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If It’s Too Good to Be True: The publishing edition
[social_share/] [social-bio] At the end of June this year, I did something all graduate students look forward to doing: I uploaded the final, defended and amended version of my MA thesis to the University of Saskatchewan’s Electronic Theses and Dissertations site. Then, only two days later, I received an email from a company offering me the chance to publish my thesis, for free. I suspected that every other grad student who submitted a thesis that month also received such a generous and tempting offer. Grad students often experience pressure to build a publication record, which I assume might be why publishing companies like this spam us. I found an article…
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What A Good Leader Does to Enable Good Teaching
[social_share/] [social-bio] By Jay Wilson, Department Head and Associate Professor, Curriculum Studies & Fellow at the GMCTE As a result of a number of encounters this week my thoughts turned towards the important role of leadership in educational institutions. Here I will share the reasons why I think leadership is valuable. The thoughts are not groundbreaking or especially new but it is important to remind ourselves why strong leadership makes our organizations successful. The characteristics that true leaders possess are instrumental in the success of our institutions. The list of traits includes many descriptors such as mentor, advocate, and champion. To put things in context, people need to know that…
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College of Education Adopts Use of ePortfolios
[social_share/] [social-bio] By Tim Molnar, Assistant Professor, College of Education The College of Education recently implemented an electronic portfolio system (ePort) called Mahara™. This open source ePort emerged from a collaborative venture funded by several post secondary institutions and government bodies in New Zealand. In Maori mahara means “to think, thinking, or thought.” Our intentions with implementing Mahara™ are to enhance teacher candidates’ learning by offering a place for the collection of evidence, analysis, representation and sharing relating to their experience as developing educators. Instructors and cooperating teachers have the opportunity to examine, assess and provide feedback to teacher candidates on their efforts and progress. Using Mahara™ also offers an…
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Adopting Open Textbooks Online Workshop
[social_share/] [social-bio] BCcampus is offering a free, online four-week workshop for those interested in adopting open textbooks or just interested in learning more about them. The workshop sessions will run from January 12 – February 6, 2015. Each week will have a new topic including: What is open? What is an open textbook? Creative Commons Licenses Institutional Readiness Find, Evaluate and Modify Open Textbooks Additional information and the registration form can be found here. In addition, the BCcampus Open Textbook project will now offer $250 to faculty or graduate students who teach at post-secondary institutions in Saskatchewan and Alberta for reviewing open textbooks in their collection. For more information about…
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There Are No “Dumb” Questions, But There Are Intelligently Guessed Answers
[social_share/] [social-bio] The weather turning colder, the snow starting to fall, the days becoming shorter and people more busily bustling around are sure signs that “the most wonderful time of the year” on our campus is fast approaching: final exam season. Few, if any, types of questions appear more prolifically on final exams than multiple choice questions (MCQ). However, there are good MCQ’s and there are not-so-good MCQ’s. An exam containing poorly written questions will produce inaccurate measures of your student learning; if the purpose of a final exam is measuring student learning, a final exam consisting of poorly constructed questions is essentially just “going through the motions” of assessment.…
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Who’s in Charge? You or the Room?
[social_share/] [social-bio] ISSoTL 2014 was held this past October in Quebec City. I was attracted to the conference not just because of the theme (“Nurturing Passion and Creativity in Teaching and Learning”) but also because of the location—I had not been to Quebec City before. I walked from the Hotel Claredon, reputedly the oldest hotel in Canada, to the conference centre through the gates going from the old city to the “new” city each morning. I couldn’t help but notice how different it felt from one side of the wall to the other. The transition zone was well marked and prominent. On the winding narrow streets of the Old City,…
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Twitter As A Catalyst for Science
[social_share/] [social-bio] By Jorden Cummings, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology In May I had the pleasure of participating in a symposium at the annual Association for Psychological Science (APS) conference entitled Social Media as a Catalyst for Psychological Science. (The organizer of that symposium, Cedar Riener, wrote a great summary of our symposium – including the slides from our talks). My own contribution was specifically about using Twitter as a psychological scientist. In fact, the very reason I was invited to participate in the symposium is because I follow Cedar Riener on Twitter, and responded to his tweet looking for someone to fill in for a symposium speaker who could…