Archive for May, 2010
Left-handers shut out of CERC appointments
Women aren’t the only ones facing discrimination
Where are the critics on this one?
The week before last, 19 men were recruited from around the world for prestigious research positions at Canadian universities, and gender-equality advocates called foul.
But rumour has it that another disadvantaged group was unrepresented by these latest CERC appointments: left-handers.
Unbelievable, eh? If you feel your blood pressure rising, take a moment—maybe a walk—then read on.
An anonymous source has tipped me off to this latest injustice. Although I can’t verify that discrimination was the reason for the omission, I’m going to go ahead and say that it was anyway (makes for a better headline). The move is a huge setback for Canadian left-handers, who say hiring practices need to take a step in the “left direction.”
A panel was appointed to investigate the hires, and found that the lack of women appointed by CERC was due to the fact that universities didn’t actually submit female candidates for selection. (Still awaiting word on the left-handed imbalance.)
In any case, The Man the men at CERC need to get their priorities straight. When will they learn that qualifications and expertise should come second to outward appearance and dominant hand tendencies?
Left-handers have had to deal with bigotry and smeared writing for far too long. I say, bring on preferential hiring, exclusive scholarship opportunities, and group favouritism. Hiring “the best one for the job” is a dated idea, and frankly, a symptom of narrow-minded fanaticism.
Don’t buy your textbooks. Rent them.
UToronto bookstore launches textbook rental pilot project
I remember ordering my textbooks for the first time, way back in first year. It seemed like such a novelty, peeling the plastic wrap off a bunch of brand-new books.
Unlike high school textbooks, there weren’t any ripped pages, scribbled notes or suspicious stains. The covers weren’t handled by eighteen generation’s worth of fingies. Nobody had breathed on the pages with their unbrushed teeth (germaphobes think about these kinds of things).
They were mine. Mine.
Hundreds of dollars and a semester later, the novelty had vanished. The problem is, the life span of most textbooks is a single semester. When you’re done with the course, you’re done with the book. Heck, I felt like I was getting away with something when I got to use my Organic Chemistry textbook two semesters in a row.
Even if you buy the books second hand, from another student or your campus bookstore, it’s still expensive enough for a one-shot kind of deal.
But the University of Toronto bookstore might have a solution. This summer semester, the uToronto bookstore is launching a textbook rental pilot project. After ordering the books online, students pick them up in the store, renting the books for about 40 per cent off the new purchase price.
A similar plan was piloted at the University of Manitoba last semester.
According to the uToronto Bookstore’s website, five titles will be available for the pilot program. The textbook rentals are then returned on a pre-determined Rental Return date. Students are even allowed to highlight and write notes in their rental books. Cool.
Another option is to buy an older edition of a textbook. The changes between editions are usually minimal, and you can save some serious money. The only problem is, even minimal changes can sometimes complicate things. I bought an older edition of my genetics textbook during my second semester. When the professor told the class to read between pages 145 and 192 for the first week, and that the midterm would focus on material from pages 163 and 267, I suddenly realized something: the page numbers between editions weren’t equivalent.
A couple classes I took last semester didn’t even have required texts. Instead, students just accessed a website and printed off course notes.
Meaning, there’s something even better than a rental textbook. No textbook.
-photo courtesy of Evil Erin
UToronto to shut down for G20
Staff and students banned from campus
The University of Toronto will clear out its downtown campus for four days in June because of an influx of anarchists security concerns.
The campus is in close proximity to Queen’s Park, the official protest site of the G20 summit, so university officials have decided to ban staff and students from the St.George campus to make sure none of their own get involved. Students in residences will be relocated, exams will be moved and events on campus will be cancelled.
“We just want to make sure that our staff, faculty and students are safe during that period,” Laurie Stephens, U of T’s director of media relations told the Globe and Mail. “We’re going to try to disrupt them as little as possible.”
Students will now have to commute to join the “humiliate the security apparatus” street party, hosted by Southern Ontario Anarchist Resistance (SOAR).
Way to make things difficult, U of T.
-Photo by bensonkua
Degrees of tension
Do Heather Reisman’s causes, or her profile, make her a target?
Ask Heather Reisman whether she feels more like a lightning rod or a pinata, and the response is a rather curt “neither.” Then again, the CEO of Indigo Books & Music also maintains she isn’t angry about protests by a handful of Mount Allison University staff, and like-minded individuals across the country, against the honorary degree she was awarded earlier this week. Irked, however, with occasional gusts to severely pissed, is exactly how she sounds. “This very same group of people have been protesting against me and against Indigo for three years,” she says. “There is an absolutely deliberate attempt to misinform; to twist facts.”
Indigo’s 61-year-old “chief book lover” was in august company at the May 17 commencement ceremonies in Sackville, N.B. With newly installed celebrity-chancellor Peter Mansbridge presiding, Mount A also conferred degrees on David Sobey, chairman of the eponymous grocery chain, Samantha Nutt, the founder of War Child Canada, and Toronto pastor and gay-rights activist Rev. Brent Hawkes. But Reisman was the one that faculty like David Thomas, a professor of international relations, took exception to, citing what he alleges are her “direct ties” to the Israeli Defense Forces. “This is a military that has been accused and found guilty on several occasions of gross violations of international humanitarian law,” he told the CBC. The Palestinian Solidarity Network and the Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid took up the cause, urging supporters to send letters of outrage to university officials.
