Do You Have This One?, originally uploaded by Corbeau du Nord.

Setting my 91-year-old grandfather up on his new iPad.

The gallivanting hay-eater’s Houdini attempt apparently paid off. City officials said the animal – who they named Molly – will be headed for greener pastures.

“We will find it a home,” said Richard Gentles of the city Animal Care and Control. “We’re [...]]]>

No bull, cow escapes slaughterhouse and hoofs it through Queens:

The gallivanting hay-eater’s Houdini attempt apparently paid off. City officials said the animal – who they named Molly – will be headed for greener pastures.

“We will find it a home,” said Richard Gentles of the city Animal Care and Control. “We’re starting to reach out to farm sanctuaries.”

Not saying anything that hasn’t been said before, but it is interesting to note that when livestock escapes from abattoirs, something about it qualities change: rather than a member of the herd, it becomes an individual. In that moment, we seem compelled to treat it morally as a different object.

The academic hiring season is going to start ramping up soon. If you’re new to the whole process, it pays to spend a little preparation time before the season starts so that you have to spend as [...]]]>
photo credit: jypsygen

The academic hiring season is going to start ramping up soon. If you’re new to the whole process, it pays to spend a little preparation time before the season starts so that you have to spend as little time as possible on finding and applying to positions when things begin in earnest. Trust people when they say that searching and applying is like a job in-and-of-itself and inevitably, you won’t have as much time as you want to dedicate to the task. So anything to streamline the process is a good thing.

I’m concentrating on the finding jobs part in this post. For my own academic job search, I found that searching for positions can be quite time consuming so I took the philosophy that I wanted the jobs to come to me. The underlying philosophy is push vs. pull. When you go out looking for a job in a paper, you’re “pulling” that information. It requires that you search the job ad out; more importantly it also means that you are spending time searching even if there isn’t a job you could apply for inside the paper. “Pushing”, not surprisingly, is the opposite. It’s about the job ad coming to you, much like a friend that connects you to a job they heard about.

I used three web-based services, two in conjunction, to help me: Google alerts, my RSS reader and a web page to RSS feed converter.

Google alerts

Once set-up, Google will send you an email containing the web pages that it has found containing the search terms you’ve provided. I had two alerts set-up last year:

“environmental studies” “tenure track” and “environmental education” “tenure track”

The same Google-fu you use for crafting your searches come into play here. So, I sent Google out to look for pages that had the terms tenure track (not just tenure or track, but both; that’s what the quotation marks do) and my two fields, environmental ed and environmental studies. I then chose what kind of notification worked best (Google can send hits immediately; I settled for daily).

Since setting these up in August 2010, I’ve received 185 emails directing me to pages with tenure-track and environmental studies and 10 emails for my environmental education search. Most were positive hits: ads for tenure-track jobs. Some results are false-positives. Most recently, for example, I got a link to a page trumpeting a University president’s record of starting an environmental studies program and the plans to hire new tenure-track faculty. Not exactly a job ad, but potentially interesting information none-the-less.

RSS reader & web page to RSS converter

Many web pages have a RSS feed that you can subscribe to using a RSS reader (e.g. Google Reader). I like subscribing to feeds because it means I can consolidate my attention in one place: visit my RSS reader once, and every new item since I last visited will appear. No need to visit all the blogs I’m interested in following individually.

Many departmental or faculty hiring sites lack an RSS feed. This typically means you need to bookmark the site and remember to visit it often enough that if a position is posted, you notice. Frustratingly inefficient. Thankfully, the web service Page2RSS can  help here. Rather than bookmarking a hiring site, I simply turned it into an RSS feed, then added it to my reader. When new positions were posted, I saw them appear in my reader. Page2RSS even will send you a tweet. Many disciplines have an aggregate listing of jobs (see the CAG job listing, for example). Page2RSS is perfect to set up this webpage as an RSS feed that will deliver new jobs to you, as they’re posted.

There can be a bit of “noise” with this method: any changes to the site will get pushed as an update. So if a department updates a news widget, you might get notification of that. On the whole, however, I found it to be of enough value that I didn’t mind the extra noise. It’s especially valuable when a site doesn’t offer to email you when new jobs are posted.

