Category: Education and Administration

An article in yesterday’s Globe and Mail titled Wanted: a great many professors reports on the need for professors in Ontario. The article by Caroline Alphonso (Tuesday, April 12, 2005, Page A12) reports on a OCUFA study, Closing the Quality Gap which argues for the need for hiring 11,000 faculty by 2010.
Continue reading Globe: Professors Wanted

A column in today’s The Globe and Mail by John Fraser titled, “Universities need money, yes, but a social mission, too” (Saturday, March 26, 2005, Page F9) drew my attention to a longish submission to the Rae commission by George Fallis from York. Titled “The Mission of the University” this report is available on the COU Think Ontario ª Resources ª Documents page. The report is a good overview of the history of the university, the uses and expectations of the university leading into the current mission of the Canadian university.
Continue reading Fallis: The Mission of the University

There is no such thing as a corporate culture. Companies are made up of many cultures, the strengths and weaknesses of which are a result of local conditions.

Marcus Buckingham Thinks Your Boss Has an Attitude Problem is a story about the research of marcus Buckingham into corporate culture or the lack of it. For various reasons I have been reading about management, and this is one of those rare stories that made me think. I suspect the same is true of universities – they don’t have one culture, but many (called departments) and we don’t know what makes one healthy and another problematic.
Continue reading Large organizations don’t have a single culture

Mark Green from the School of Creative Media at the City University of Hong Kong came through to talk to us about new media education. Not only did he go and teach at McMaster, but he is a pioneer in computer science and games working at the University of Alberta before going to Hong Kong.
The SCM has about 30 instructors (10 of which do only teaching), up to 450 students, and about 130,000 square feet of space. (They are getting a geometric Libeskind new building. See Announcement of Creative Media Centre.) The programs they offer are around New Media, Film, Installation Art, Animation. They accept about 140 students a year into 2 and 3 year programs.
Administratively SCM is a separate school with no departments and one dean – they encourage people to mix and team teach. “One dean, one focus.” One of the amazing things is the number of applicants they get – over 6000 for 900 interviews and 140 places!

The major lesson they learned starting quickly was the importance of hiring in order to get the right people.

Update: The link below is broken, but here is a link to their new Arts Promotion Kit. Lots of good links in there.

The Canada Council for the Arts has a neat little site that provides an Advocacy resource kit. It for Canada as it has mostly Canadian facts and quotes. Nobody like to do advocacy – it makes us feel dirty, especially if we are trying to advocate for noble enterprises like churches, universities or arts. That said, we can learn from the health sector. Through ongoing advocacy they have been able to effectively make the case for funding of health care (and health research). If we believe in what we do why should we be ashamed to tell people?
Continue reading Making the case for arts and culture

My wife just attended a talk by Pierre Fillion where he argued that successful mid-sized cities have:

1. Proximity to a university
2. Cultural attractions and historical buildings
3. Pleasant pedestrian walkways
4. Retail space (but not a mall)

He argued that parking and malls are not helpful. A downtown should be different from surburbs or no one will bother going downtown. See Archives: Journal of the American Planning Association for his article on “The Successful Few: Healthy Downtowns of Small Metropolitan Regions”.
Continue reading Successful Mid-sized Cities

The Women in Film and Television – Toronto commissioned an interesting study from EKOS Research Associates, Frame Work: Employment in Canadian Screen-Based Media – A National Profile. The Executive Summary is available in PDF format for download.
The Executive Summary looks at the Screen based industries from Film to New Media. It pays special attendtion to diversity issues and has a nice summary of where new media jobs are expected.

As technology advances, so does the need for a skilled workforce. Today, the screen-based media industries face the critical challenge of ensuring our workforce is trained to exploit new digital technologies on the one hand, and the increased need for creative/sophisticated business and financial skills on the other. (p. 14)

Continue reading Framework study: New media in Canada

What would a high-end computer supported visualization studio look like? The Alias Visualization Studio, from the look of the web site, is a space for smaller groups to visualize design ideas (developed with Alias software no doubt) and discuss them. Unlike caves and walls that I have seen, this seems to use mostly projectors and seems to have benefited from an architect who thought of the whole space. How could we use these in education?
Thanks to Mark Chamberlain for this.

The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: An Annotated Bibliography is a useful bibliography (as of 2002) coming out a movement from the “classic” report by Boyer, Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate which identifies four types of scholarship from scholarship of discovery to scholarship of teaching. The bibliography works for me because it is annotated concisely and because they haven’t tried to include everything.
What’s also interesting is how “Scholarship of Teaching and Learning” seems to be the catchphrase for treating an investigative approach to teaching as research – if teaching can’t beat research it should join it. Of course, a scholarly approach to teaching doesn’t mean good teaching … though it probably makes a difference.

For many in higher education, the most salient history begins with Scholarship Reconsidered, the 1990 report by Ernest Boyer, writing as president of The Carnegie Foundation. Boyer contends we must “move beyond the tired old ‘teaching versus research’ debate and give the familiar and honorable term ‘scholarship’ a broader, more capacious meaning,” one that includes four distinct but interrelated dimensions: discovery, integration, application, and teaching. In thus staking a claim for the scholarship of teaching, Boyer seeks to bring greater recognition and reward to teaching, and is also suggesting that excellent teaching is marked by the same habits of mind that characterize other types of scholarly work (he does not sharply distinguish between excellent teaching and the scholarship of teaching). Scholarship Reconsidered has given powerful momentum to a wave of reports and recommendations from both campuses and scholarly societies that share this agenda of bringing greater attention and recognition to teaching.

Continue reading Scholarship of Teaching

According to a story by Jack Kapica, “Globetechnology: Canadian high-tech sector shows signs of growth” (Globe and Mail Update, March 4, 2005), Statistics Canada is reporting that the high-tech sector is showing high rates of entry of new businesses which show that financial backers see opportunity. The high rates of entry could lead to strong employment growth. The Statistics Canada report is titled “An anatomy of growth and decline: high-tech industries through the boom and bust years, 1997-2003“. Here is the abstract:

This paper tracks the growth and decline of information and communications technology (ICT) industries that were synonymous with the so-called new economy boom of the late-1990s and its subsequent bust period in the early 2000s. The analysis focuses on the question of whether the ICT bust has been accompanied by a structural shift illustrated by less firm turnover. It shows that to date there is little evidence of a structural shift. Entry rates of new establishments within the ICT sector were above those of other sectors within the economy during both the ICT boom and bust. This is evidence that both firms and entrepreneurs continued to see opportunities to develop new products and markets even during a time of retrenchment. The location of the ICT sector also showed little evidence of a change.