At issue is a charity Reisman and her billionaire husband, Toronto businessman Gerry Schwartz, set up in 2005. The Heseg Foundation provides bursaries and pays living expenses for former IDF members who wish to study and settle in Israel, but have no family in country. Headquartered in a historic Tel Aviv mansion, the foundation supports approximately 125 “Lone Soldiers” each year. Reisman says her foes are misrepresenting both Heseg’s work and her own beliefs. “They are trying to suggest that the program is supportive of the war, that we in some way encourage people, who wouldn’t otherwise, to come to Israel, that we are doing bad things to people in the Palestinian territories,” she says. “Those are outright lies.”
The backlash was modest—about 100 emails at last count. And some, including a part-time instructor in the Mount A English department, objected to the honorary degree on completely different grounds, accusing Indigo of “bulldozing competitors” with predatory business practices that have killed off independent bookstores and small presses. (Mark Lefebvre, the incoming president of the Canadian Booksellers Association, doesn’t quite see it that way. “Most of the damage had been done by Chapters before Heather bought out the company.” Indigo is a colossus, but not a malevolent one, he says, citing the company’s support for literacy and expansion of book culture.)
Reisman’s take is that she’s a target because of her high profile. There’s no question that as one the country’s richest and most powerful couples, she and Schwartz tend to make headlines. Sometimes it’s for their good works, like a $5-million donation to Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital. On other occasions it has been for their enviable lifestyle; flashy cars, a private jet, mansions in Rosedale and Palm Beach, Fla., and a modest three-bedroom, two-bath beach house in Malibu, acquired in 2008 for US$19 million. As the country’s largest bookseller, Reisman can also make news by simply removing something from her shelves, as she did with Hitler’s Mein Kampf in 2001, and a 2006 edition of Harper’s magazine that republished a Danish newspaper’s controversial cartoon depictions of the Prophet Muhammad.
Her opinions matter. Sandwiched between her directorships at J. Crew and the sporting charity Right to Play, Reisman’s CV notes her place on the “steering committee” of the Bilderberg Group, an invitation-only annual confab that brings together 130 of the world’s business, military and financial leaders.
Israel is an emotional subject. A lifelong Liberal, major donor and former policy chair, she broke with the party in 2006 over interim leader Bill Graham’s stance on the Lebanon war. Reisman says she supports a two-state solution, but is reluctant to discuss her views in detail, lest there be further misinterpretation. “I think a lot of people basically have very strong opinions, and not a lot of knowledge,” she says.
Reisman does point to “Heather’s Pick” this month: I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor’s Journey. She has been travelling across the country, hosting in-store events with the author Izzeldin Abuelaish, who continues to work for peace despite losing three of his daughters and a niece to an Israeli tank shell during the fighting in January 2009. It might be interesting to talk to him, she suggests. Abuelaish declined the interview request. “As Heather knows my message is a human one and I do not want it to be politicized or biased at all,” he wrote in an email. “Thank you for your understanding.”
Another week, another student lawsuit
Cambrian College sued for $20 million, over allegations it misrepresented its health and information management program
Cambrian College is facing a $20 million lawsuit over allegations it misrepresented its health and information management program. The suit, filed by 11 students, claims that Cambrian mislead them about the school’s intentions to become certified by the Canadian Health Information Management Association, which is responsible for controlling entry into the profession.
College president Sylvia Barnard and two other administrators have been named in the suit. The allegations have not been proved in court.
Cambrian began offering the health and information management program in September 2005. According to the statement of claim, quoted in the Sudbury Star, “Prospective students were told in promotional materials and through outreach activities about the possibility of entering the ‘high-demand’ field of professional health information management.”
The claim adds that the college advertised that the “HIM program was based on requirements established by the Canadian Health Information Management Association, which controls entry into the profession through a national certification program and that the college’s program would be CHIMA certified.” According to the student plaintiffs, it was not until 18 months after the program began that the college began applying for certification, a process that was not completed.
President Barnard denies the allegations. “We will be working through the process because we do not feel that there has been any wrongdoing on behalf of the college. Other than that, we’ll be defending ourselves vigorously, but I can’t go into any other detail … It’s before the courts, so at this point I can’t comment any further,” she told the Star.
School’s out
Time for catching up
Sleeping-in during summer vacation isn’t as much of a novelty as it used to be. The thing is, if you plan your class schedule right, you should be able to sleep in during the school year, too.
In university, the best part of summer vacation is being able to procrastinate guilt-free.
Now my friends and I have time for profound conversations. Like the merits of Modern Warfare versus Sniper: Ghost Warrior, which will only cost 40 bucks when it’s released next month. Modern Warfare might have AC-130s and airstrikes, but Ghost Warrior has realistic sniping missions.
