Initiative “is a grant-funded group at Carnegie Mellon University, offering innovative online courses to anyone who wants to learn or teach. [Their] aim is to create high-quality courses and contribute…