An important post-sabbatical duty for profs, is writing a report of the activities that were undertaken. As I keep telling people, including, astonishingly, some professors: "A sabbatical is NOT a holiday!" After my first two, year-long, sabbaticals in 1997 and 2004, I wrote boring memos to the Dean's office. My approach to reporting changed in […]
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About those missing blog posts... part 2: link rot
I covered some of my challenges with blogging in the first of this "about those missing blog posts..." series. Today is about link rot, which is what happens when you link to a live url (uniform resource locator) in a blog post, but at some point, the link to this content breaks. Why does this happen? And […]
Another VLOG... this time from Professor Pat Lakin-Thomas
Smart phones not only put advanced photographic capacity into the hands of everyone who owns one, but also an ability to record amazing videos. An emerging research literature is documenting the power of these technologies in taking science communication to the next level. I have been posting home-made science communication videos, made with iMovie, on […]
A VLOG to celebrate the 5th birthday of the #AdventBotany blog series
This post IS about science blogging, but not about link rot in blogs, as promised yesterday. That post will come later this week. From its inception, I have contributed to the University of Reading in the UK's Advent Botany blog series, now in its fifth year. My posts have allowed me to indulge my passion for […]
About those missing blog posts... part 1: posting regularly can be tough
I learned how to blog in 2006 when I became director of York University's Institute for Research and Innovation in Sustainability. I quickly realized that a research institute focussing on sustainability, needed to do much more than ivory-tower-situated research, and that we needed to find ways of meaningfully engaging all members of the York University campus […]
Celebrating International Ada Lovelace Day 2018
We held our fourth annual Wikipedia Editathon on Thursday October 11th 2018 in Steacie Science and Engineering Library. On Monday October 22nd, Prof. Jeremy Kerr will give York's 4th Ada Lovelace Day lecture: Waiting for Equity or Making it Happen: What’s the Difference? Jeremy's talk is at 12:30 pm in Room 107 of the Life […]
Wikipedia Editathon Chronicles Part 3: growing Wikipedians
When I returned to my full-time undergraduate teaching load in 2014, after 7 years of having a reduced teaching load while I was director of IRIS, I included a series of new assignments in my Biology courses. In addition to learning about ecology, these assignments introduced students to using social media skills, such as Twitter, […]
Talking Biodiversity & Food Security in Our Fragile Planet Series at Toronto Public Library branches
Along with museums and archives, there's nowhere I would rather than spend time than in a library. So I was delighted to have a chance to participate in the Toronto Public Library's Our Fragile Planet series. In May 2018, and again, in September, I will be giving a talk on local food and biodiversity. I […]
Science Communication with Twitter: Tweeting Science to Policymakers
Late last year, my friend, Prof. Shoshanah Jacobs of Guelph University, proposed a panel about Science Twitter for the Canadian Society for Ecology and Evolution Annual Meeting that would be happening in July 2018 at Guelph. I immediately agreed, because the other panelists were to include some of Canada’s top ecologists active on social media, […]
My Undergraduate Assignment for Learning to Edit Wikipedia Pages
Dr. Jess Wade’s project of creating Wikipedia pages for Women in STEM – she’s written about 270 in 2018 so far, which is an amazing feat – has recently been getting a lot of well-deserved public attention. We’ve known for years that women are under-represented in Wikipedia, reflecting the demographic make-up of the volunteer writing […]