With labs, essays and exams to worry about, it’s easy to lose touch with the rest of the world. And in the space of two semesters, everything changes. Sometime between last September and my final exams, everybody stopped playing Halo 3. And according to my 14-year-old brother, World of Warcraft is lame-ass.
I have some catching up to do.
-photo courtesy of Mike Willis
Hey freshmen, we want your DNA
Incoming students at Berkeley given gene-testing kit
A plan by the University of California, Berkeley to voluntarily test the DNA of incoming freshman has come under fire from critics who said the school was pushing an unproven technology on impressionable students.
The university has said it will send test kits to 5,500 new students to analyze genes that help control the body’s responses to alcohol, dairy products and folic acid. The voluntary tests are intended to spur conversation about the growing field of personal genomics, not predict the likelihood of disease, university officials said Thursday. “We thought that this would be a more engaging vehicle for discussion than having them read a book or an article,” said Mark Schlissel, dean of biology at UC Berkeley.
Critics, however, worry that students could get the idea the school approves of widely available direct-to-consumer gene-testing kits that claim to predict the risk of future health problems, said Jesse Reynolds, a policy analyst at the Center for Genetics and Society, a bioethics think thank. Students might think, “Berkeley gave it to us. It must be good. UC Berkeley would never be giving its incoming students anything bad or controversial,” Reynolds said.
One such kit was set to go on sale at Walgreen’s pharmacies last week. However, the chain changed its mind after federal regulators said the kit’s manufacturer never submitted the product to the Food and Drug Administration for review, a requirement for medical devices.
University officials said they were careful to choose genes for testing that were not related to serious health issues. “We wanted to pick genes in which the variants were very easy to understand, not threatening, and probably reveal information students have about themselves already,” said Jasper Rine, a UC Berkeley genetics professor who is spearheading the testing program.
The program’s organizers said it was important to get students talking about the issues because genetic testing would likely become an everyday part of medicine in coming decades. A key concern about many direct-to-consumer genetic tests is their reliance on studies that use statistics to determine how likely a particular gene variation is to be connected to a specific disease.
Many such studies are preliminary, but public health officials worry that without proper counselling, consumers are likely to take their test results as definitive. Schlissel said the science behind the tests being given to students was well-grounded in years of research. In addition, students arriving in the fall will be able to attend a presentation of the overall results for the entire incoming class and learn what the results mean.
All DNA will be collected privately, officials said. Students will use a barcode that only they have to locate their individual results, and the university said all DNA will be incinerated after the analysis is completed. Students also will be able to compete to win one of four much more comprehensive personal gene scans from 23andMe Inc., a Google-backed company that has been at the centre of the debate over direct-to-consumer genetic testing.
Dr. Muin J. Khoury, director of the National Office of Public Health Genomics at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said the value of the tests to students will depend on how well the results are presented and discussed. The test for a gene related to how quickly a person absorbs alcohol could easily lead new college students to get the wrong idea, he said. “I just worry about 18-year-old kids saying, ‘Oh, I’m a fast metabolizer, I can drink a lot of alcohol, it won’t affect me.’” Still, said Khoury, “if it’s packaged well, it could be a great experience.”
The Canadian Press
Rabbit traps tampered with at UVic
Incensed activists give animal lovers a bad name
Nothing says “take me seriously” like vandalism and crying.
Police were called to the University of Victoria Monday after the university accused rabbit activists of overturning traps and spilling bait. The traps are part of a UVic initiative to live-trap and euthanize rabbits in order to stall a campus infestation.
Kathleen Terrio, an English teacher with the continuation education program, admitted to calling members of the Coalition for the Ethical Treatment of UVic Rabbits after noticing the traps. “One teeny-weeny, cutest little baby I recognized was in one of the traps and I asked if I could please take him home, but they wouldn’t let me,” she said to the Times Colonist.
I don’t like the idea of rabbits being trapped and euthanized either. Especially since alternatives have been proposed, such as Victoria veterinarian Nick Shaw offering to vasectomize rabbits for free. But kicking and swooning? Counterproductive, and frankly, embarrassing to those of us who like to call ourselves animal rights activists. If rabbit-defenders want the university to deal with the issue responsibly, they need to behave responsibly as well.
-Photo by _Oblique_
Getting into med school just got a little harder
Fewer med school seats = fewer doctors
Thinking about applying to med school in Canada? Your chances just got a little worse. This fall, fewer spots will be open to medical students at the Universities of Alberta and Calgary. Last month, there was talk about possibly losing 50 spots out of the planned 190 at uAlberta’s med school and 40 out of the 180 at uCalgary.
Canada needs more doctors, and losing med school spots won’t exactly help the situation. However, due to budget cuts, uCalgary and uAlberta might not have a choice. Rithesh Ram, a second-year med student and president of the Calgary Medical Students’ Association, along with 100 other med students, signed a petition asking for more provincial funding. “We have a decreased physician workforce as it is. And it will continue to worsen. It’s a national problem, but it’s even worse in Alberta,” Ram said in an interview with the Calgary Herald.
