Dawn's Blog and General News Items

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 decade in academia: 2000-19 In 2010, I was three and half years into what would become a seven-year, four-term stint as director of the pan-university Institute for Research […]

It's December 30, 2019. I know that many colleagues will either be submitting the last of their Fall Term grades, or casting their minds forward to their Winter Term teaching. I'm in the latter group. I hope that student members of the academic community are resting, having fun and catching up on their sleep, and […]

I have had the pleasure of working with professional journalists since the 1990s, because, since I was in high school, I have always held the view that publicly-funded science should be made accessible to the public. And, since I'm a political junkie, I have always seen a connection between science and politics, and the public […]

Science Twitter brings connections near and far. One local young scientist, whom I met through Twitter, who continues to impress me, is #SciComm-er extraordinaire, University of Toronto doctoral student Ms. Farah Qaiser. Last Fall, Farah kindly invited me to be the guest speaker at Gerstein Library's Wikipedia Editathon in celebration of February's International Day of […]

"You won't get asked to write a multiple choice exam as a feature of your job after you graduate with a Yorku Biology degree, but you will probably be asked to write memos and reports." In fact, this is not strictly correct, because, if you are a first-responder for your organization, you will have to […]

Happy New Year! The days are getting longer and in the northern hemisphere's educational institutions, a new term will begin in a few days. I'm looking forward to teaching two biology courses: Plant Ecology and Plant Biology. Both have lots of cool labs with PLANTS, fungi and every kind of taxa, except for animals. As […]

This post is partly inspired by a recent tweet that I saw by a professor (I can't find the tweet, but I think that it was either Meghan Duffy or Kate Clancy) that their main contribution to science might be via their science blogging, rather than their peer-reviewed publications. I found this interesting and intriguing, […]

Some digitally created content, like ill-considered tweets, seems to last forever. They come back to haunt the author at most inopportune times. But other digital content, on which precious time was spent, can disappear. Storify, which was software that allowed tweets to be strung together, together with commentary, and other media, in order to create a […]

If you're a devoted reader of my blog, which I sincerely hope that you are not, and that you have better things to do with your time, you will notice that this post is part of my earlier post on Professor Pat Lakin-Thomas' VLOG on the Biology Department's Research Practicum course. In the summer of […]

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 […]