I took up field work for the 2nd time this season at the Ontario Bioblitz flagship event on the Don Watershed. The Ontario Science Centre was the HQ. I was joined by Vithuja Vijayakanthan, one of my remaining 2 graduate students from my IRIS director days. Her research, looks at the inherent tensions between the Bioblitz as a research vehicle, and […]
Public understanding of science
My first MOOC: UQx's Denial101x Making Sense of Climate Science Denial
Update August 4, 2015: Unfortunately, my lower back & hip injury, has taken up ridiculous amounts of my life, and limited me to a max of 7 hours a day work, standing up, since late April. I was very sad that this meant I simply couldn't complete this very worthwhile, beautifully organized MOOC. I watched the first […]
The sky high Opportunity Cost of dealing with #HigherEd administration
The reason I am late by a week with this post, is that I spent a ton of time last week: 1. With inspiring high school students and great colleagues (at right). For the 2nd year, I judged the Toronto Envirothon at the Ontario Science Centre. 2. With inspiring university students: I edited the publishable research of my […]
Jim Woodgett discusses the Challenges of Science Communication
Yesterday, Monday 2 March, Dr. Jim Woodgett, research director of Mount Sinai's Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute, spoke about the issues and challenges faced by scientists, when it comes to doing effective communication of science in the public understanding of science realm. If you’re a Canadian scientist on Twitter you will know him as @JWoodgett, and may […]
Academic Citizenship: my authored output in 2015 so far, is 15 references
John Morgan (@JMorganTHE) and Chris Havergal's (@CHavergalTHE) wide-ranging article in the Times Higher Education magazine describes the stresses and strains on the clear glue that holds the global higher education ecosystem together. All of the invisible work that we do beyond our research and teaching can be loosely termed "administration", or community-building, or academic citizenship. […]
Keeping on the bright side: High & Low points of my 2014 #HigherEd year in numbers
An Academic New Year's Resolution list: For 2015, 101 Big And Small Ways To Make A Difference In Academia http://t.co/DCBuVYWyLo — Conditional Accept (@conditionaccept) January 7, 2015 In my experience, what I do remains a mystery to most people both within and outside of Higher Education. When they were young, my daughters told me that […]
Confronting Structural Sexism in #STEM: Pt 2
Because everyone who writes science blogs has written about this in the last few weeks, I'm joining the pack to give my 2 cents worth about the online attacks against those women in STEM who commented on the shirt worn by Dr. Matt Taylor of the ESA Rosetta Mission, while he was explaining the Philae probe's landing […]
Confronting Structural Sexism in #STEM: Pt 1
Women in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering & Medicine) have made progress, but not as much as expected, as Dr. Mildred Dresshelhaus explains in her interview with Science. Direct sexual harassment aside (discussed in part 3 of this blog series), the structural sexism of #STEM has greatly concerned me for decades, and, I am unhappy to report, […]
Why I'm using Twitter as a teaching tool
Dawn Bazely at York University Teaching in Focus conference May 21-22 2015 from Dawn Bazely As a teen doing my homework with the tv on in the background, I would hear stuff like "you'll get square eyes", "don't be a couch potato" (image at left, from Wikipedia) and "it's the boob-tube". In other words, tv watching […]
Perspective on the rise of administrators and audit culture in Higher Education
Update: The books examining and exposing audit culture, the rise of the managerial class in higher education, just keep on coming, e.g .Derek Sayer's forthcoming Rank Hypocrisies. The main proponents of audit culture in higher education often seem to be former academics who've entered the one-way street of administration. They're unlikely to return to active teaching […]