According to an article from the Edmonton Journal, Advanced Education and Technology Minister Doug Horner said the universities wouldn’t be allowed to cut seats without his permission. “In order for them to pull back on the number of positions we’ve already paid for, they’d have to get our approval,” he said, claiming that it’s “premature” to talk about cutting seats.
A month later, things are looking a little better. With additional funding from the province, fewer seats will be cut from both schools, with uAlberta accepting 167 students compared to last September’s 188, and uCalgary accepting 170 compared to last year’s 180. “So we’re not quite what we were last year, but we’re pretty close,” said Dr. Tom Feasby, dean of uCalgary’s faculty of medicine, in the Calgary Herald.
Of course, it’s still a step in the wrong direction. Cutting 31 med school seats means 31 less future doctors.
But what about the classroom?
Canada poaches scientists from around the world, critics worry about lack of funds for teaching
After poaching 19 top researchers from around the world, Canada’s university sector couldn’t be more thrilled, but not everyone is happy with the money spent on the newly implemented Canada Excellence Research Chairs (CERC) program.
The 19 chairs, distributed across 13 universities, all come from outside Canada, prompting fears of a brain drain from other countries. More than half of the CERC recipients will hail from the United States (9) and Britain (4), while the balance will be made up of researchers from Germany, Brazil and France.
Industry minister Tony Clement, whose government first announced the program in 2008, touted the initiative as proof of Canada’s scientific prowess. “The CERC program confirms Canada’s standing as a global centre of excellence in research and higher learning,” he said Monday. Each CERC appointment is worth $10 million over seven years, but with help from provincial governments and private donors that number has risen to an average of $27 million. The funding will be used to support research teams, as well as the researchers themselves.
The CERC program aims to bring in top talent in the technical fields of environmental sciences and technologies, natural resources and energy, health and related life sciences and technologies, and information and communications technologies.
Since the program was announced two-years ago, Canadian schools scrambled to have their research proposals accepted, which was followed by a nomination of potential chair holders. The final appointments were made by a selection board. Many of the universities that succeeded will come as little surprise, with the University of Alberta getting four chairs, and the University of Toronto two. There were upsets, as McGill University failed to get a chair, and a few surprises, epitomized by the awarding of an excellence chair to the University of Prince Edward Island.
Convincing foreign scientists to come to Canada has been met with several sports analogies. “It [was] almost like a hockey negotiation where you are trying to entice a player from another team. And the other team wants to hang on to them, and so they offer more money,” Derek Burney, head of the selection board, told the Globe and Mail.
In its praise of the Conservative government, Paul Davidson, president of the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada, called the program “smart and strategic: smart because research is vital to Canada’s prosperity and we’re in a very competitive environment in terms of attracting and retaining world-class researchers. It’s strategic because it is focused on the four priority areas of Canada’s science and technology strategy.”
But not everyone believes the money is being well spent. The long awaited announcement of the chair holders comes at an awkward time for Canada’s universities. Many institutions are slashing budgets, including the University of Alberta which recently implemented an early retirement package, as well as furlough days. A report from the Toronto Dominion Bank, released Monday, warned of pressures on educational quality due to factors such as increased class sizes.
The contrast between money spent in the classroom and these new research chairs was not lost on Don Drummond, an economist and one of the authors of the report. “I’d still like to get my daughter into a smaller classroom,” he told the Globe. James Turk, executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, also told the paper that he is similarly skeptical of the program, “We are bringing in stars at the same time that courses are being discontinued and labs are being shut.”
Others are critical that none of those awarded a research chair are women. Of the 40 shortlisted candidates provided by universities, all were male. Wendy Robbins who teaches English at the University of New Brunswick, told the Winnipeg Free Press’s Mia Rabson that she partially blames the lack of women on the program’s focus on technical fields where women tend to be underrepresented. Robbins says this is a mistake. “Unless you can patent it they’re not interested. But we need society and government to recognize not all our problems can be solved by science and engineering,” she said.
Revisiting highschool
A chance to reinvent yourself
I recently attended an open house for my younger brother’s high school. Sitting in the school’s auditorium, along with hundreds of grade eight students and their parents, I could tell David was feeling really excited about starting grade nine next year.
He’ll suddenly have his own locker, instead of just a small cubby hole to share with another student. There will be tons of new classes, from media arts to wood working, and dozens of school clubs and activities. David won’t know anybody at his new school, so he’ll have a chance to reinvent himself and make new friends. He can hardly wait.
Throughout the presentation in the school’s auditorium, one thought kept running through my mind:
Thank God I’m finished high school.
How not to defend the liberal arts
Study philosophy if you are bothered by philosophical problems
Spend long enough studying philosophy, and eventually someone — most likely a member of your family — is going to ask, “what are you going to do with that?” It’s a tough question to answer, since philosophy isn’t really something you do something with, like a screwdriver. It’s more like something you just do — like fly fishing. But academic philosophy, like every other department in the university, is in the selling game, trying to attract customers and the money they bring, money that enables you and your colleagues to keep doing philosophy.
