Last January, before in-person undergraduate classes were cancelled in March 2020, my 8:30am Winter Semester Applied Plant Ecology lecture covered media literacy and science communication. We discussed where people get their news from, who is behind different media platforms, and the role of social media in public science education. I'm pretty sure it was […]
Public understanding of science
Pandemic Pedagogy Chronicles 9: 2020's science-policy-politics-lessons
It's a year since scientists sounded the alarm about a novel, rapidly spreading coronavirus centred in Wuhan, China. Today, the New York Times published a review of the early events, in which politics over-rode the science, and some of the key doctors who first encountered what we now call SARS-CoV-2 virus, died as they warned […]
Pandemic Pedagogy Chronicles 8: #AdventBotany VLOGs & BLOGs
I've been touting the benefits of blogging for developing student writing skills, ever since 2006, when I learned how to write posts for the Institute for Research and Innovation in Sustainability website, after I became its director. On my return to full-time teaching in 2014, I immediately added Blog writing assignments to all my Biology […]
Pandemic Pedagogy Chronicles Part 5: Mourning what we have lost in this pandemic
Lost relatives, friends, careers, jobs and money The cancellation of plans that were long in the making. In the months since the SARS-Cov-2 virus has spread across the globe, people have experienced losses, big and small. I am sad to write, that so many are grieving for family and friends who died (increasingly, un-necessarily) from […]
Pandemic Pedagogy Chronicles Part 2: creating good online courses takes resources
Since March 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic shut down in-person classes across North America, conversations have proliferated about online learning and the time that it took to teachers to pivot to courses online. In early April, I decided I must come up with an online substitute for the cancelled in-person field courses that affected about […]
My #SciComm (not Cricket) Tour of India, Bangladesh, Australia & Pakistan
There truly is nothing like a well-planned and structured sabbatical for giving professors the intellectual and emotional space to reflect on and crystallize what their previous five to six years of long days and hard work has been most fundamentally about. This is why, in my view, where they still exist, the sabbatical should be […]
Wikipedia Editathon Chronicles Part 2
In Wikipedia Chronicles Part 1 (January 30, 2018) I posted about my plan to hold a Wikipedia edit-a-thon at Visva Bharati University, West Bengal, India. I held a mini Ada Lovelace Day Wikipedia Editathon for my third Science Communication Workshop on March 20th. During my time (January to March 2018) as a visiting professor, I […]
Digital Divide Chronicles Part 3
This is the last leg of my four-month sabbatical trip to Asia and the southern hemisphere. I've met wonderful new colleagues, taught incredible students and learned a huge amount. I've been in India (2.75 months) with a side-trip to Bangladesh, Australia (3.5 weeks) with a side-trip to New Zealand. Now, I'm in Pakistan for […]
From Ecotourism Practitioner to Teacher & Researcher
I've been giving some lectures in the Biodiversity and Conservation course at Visva Bharati. So far, I've introduced students to arctic and forest ecology in Canada, and yesterday, I gave my first ever lecture on ecotourism, which is a topic in the course. Broadly speaking, ecotourism is the kind of tourism where people seek out […]
Digital Divide Chronicles Part 2
I began my career as a field ecologist on the remote shores of Hudson Bay, where I spent between two and four months off the electrical grid for five successive summers (1980-84). That's me at far left, with a rifle for polar bear protection. A generator charged the car battery that powered the radio that […]