Job aggregation sites

A strategy that I didn’t mention as part of my web-based services but equally helpful are the job alerts that some (University Affairs being a notable exception) sites allow you to subscribe to. I’ll use the Chronicle of Higher Education job section as the example, though different sites offer similar services. After signing up for an account, you can set-up a job alert, which will send you an email when a job is posted that matches your search criteria. These sites are a rich source, which is why I wanted to mention them. No special hocus-pocus, however, in getting them to work. Register, subscribe and you’re getting job postings right away.

So there is talk in shutting down Riverdale Farm in Toronto as a cost-savings measure (insert reference to gravy here). 2500 of the concerned have taken to Facebook to “Save the [...]]]>
photo credit: vasta

So there is talk in shutting down Riverdale Farm in Toronto as a cost-savings measure (insert reference to gravy here). 2500 of the concerned have taken to Facebook to “Save the Riverdale Farm“. I’m feeling a bit ambivalent about this. On one hand, we have less and less contact with the animals that are responsible for the flesh we eat and modified sweat we consume. So if urbanites can see those animals and make the connection between the disembodied grocery store and a living, breathing organism, that’s a good thing. Is it a better world, however, if these animals weren’t kept at all?

“But,” I hear, “they’re domesticated animals.” How does that change the argument, though?

I’ve decided that I’m going to work at adding a few more posts here and there that fall somewhere in between tweets and what has emerged as my approach to blogging here, which is distinctly longer form.

My macro-blogging posts meant I updated infrequently (having to build up my psychic energy). Tweets have [...]]]> Oh hai! Metapost here!

I’ve decided that I’m going to work at adding a few more posts here and there that fall somewhere in between tweets and what has emerged as my approach to blogging here, which is distinctly longer form.

My macro-blogging posts meant I updated infrequently (having to build up my psychic energy). Tweets have certainly taken over my micro-blogging practice and I have something of a constant stream (look at the sidebar for recent updates). I’m going to aim for meso-blogging posts, just like the one I just added: clocking in at 171 words, I should be able to add a few more of these in the same time-frame as my macro-blog posts. Anyway. That is all.

-G.

Email signatures are helpful, but not necessary all the time (like do your colleagues really need to know who you are for the umpteenth time?). I streamline my emails by not having a default [...]]]>
photo credit: Peter Van Lancker

Email signatures are helpful, but not necessary all the time (like do your colleagues really need to know who you are for the umpteenth time?). I streamline my emails by not having a default email signature. When I do send an email to someone who I expect could use the context provided by my signature, I add it in.

How?

Auto text expansion. By attributing _wsig as the trigger, I can type these five characters in my email and up pops this:

—
Gavan Watson, PhD | Educational Developer, Teaching Support Services

206 Day Hall, University of Guelph, Guelph ON. N1G 2W1.

Phone: +1 (519) 824-4120 x56856 | Fax: +1 (519) 821-8530 | Twitter: @guelphTA | Facebook: TAing at Guelph | Web: http://www.tss.uoguelph.ca/id/ta/

Auto text signatures have the benefit of being program agnostic: I can add the same signature to my work email or my gmail account. Type once, use everywhere.

Now a Mac user, I purchased TypeIt4Me (and use and like). As a Windows user, I used the free version of PhraseExpress.

I’ve spent the past three days in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan as a participant at the 2011 iteration of the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (STLHE) [...]]]>
photo credit: jef safi (writing)

I’ve spent the past three days in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan as a participant at the 2011 iteration of the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (STLHE) conference (theme: From Here to the Horizon: Diversity and Inclusive Practice in Higher Education). It has been, in a word, great. This educational development gig is a new one for me and beyond getting settled in the day-to-day-ness of my job, I’ve spent considerable time thinking & reflecting (on a larger intellectual scale) about just what I do. The sessions I’ve attended through the pre-conference workshops and the conference proper have, unexpectedly, coalesced my thinking about some of the approaches I take and just what I do as an educational developer.