And so during my time in academia, I spent a number of days at university fairs, these events in big convention-style halls where you set up a little booth, pile a few texbooks in front of you, and wait for prospective students to wander by. And when they do — parents hovering skeptically in the background — they want to know why they should study philosophy. One year, I remember manning the booth with a fellow grad student, and we had come up with what we thought was a pretty clever sales pitch. “It’s great preparation for law school,” we told our customers. “Think of it as like cross-training for your brain.” etc.
The truth is, neither of us really had two clues why anyone should study philosophy, or what you would do with it. It didn’t really bother us though, since philosophy was interesting, we were young and curious, and the harder, more pressing questions seemed a long way off. But the fact that the best we could do by way of justification for philosophy was its instrumental or technocratic benefits says a lot about our own disciplinary insecurity and the ideological tenor of the times (which, it has to be said, has only intensified over the last decade).
So that’s one bad way of defending philosophy (feel free to substitute your own favoured discipline for “philosophy”). The value of studying philosophy can’t be that it’s a form of preparation for law school, or that it provides a sophisticated critical/analytic training for your brain.
But at the same time, the liberal arts has to be useful in some sense, doesn’t it? I say this because there is a defense of the “squishy subjects” that makes the opposite error, by making their value far too, well, squishy. A case in point is a recent piece by Peter Berkowitz of the Hoover Institution, which was printed in the Wall Street Journal. According to Berkowitz, the true aim of liberal education is to prepare citizens for the proper exercise of freedom. “Education for freedom” or “Education for citizenship” is an old idea; here’s Berkowitz’s version of it:
How can one think independently about what kind of life to live without acquiring familiarity with the ideas about happiness and misery, exaltation and despair, nobility and baseness that study of literature, philosophy and religion bring to life? How can one pass reasoned judgment on public policy if one is ignorant of the principles of constitutional government, the operation of the market, the impact of society on perception and belief and, not least, the competing opinions about justice to which democracy in America is heir?
This makes me more or less uncomfortable, depending on how we are interpret the thesis. On a “strong” interpretation, Berkowitz comes close to saying that only people who have studied the liberal arts are truly indepedent thinkers and are positioned to judge public policy. At the extreme, only these people are truly citizens. I’ve never really been persuaded by these sorts of arguments, and it strikes me as a dangerous route for the defenders to take by moralizing the study of the liberal arts. It is a commonly held position in academic circles though — more than a few humanities profs console themselves with the thought that even if they aren’t as important or as well paid as the hotshots in the sciences or engineering faculties, at least they are better people.
A weaker version of the thesis says something like the following: A healthy society provides a cadre of intellectuals with the time, space, money, and resources to think deeply and broadly about all sorts of questions. The goal of these inquiries is not “freedom” or “citizenship”, and it certainly isn’t more questions. The answers matter because the questions matter, though their practicality or application may not be always relevant or obvious. But it is worth having people think and argue about all sorts of things: immigration, equality, justice, voting behaviour, constitutionalism, race, culture, language, class and on and on, because we don’t really know what sort of problems we’ll face as a society.
On this view of things, the liberal arts work sort of the same way as your immune system. Your immune system doesn’t know what specific invasions it will face, so it just generates billions of shapes of antibodies, hoping that one of them will match the relevant antigen. I could go on, except I seem to have arrived at pretty much the same answer given by Paul Wells, in his excellent essay on the subject, which you must read if you haven’t yet.
The upshot: Study philosophy if you are bothered by philosophical problems. Study history if you are interested in problems in history. Etc. If you are lucky, you will have an interesting career. If you are very good and also very lucky, your work will be relevant and useful.
Apple America
Why Canada’s learning technology experts say tech handouts are lackluster
When they enter university, freshman are often told that with all the social and educational opportunities before them, the world is at their fingertips. But, while online educational resources have given new understanding to that phrase, just within the past year it takes on an even more literal meaning.
At Seton Hill, a Catholic liberal arts college in Pennsylvania, the new catchphrase is “An iPad for everyone.” On March 30, the school made headlines as the first in North America to announce it would put the latest Apple touch technology in the hands of its new recruits—at no cost to them. “The iPad will lighten the backpacks of Seton Hill University students,” said president JoAnne Boyle in a release from the school. The school hopes Apple’s iBook application will allow students to ditch the heavy textbooks they lug around, and even make carrying a pen and paper unnecessary.
The initiative is part of the Griffin (the school’s mascot) Technology Advantage the school promotes to entice students. Not only will freshman receive an iPad for the first time this fall, but the school is also handing out brand new 13” Macbooks as part of the all-encompassing technology program, which upper-year students can opt in to for $500 a semester.
And while Seton Hill is the first American institution to announce it would gift iPads this fall, it isn’t the first American institution to offer Apple handouts to new students. In 2008, Abilene Christian University, in Abilene Texas, began offering iPhones or iPod Touch devices to its incoming freshman, citing at the time students’ ability to use them for “homework alerts, answer in-class surveys and quizzes, get directions to their professors’ offices, and check their meal and account balances.”
George Fox University in Oregon also announced it will give first-year students the choice of scoring a new iPad instead of the MacBook the school normally gives out. The price is offset in tuition, but students get to keep their new device when they graduate.
