3 Minutes to change the world – top graduate student research in 3 minutes or less
On March 31st, McGill hosted the third annual “3 minutes to change the world” competition, where graduate students give threeContinue Reading
Category: Students Today
Co-teaching a blended class across universities: Why? And why not?
This term I am co-teaching a graduate class in advanced groundwater hydrology with Grant Ferguson (University of Saskatchewan) and SteveContinue Reading
Communications and expectations in graduate supervision
During my graduate education, I had two great supervisors and never any problems with communicating our mutual expectations. Their PhDsContinue Reading
MOOPies – Mini Online Open Projects from Bio-Treatment of Wastes class at Mac Campus
This year, the students in the Bio-Treatment of Wastes class and I are doing an experiment. I have asked the students to do a group project with a twist: each group is producing a 5-minute video, about a bio-treatment topic, to be posted to YouTube. These are our Mini Online Open Projects, or MOOPies. Read more –>
Looking for the right answer
EDUCAUSE is an association with the mission of improving higher education through the use of information technology. So it was a little surprising that the keynote speaker at EDUCAUSE 2013, Sir Ken Robinson, chose to show a short video featuring the work of third grade children. Read more –>
Why undergraduate students are teaching my entomology course – repost from arthropodecology.com
Reposted from arthopodecology.com. This term I’m teaching an introductory Entomology course at McGill. These days, however, I’m not lecturing at all – the students are doing the teaching. Read more –>
Is Intellectual Curiosity a Strong Predictor For Academic Performance?
Here’s an article I received from the “Tomorrow’s Professor Blog” run by Rick Reis. Getting students to invest in their educations intellectually is an excellent predictor of success. Who knew? Maybe this is the best argument I’ve seen for why we should get students interested in research as soon as possible. Show them that the edge of human knowledge is the best place to be if curiosity is the driver of educational excellence. Not sure how MOOCs will do this- but face to face this works wonders. Read more –>
Writing – part of the educational journey
. I got involved with a teaching exercise called “Routes of Writing” run out of the McGill Writing Center. I was asked the following question: How do you perceive the relationship between academic writing and critical thinking? In my mind, the two are inextricably linked. I have written a lot of papers. Nothing clarifies my understanding of my own work better than writing out my ideas. Read more –>
Routes of Writing
I teach academic writing, and I regularly hear students say that they find writing academic papers to be a tough and lonely task. What they often don’t realize is that writing well-thought-out academic papers is challenging for most people, including seasoned academics. To encourage my students to persist with the challenge, this quotation from Samuel Johnson is posted to the myCourses Home Page of my academic writing course:“What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.” Read more –>
Social media, mobile technology and an outdoor classroom
Repost from Arthropod Ecology:Last year, my field biology course took part in an amazing project – we used mobile technology in a field setting, and combined that with social media tools. This was done in collaboration with Teaching and Learning Services at McGill, McGill Libraries, and the tablets were generously provided by Toshiba. Read more –>
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