The relevant preamble here is that I come from an academic background of critical environmental education (special thanks to Leesa and York University’s Faculty of Environmental Studies for that particular flavour of practice), informed by a worldview that works actively to acknowledge, then illuminate the inherent blindspots of an anthropocentric orientation to the world. Environmental education is not, then, simply the act of educating about the environment (the assumption that somehow if everyone knows about the water cycle, we’ll have solved that particular component of the environmental crisis).

If I’ve been struggling at all in my new position, it is how to integrate my (now) two educator selves. I intuitively felt as though my academic training as a critical environmental educator had something important to offer my educational development work; I just needed to figure out what or how.

I participated in two pre-conference sessions that introduced themes that I revisited as the conference went on. The first was centred on professional skill training for graduate students. This links to my professional practice as a member of the University of Guelph’s graduate student learning initiative and as someone who trains graduate students interested in their own teaching practice. Without getting into lots of detail, there has been tri-council gnashing of teeth and wringing of hands around the lack of coherent professional skills training at Canadian Universities. This came to a head in the late oughts with the publication of a few policy documents, including lists of competencies, but has since fallen off the radar. We had, in the pre-conference session, the opportunity to work towards actions that can be taken to re-emphasise skill development as an important component of graduate education.

We began from the position that professional skill development is a good thing. Which, on the surface, is a natural assumption to make. Yet it’s not entirely unproblematic. See, for example, Doctoral student Melonie Fullick’s (another York U student, too!) post on the knowledge economy, human capital and tenure to see how we might muddle that idea a bit—my own critical interpretation is that grad skill development can be an (unintentional?) attempt to widget-ize grad students.

That afternoon was spent thinking— ultimately—about making a more explicit effort to get the epistemology “right” behind our efforts in teaching and learning. Constructivist metaphors to learning permeate recent approaches to understanding how we learn. Further contextualizing my time in Saskatoon was the land we were on (the Treaty 6 lands of Cree First Nations) and the theme (Diversity and Inclusive Practice in Higher Education). I struggled in the session because while I was seeing a clear attempt for us to think critically about our assumptions about our epistemic understandings, our offered alternative approaches were still steeped in a Western philosophical tradition. What of an approach that echoes Cheney & Weston’s (1999) ethics-based epistemology? Or that is distinctly non-Western?

Later, as we entered the full conference proceedings, I started to see rumblings on Twitter about a disconnect between practice and theory. I was struck with wondering why, as a community of practice, we seem to get stuck in certain epistemes of practice: it is, as best as I can tell, a Western, knowledge-as-deliverable one. Buffy St. Marie put it another way in the closing plenary: “University saved me. But the best teachers I ever had never had a chance to go to university…Eurocentric learning is not big enough, we need a bigger paradigm”

This is not to say I didn’t also start to see people operating at the periphery (or outside) this approach. Colleagues from environmental education, such as MJ Barrett, presented on decolonizing teaching practice; a team from U Sask re-framed teaching portfolios as storyboards and, in turn, turned a check list into an unexpectedly holistic practice.

My own doctoral work concerned itself about the ontology of humans watching birds: what relationships become, or emerge, in the particular practices of this human and non-human relationship? To link these emerging themes to my own work and the image above, it came together when I attended a session facilitated by Teresa Dawson on transforming the ontology of graduate education. Teresa did a great job laying bare an implicit approach to my understanding of work as an educational developer: it’s about the epistemology (often) at the expense of the ontology. Put another way, it’s about the ends (or knowledge) in spite / despite of the means (or questions). It’s focusing on learning the names of bird parts (the eye-ring, the scapulars) without learning about the situated context of that bird (how does it move, where is it found, what does it sound like). It’s being lectured at in a plenary of innovative practitioners because there’s an implicit fear of not getting the knowledge “out there.”

And this has given me my way forward: I’m not advocating throwing the baby out with the bathwater. My work will still concern itself with knowledge (how to plan a lesson, how to evaluate using a rubric) but this will not be the only ends I work towards. I intend to be more playful with participants; to spend more time exploring other possibilities; to include, or illuminate, other perspectives that I would let lay hidden.

For that, these four days have been a great success. Thanks to all at the Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching Effectiveness.