Though it may just be the latest incentive to drive recruitment at some U.S. schools, Canadian students may be feeling left in the digital dark age. With the buzz created over the possibilities of the iPad in academia, the question is whether it will prove to be a valuable education tool. And is the attention the new device is getting south of the border a sign Canadian schools are falling behind in learning technology innovation?
The answer, simply, is ‘No,’ said Ken Coates, dean of the faculty of arts at the University of Waterloo. Coates recently chaired the learning stream of the Canada 3.0 conference on digital media, held in Stratford, Ont.—the birthing grounds of Waterloo’s newest satellite campus designed to house niche programs in digital media and global business. He said even though the traditional approach to education is still a recent memory in the minds of most Canadians, the country isn’t lagging in a race towards digital academic innovation.
“I think we’re pretty much on the curb with other countries,” Coates said. “It’s a hundred yard race, and now we have one foot out of the starting block.” Coates said while there is no doubt students would be happy with the latest Apple technology, the nature of the Canadian university system functions much differently than the for-profit attitudes of some American schools. In fact, he said, the idea of handing out the latest in technology is not a new concept, even to Canadians.
At Acadia University in Nova Scotia, the technology advantage program saw the incorporated use of notebook computers loaned out by the school as part a blended learning approach more than a decade ago.
But, Coates said, the focus for Canada and the 3.0 conference was to take the thousands of projects happening in the country today and collaborate on how to move forward to meet student demands for digital, accessible and virtual learning. “Our country needs to make a huge move into this space if we’re going to be competitive in the 21st century,” he said. But, he said in the process of giving students the learning opportunities they want, the real concern becomes: “Can we ensure that the learning occurs with the level and with the intensity that we expect?”
While university is supposed to encompass a certain aspect of experimentation, the real purpose of higher learning is to be intellectually challenging, Coates said. “Technology lets you do that, but the idea of post-secondary education is that you don’t just turn students over, but you guide them.” And while the iPad is nice piece of hardware, Coates said what’s important to remember when moving learning-specific technology forward is that every program and course can’t be fulfilled by one blanket solution. What might work for teaching an English class won’t suffice for a chemistry lab, Coates said.
The SketchBook Pro app on the iPad may be an advantage for design and arts students, but for chemistry students, beyond displaying the periodic table and other reference matierials, it isn’t an asset for lab work.
Program-specific tech may be the way forward for Canada’s innovators, but Blackboard Inc. mobile developer Aaron Wasserman said offering students the flexibility of having learning materials wherever they are is a growing expectation of today’s student, American or Canadian. “It’s very natural that they would expect to be able to get academic information . . . on-the-go,” Wasserman said. “That is a commonality.”
Still a student at Stanford University, Wasserman developed an iPhone application called iStanford, which provided his peers with at-hand course material, as well as content on school life, such as transit schedules and the latest in campus news. When Blackboard, who specializes in learning management systems in North America acquired Wasserman’s design and expertise, they turned the iStanford model into Mobile Central, so the technology could be retrofitted to schools who sought the system for their students.
But Brian Lamb, manager of emerging technologies and digital content at the University of British Columbia, said while handout technology and mobile apps are impressive, most don’t serve to improve student learning. “They seemed to be geared towards recruitment and student life as opposed to enhancing learning and education,” Lamb said. “They’re shiny and they’re fun to use . . . but I do worry a little bit that we might be reinforcing a new kind of Internet,” Lamb said.
He said in a way, incorporating and investing closed-content devices like the iPad into higher education would not only be a waste of public resources, but would take a step back from open education and nationwide collaboration the federal government promoted and funded in the early 2000s. “When I entered this field in 2002, there really was something like national strategy happening in online learning,” Lamb said. “It would be nice to see something like that again.”
Lamb said these collaborations lost momentum with the Paul Martin administration. After his term in office, in 2006 and 2007, Industry Canada released two strategies—Advantage Canada and Mobilizing Science and Technology to Canada’s Advantage—to enhance science and technology infrastructure and innovation and included a focus on advancing learning in universities.
Industry Minister Tony Clement was a keynote speaker at the Canada 3.0 conference. In his address he announced the country’s newest Digitial Economy strategy, which puts an emphasis on digital technologies. “I don’t need to remind this audience how important these new tools can be—to propelling our economic growth and enhancing our quality of life,” Clement said during his speech at the conference. “Already, these technologies are transforming the way we communicate, run our businesses, conduct commerce. They’re revolutionizing how medical professionals keep us healthy, how research is done and how students learn.”
As far as the gap in technology between Canada and the U.S., Lamb said from his experience at conferences in emerging technology, Canadian institutions usually have a strong innovative presence. “I think Canada stacks up reasonably well,” he said. In some ways, thanks to the smaller number of institutions, Lamb said Canada has greater possibilities to collaborate on best practices in learning technology and learn from one another, an advantage the U.S. doesn’t have. “We can actually know who all each other are,” Lamb said. “And that’s impossible in the United States.”
The unteachables
Are some people just mentally unfit for university?
