Canadian higher education has mainly functioned virtually since March 2020, when campus buildings were closed. The residential population of York University during this pandemic has consisted of students and their families, for whom their campus apartments are their main homes, and international students who could not get home at the end of April, due to […]
Dawn's Blog and General News Items
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 4: Addressing Black Lives Matter in our Courses
The day that in-person classes were cancelled at York University, was the same day that Breonna Taylor was shot and killed by policemen. They erroneously entered her apartment looking for someone who didn't live there. The police have still not been charged for the murder. I read a newspaper article about Ms. Taylor's death the […]
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 […]
Pandemic Pedagogy Chronicles Part 1: What is Exponential Growth Bias?
By the time the York University leadership cancelled in-person classes on Friday March 13, 2020 in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, I already knew that in-person April exams would inevitably be cancelled, along with in-person Summer Semester courses: the novel virus SARS-CoV-2 was entering its exponential growth phase by the time the pandemic was […]
My pandemic pedagogy planning began in January 2020
It's August 2nd. I haven't yet posted on this lab blog in 2020. I did write some posts for my Applied Plant Ecology course blog. BIOL 4095 ran from January to April 2020. One of its 11 topics is invasive, non-indigenous organisms, which meant that I began including the spread of the novel virus, SARS-CoV-2 […]
Google Doodles for Reflecting on Science Communication and History
I will always have a soft spot for Google, hailing back to 1999 when I used to recommend it to my ecology students, as a cool up-and-coming internet search engine. This continues, despite my fairly strong opinions about the need for tech giants to be regulated, and for large portions of their staff, including the […]
COP25 saw more of the same rhetoric and policies as at COP15
Members of the York University delegation to COP25 on Madrid will be reporting back to the community on January 14th, 2020 (details left). I've been teaching undergraduate and graduate students about the greenhouse effect, global warming and climate change since 1992, when I taught my first applied plant ecology course at York University. I couldn't […]
Reflections on the year in higher education 2019: Part 3
When I realized that the first of my six catch-up 2019 blog posts was really long, I split it into three posts! Some thoughts about my past thirty years as a professor: 1990 to now As I juggled my family with research, teaching and administrative duties during the 1990s, I realized that my kind of […]
