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 […]
Education
Pandemic Pedagogy Chronicles 7: How Humanizing Science Helps with Hallowe'en at Home
My favourite book by Charles Darwin is the one about worms (The formation of vegetable mould, through the action of worms: with observations on their habits: 1881). Today, Darwin is still a larger than life iconic figure, but thanks to his habit of writing in books, known as marginalia, we have insights into him as […]
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 3: All Zoomed Out
Zoom is the platform that somehow won the online meeting software wars during the COVID-19 pandemic. I've previously used it, Adobe, Skype, Bluejeans, Citrix, GoTo, and many other platforms for virtual meetings, including doctoral defences, and webinars going back to the mid 2000s. via GIFER I've been climbing the Zoom pandemic pedagogy mountain since March […]
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 […]
The Canada-India project, CIPRI, started with a conversation about the arctic
I have been in Delhi, and in one of its many surrounding suburbs (Greater Noida), this past week, with YorkU colleague, Dr. Nivedita Das Kundu, networking and building CIPRI (Canada-India Project for Research and Innovation) connections for the York Centre for Asian Research. Nivedita, a political scientist and International Relations scholar, lived, studied and worked in […]
At long last, the subway to York University has arrived!
I arrived at York University in 1990, to start a job as an assistant professor in Biology. I was returning to Toronto from six years in England, at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, doing doctoral research, and afterwards, holding a couple of junior research fellowships (post-docs). I was excited to join York, a new […]
What Trees Talk About features the excellent research of Canadian ecologists
I'm always thrilled when one of my colleagues contacts me, to alert me to their research hitting the mainstream media. On November 26th, 2017, CBC's Nature of Things, which is introduced by Dr. David Suzuki, broadcast an absolutely fabulous documentary on the ecology of Canada's boreal forest: What Trees Talk About. I loved the programme […]
Science, Art, Policy and Politics at the United Nations Climate Change Meetings
I'll be posting 12 blogs between December 1st and 24th to reach my goal of 24 posts for 2017. I'm behind because my sabbatical has kept me too busy to maintain my blogging schedule! Back in 2009, when I was director of the Institute for Research and Innovation in Sustainability (IRIS), I applied for York […]
New Indigenous People & Plants Trail at Royal Botanic Gardens, Hamilton
The new Indigenous People and Plants Trail at the Royal Botanical Gardens, Hamilton, Ontario, opens to the public on Monday 18th September 2017. The trail, located in Cootes Paradise, teaches us about how plants were used by the Anishinaabe people. I found a great journal article about Anishnaabe ethnobotany in NW Ontario, by Davidson-Hunt, Jack, Mandamin & […]