Many years ago, a student sat in my office as I explained what he needed to do to write a good literary essay. Let’s call him “Dave” to protect his privacy and since I have no idea what his name actually was (I hope it wasn’t really Dave). Dave sat patiently as I explained that the essay cannot just be an account of the poem or story or whatever it was; he needed to come up with a claim about the meaning of the text. He had to really do some analysis and say something beyond the obvious.
After a pause, Dave looked up and said dully, “But I can’t think of anything.”
At that moment I knew there was nothing I could do for him. It was time for Dave to find another line of personal development.
I have often wondered since then how many students produce substandard work because they haven’t given it their best effort, and how many students produce substandard work because their best effort, try as they might, just isn’t very good. And for that latter group, the Daves as it were, how many of them simply lack the basic mental acuity to be able to ever do the work?
Questions like this sometimes lead me to doubt my university’s more or less open admissions policy. Should we really be admitting students who have little chance of succeeding? Doesn’t admission itself imply that with some effort, results are possible? Did they cheat Dave by not sending him elsewhere in the first place? Sometimes I think they did.
Other times I think that it should be up to the students themselves to decide whether they want to enroll and take their chances. Maybe it’s not up to the university to decide ahead of time who has a chance — whatever their high school grades might have been. Maybe it’s like buying a gym membership: being a member gets you in the door to use the facilities, but there’s no guarantee you’ll actually get fit.
On the other hand, gym memberships don’t cost thousands of dollars a year (I assume: a quick look at me will attest that I have never been a member of a gym). They don’t require full-time effort, and the government isn’t picking up half the tab for those whose time on the treadmill is never going to amount to anything.
In the end, I guess I will have to take solace in the fact that one can never know for sure. Like political ideologies, ignorance and stupidity look the same at the extremes. Maybe some day another Dave will be in my office listening with all his might and suddenly the light will go on. He’ll get it, and a whole new world will be opened to him.
And maybe some day, I’ll get fit. You never know.
The Information Flood
Too much to do? Ditch the laptop.
I’m done with school for the year, but my work load is just as heavy as it ever was. At home, with no obligations and the internet at my fingertips, I find myself sucked into its murky depths for hours on end; reading about the dramatic British election, the publishing executive who provided the basis for Sex and the City’s Mr. Big (a guilty pleasure), an inspiring commencement address by Steve Jobs, the incredible speed and efficiency of the FBI in tracking down amateur terrorists, Iran’s nuclear antics… the list time-consumingly stretches on.
Then there are the psychology magazines I bought for my flight home but haven’t gotten around to reading yet, the stack of philosophy books and novels I’d like to get around to this summer, a foreign language to maintain and another to learn, a musical instrument to re-familiarize myself with, daily news to keep up with internationally, domestically, locally, friends and family to see, and so on. Of course, these tasks are joyously low-burden compared to the high pressure workload of university, but they demand time and energy nonetheless. On a micro scale, these incessant distractions are indicative of the information flood.
The above link is to a special report in The Economist, which examines the explosion of data creation in the age of cheap cell phones and cameras producing mountains of information alongside massive telescopes and Large Hadron Colliders, which alone creates 40,000 gigabytes of data each second. All that data creation far outpaces our ability to store it, let alone classify and analyze it. The result is a society struggling to keep up: the data management industry is now worth $100 billion and growing at 10 per cent a year; universities from McGill to Berkeley have created dedicated Schools of Information; Chief Information Officers (CIOs) and data scientists are becoming more prominent in business.
This information flood on a societal scale trickles down to the individual too, who, faced with far too much information to take in and too many demands on his time, is forced to somehow choose to focus on that which he finds salient. Once that decision is made, and information is encoded into memory, the task of analysis must begin, sorting through the masses of newly acquired information and identifying trends, patterns, lessons.
The difficulty is of course amplified by the internet, a fact which has led some of my perhaps more intelligent friends to take drastic measures. Realizing that the university’s wireless internet didn’t reach his dorm room, one friend decided to literally cut his ethernet cable in half, forcing himself to go to the library to use the internet and opening up vast swathes of time in which to read books, have face to face conversations, and otherwise focus his time and attention much more effectively. Another friend, who is moving out next year, is leaving his laptop at home altogether, convinced that the benefits to his time and focus are more valuable than the aimless wading through the information flood. If direction and focus is lacking in your own attempts to negotiate the deluge, perhaps such action is indeed worth considering.
College students have their say
Survey results from 44 colleges in Ontario and B.C.
Ontario and B.C. have released the latest round of college surveys revealing what students think about their schools and the quality of education they received. Areas of focus include the usefulness of knowledge and skills obtained, as well as an assessment of the level of college facilities, resources and services. In both provinces the overall level of satisfaction among students was high. The B.C. survey found particularly high scores on the question of satisfaction with the quality of instruction. The Ontario survey also interviewed employers who hired college grads and asked them how well they felt the college had prepared its graduates to meet their needs as employers. Overall, 93 per cent of employers were satisfied with how Ontario colleges had prepared their graduates for the workforce.
