Category: Education and Administration

Bob Rae has been commissioned to advise the Premier of Ontario on our postsecondary education system in January of 2005. A Discussion Paper is now available. The Resource Room has links to a number of useful documents.
Continue reading Rae Discussion Paper

Bob Rae mentioned an OECD document, On the Edge: Securing a Sustainable Future for Higher Education from the Institutional Management in Higher Education (IMHE) programme of the OECD. (I’m not sure of all the acronyms, departments, and programmes.)

New Media in Academia is a set of interviews with representatives from 18 universities like Carnegie Mellon and Rensselaer about the history and design of their programs. There is an introduction by Jan Ekenberg who identifies two main models, the classroom model and the studio model.

SFU News – SFU integrates TechBC students – Feb 21, 2002 is an article about how Simon Fraser University is taking on the students stranded when TechBC was closed. TechBC was an interdisciplinary university set up in 1999 and soon closed due to budget and student issues. One of their undergrad programs was in Interactive Arts (for more on the program, see the interview from Switch.)
So what was the full story on TechBC?

The design, decoration and equipment of our places of education cannot be regarded as anything less than of first-rate importance – as equally important, indeed, as the teacher. … We shall not bring about any improvement in standards of taste by lectures and preachings; habitation is the golden method. … The school, the technical college, the community centre, which is not a work of architectural art is to that extent an educational failure.

viewing Impington – Henry Morris and the idea of the village college is an extended essay in an encyclopedic site on informal education: infed.org. The essay on Morris and village colleges talks about the attention to balanced space for these community education centres. The Village College combined children’s education with lifelong learning and community spaces.

It would take all the various vital but isolated activities in village life – the School, the Village Hall and Reading Room, the Evening Classes, the Agricultural Education Courses, the Women’s Institute, the British Legion, Boy Scouts and Girl Guides, the recreation ground, the branch of the County Rural Library, the Athletic and Recreation Clubs – and, bringing them together into relation, create a new institution for the English countryside.

Continue reading Village Colleges

The Ingenuity Gap is a book by Thomas Homer-Dixon that evolved out a 1995 article, The Ingenuity Gap. It is a moving plea for the attention and intelligence in the face of increasingly complex problems.
Continue reading Homer-Dixon: Ingenuity Gap

The University of Waterloo is moving their School of Architecture to Cambridge Ontario. This project is taking a historic building and renovating it for an elite architecture school that could bring new life to Cambridge downtown.
Continue reading Waterloo School of Architecture: Cambridge

In a previous blog on Information Studies at the University of Toronto, Information Studies, I looked at the Chartreuse paper created by the dean there. Now that has been developed into an academic plan, see Faculty of Information Studies home page and the FIS Academic Plan. Note the three major thrusts of their proposal and the way they plan to model an electronic university for the rest of U of T. Will anyone listen when they do?

Cities and municipalities, which have become a hot issue, in Canada, have become interested in developing universities. A university brings the right sort of knowledge people into a neighborhood so we are seeing a lot of interest in moving universities and setting up new campuses of existing ones. McMaster is in discussion with Burlington and I am helping with this. (See, McMaster Daily News – July 29: A McMaster presence in Burlington?.) As I am helping you will see blog entries on subjects around the development of university activities.
Continue reading U of Waterloo new School of Pharmacy