Category: Education and Administration

The Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences is sponsoring a National Dialogue on Higher Education in November in Ottawa.
How is it a dialogue? They have an online forum and at the conference there will be “Table Talk” sessions at meals. There has also been a lot of discussion behind the scenes between the organizations sponsoring this. I can’t help feeling, however, that some of this is about promoting higher education outside the academy.
Continue reading A National Dialogue on Higher Education

Concordia: EV Complex sneak peek tour is a multipage tour by pictures of the new Integrated Engineering, Computer Science and Visual Arts Complex. This building is interesting for a number of reasons. First, it encodes in the building an intergration of visual arts and computing/engineering – not a normal mix. Second, because it was built in downtown Montreal, they had to build up and there are a number of interesting ways they get around the problems of building up. They have these three floor atriums with spiral stairs that connect departments and they have high-speed escalators and elevators to move people up quickly.

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