Each year in Ontario, 24 colleges survey current students, recent graduates and their employers to collect data in five key areas: graduation rate, employment rate, graduate satisfaction, employer satisfaction and student satisfaction. The 2009 survey reflects the views of more than 122,000 college students, 40,000 graduates and almost 7,000 employers. In British Columbia, the annual B.C. Diploma, Associate Degree, and Certificate Student Outcomes (DACSO) Survey asks former students of 20 B.C. post-secondary institutions to evaluate their education and employment experiences. Last year, nearly 16,000 former students were interviewed after completing all, or a significant portion, of their educational program.
The B.C. survey posed a series of specific questions asking respondents how their program of study helped to develop skills in 10 areas, including the ability to write clearly and concisely, and to analyze and think critically. Another set of 10 questions asked about satisfaction with aspects of the program, including the quality of computers and software, and the availability of instructors outside class. In addition, respondents who had gone on to full-time employment were asked to rate the usefulness of their training in getting and performing their jobs.
In the Ontario survey, the graduation rate indicator tracked students from one-, two- and three-year programs who went on to graduate in 2008-2009. Rates ranged from 73.3 per cent to 56.6 per cent, with a provincial average of 65 per cent. Meanwhile, the number of Ontario college grads that were employed within six months of graduation was down for the second year in a row. The provincial average stood at 84.8 per cent—down from 90.5 per cent two years ago.
Oops! we didn’t really mean to cut $2.5 million
Dalhousie’s medical school lost funding over a government clerical error
Dalhousie’s medical school has lost $2.5 million in provincial funding, an error the Nova Scotia health minister said likely stems from “poor paperwork,” the CBC reported.
After the provincial budget omitted the funding in April, school officials warned loss of licensing to train doctors. “It’s extraordinarily complex and all of the paperwork wasn’t necessarily done in the manner that maybe it should have been done on the part of government,” Health Minister Maureen MacDonald told the CBC. Exactly when the funding will be restored, and by how much, is still yet to be determined, MacDonald told the Chronicle Herald. “We haven’t finalized all of the details and I don’t want to discuss those until they are finally resolved,” she said.
The school, which would be losing eight per cent of is budget, is already on a two-year probation after the Liaison Committee for Medical Education review of curriculum management, monitoring and evaluation turned up 17 non-compliant standards. Dalhousie president Tom Traves told CBC the confusion stems from responsibility for funding delegated between the Health and Education ministries, but MacDonald said they’re working with the school to right the situation.
Dalhousie’s is the only medical institution in the three Maritime provinces.
How it was done
B.C. Diploma, Associate Degree, and Certificate Student Outcomes Survey
The B.C. Diploma, Associate Degree, and Certificate Student Outcomes (DACSO) Survey is conducted annually province-wide, and asks former students to evaluate their post-secondary education and to report on further education and employment experiences.
The 2009 survey interviewed 15,856 former students. The findings are useful for prospective students making educational choices, as well as providing information to institutions for educational planning.
The DACSO survey is conducted with funding from the Ministry of Advanced Education and Labour Market Development in partnership with 20 B.C. post-secondary institutions. Former students were interviewed nine to 20 months after completing all, or a significant portion, of their educational program. The survey does not include students in baccalaureate degree programs, apprenticeship students or those in developmental programs such as ESL and adult basic education. The telephone survey was conducted in spring 2009 and achieved a 59 per cent response rate.
Several of the indicators were calculated from questions that offered four or five response categories (e.g. 5=very well, 4=well, 3=adequately, 2=poor, 1= very poor). The results are the average of the responses shown on a scale of 5 to 1 or 4 to 1 where a higher value indicates a more favourable rating.
The results also include data from a standardized index. Program mix, which varies considerably from one institution to the next, can affect how students evaluate their programs and directly relates to employment and further education. The DACSO survey has created a standardized index that allows results for an individual school to be compared to what would be the provincial value if all the schools in the system offered the same mix of programs as the school in question. This data includes results shown as percentages: higher, lower or—at 100%—equal to the provincial score.
When displaying the survey results, Maclean’s has ordered the colleges in descending order according to how each performs as compared to the provincial adjusted score.
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Who took part
B.C. Diploma, Associate Degree, and Certificate Student Outcomes Survey
The annual B.C. Diploma, Associate Degree, and Certificate Student Outcomes (DACSO) Survey asks former students of 20 B.C. post-secondary institutions to evaluate their education and employment experiences. In 2009, 15,856 former students were interviewed nine to 20 months after completing all, or a significant portion, of their educational program.
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Highlights
Ontario Colleges Key Performance Indicators Survey
The 2009 Key Performance Indicators survey found generally high levels of satisfaction among Ontario college graduates, their employers and college students
Among the findings:
• 93 per cent of employers were satisfied with how Ontario colleges had prepared their graduates for the workforce
• 84.8 per cent of 2008-2009 Ontario college graduates were employed within six months of graduation (down from 88.9 per cent in the previous year)
• 79.8 per cent of graduates were satisfied with the usefulness of their college education in achieving their goals after graduation
• 76.3 per cent of students were satisfied with the overall quality of services, programming and resources available at Ontario colleges
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