Category: Education and Administration

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.

The Stanford Institute of Design or d.school is “a bold new design institute at Stanford founded by the likes of Terry Winograd. It seems to have come out of “Computer Science, Mechanical Engineering, Management Science and Engineering, and the Graduate School of Business”. Strangely there don’t seem to be any architects or artists involved – it seems to be about engineering and business.
The web site is brilliant, I love the d.Manifesto – “All you need to know. On a napkin.” The section on “Our Place” also shows their ideas for an innovative project space for students and visiting faculty.
Thanks to Audrey for pointing me to this.

The “Highlights of the Literature Review” of Face of the Future by the Cultural Human Resources Council has a section on the new media industry which has an interesting subsection on definition. One of the key problems with this sector is defining it. Does it include the ICT (Information and Communications Technology), for example? Or is it just the creation, production, and distribution of content?
Continue reading New Media Highlights

The New MEDIA Employment Centre has an extensive list of links on multimedia jobs, employment and industry. A great place to find other stuff.

At Mac we use a competencies model to audit our curriculum where we list the things we want students to be competent at when they graduate and then see if these are actually taught and reinforced in the curriculum. I just found a much more thorough list of competencies from the Cultural Human Resources Council. There is a short checklist that would be great for students to check themselves against and then there is a longer disucssion of the competencies in the Profile document. Here is the summary list of professional competencies (which the profile goes into much more detail on):
A. RESEARCH ñ EXPLORE IDEAS
B. IDENTIFY PROJECT OBJECTIVES
C. PROPOSE A PROJECT
D. DESIGN A PROJECT
E. DEVELOP A PROJECT (PRODUCE)
F. MANAGE A PROJECT
G. INTERACT WITH CLIENT
H. PROMOTE PROJECTS OR SERVICES
I. OPERATE TOOLS AND EQUIPMENT
J. SHARE KNOWLEDGE AND INFORMATION
Continue reading New Media Competencies

Cultural Human Resources Council has a good summary of studies by Statistics Canada on the impact and contribution of the cultural sector.
Canadian Framework for Culture Statistics provides the definitions as to what is considered the cultural sector and has some interesting stuff on how they think culture works. Strangely they don’t say much about digital culture, it is woven into other industries.
Economic Contribution of Culture in Canada has the statistics showing a higher growth rate in employment in the culture sector. The “Culture sector employment grew faster than overall Canadian employment
in most years”. Also noteworthy is that written media are by far the largest area of employment though festivals have seen significant growth. Another interesting statistic is that over a quarter of all people employed in the cultural sector are self-employed, which is much higher than average. This is because so much work in the film industry, for example is project based.
There is a related report look at provincial distribution and one about Ontario. Ontario it turns out has about 42% of Canada’s cultural jobs, a significant percentage of all the cultural jobs.

All the reports on this area are at Publications – Guide to Culture Statistics | 87-008-GIE.
These statistics would seem to indicate that the cultural sector is an important part of the economy, that it has seen higher growth in employment than other sectors, and that it has a higher percentage of self-employed people.
Statistics Canada also has a quarterly Focus on Culture for which you have to pay for more recent issues.

Knowledge Matters: Skills and Learning for Canadians – Section 3: Strengthening Accessibility and Excellence in Post-Secondary Education is part of Canada’s Innovation Strategy. It calls for dramatic increases in graduate admissions (5% per year until 2010!) and making post-secondary education financially accessible. Of interest to me is the statement,

INCREASINGLY, SUCCESS IN THE KNOWLEDGE-BASED ECONOMY REQUIRES INDIVIDUALS WHO ARE CREATIVE AND WHO HAVE HIGHLY DEVELOPED PROBLEM-SOLVING AND COMMUNICATION SKILLS.

High-performance firms attribute much of their success to developing a wide range of competencies. Information and communications technologies also require these skill sets. Teamwork is an essential part of the production process, and interpersonal skills are becoming key determinants of business success. For this reason the arts, humanities and social sciences are increasingly valued as preparation for employment. Also important are multidisciplinary learning and teaching techniques that develop an ability to think creatively and work collaboratively.

What strikes me from the Executive Summary is how this document foreshadows the Rae Report.

Lynn Hughes and I spent three days at the Knowledge Project, an event put together by the Social Science and Research Council of Canada. Wednesday was devoted to reporting back about the Transformation (more in another post.)
Thursday was an all day poster session (or, as Marc Renaud called it, a trade-show) for Strategic Research Clusters, MCRIs, CURAs, and INEs – in other words many of the large SSHRC-funded projects were there. Lynn and I are PIs on iMatter or Interactive Matter, a Strategic Cluster on digital media creation and interpretation in the arts and humanities.
What is interesting is that SSHRC, despite having impressive handouts for the “Knowledge Project”, does not have a web site for it.