The popular Advent Botany blog series, launched in 2015 by Drs. Alastair Culham and Jonathan Mitchley of the University of Reading, has been on hiatus for the past two years. Correction: In fact, they first launched Advent Botany in 2014. The first post that I ever contributed was about Red Osier Dogwood. Alastair thought to […]
Tag Archives: pedagogy
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 […]
Wikipedia Editathon Chronicles Part 2
In Wikipedia Chronicles Part 1 (January 30, 2018) I posted about my plan to hold a Wikipedia edit-a-thon at Visva Bharati University, West Bengal, India. I held a mini Ada Lovelace Day Wikipedia Editathon for my third Science Communication Workshop on March 20th. During my time (January to March 2018) as a visiting professor, I […]
Digital Divide Chronicles Part 2
I began my career as a field ecologist on the remote shores of Hudson Bay, where I spent between two and four months off the electrical grid for five successive summers (1980-84). That's me at far left, with a rifle for polar bear protection. A generator charged the car battery that powered the radio that […]
Wikipedia Editathon Chronicles Part 1
When Wikipedia first launched in 2001, students quickly discovered its articles and started citing them in their written work. In the early 2000s, when I began to use TurnitIn to analyze student essays and lab. reports for plagiarism, I would often find entire paragraphs lifted from Wikipedia. Plagiarism aside, most professors, including me, banned Wikipedia from being cited in […]
I'm aiming to break my class out of the cycle of "memorizing & forgetting"
I haven't taught BIOL 4090.40, Plant Ecology for nearly 10 years. It's been shifted from Fall to Winter term, meaning the entire lab. component needed changing because of the different season, and now we're on Moodle, and we have #SoMe (social media), so it was time for a mega-overhaul. AND, it's week 2 of the winter term, […]
