By David Greaves, Teaching and Learning Enhancement Specialist When it comes to student feedback, more is generally better. When we have higher response rates, we know that more student voices are being heard and that the feedback an instructor receives…
By Lisa Greig, Student Support and Outreach Coordinator It has been a difficult nine months for many as we have all been braving the waves of grief, collectively, in this pandemic. Understanding grief Jack Jordan provides a great definition of…
By Murray Drew, Professor, Department of Animal and Poultry Science I am a member of a committee which is exploring whether there are teaching practices that support student mental wellbeing in the classroom. You are probably thinking that this means…
By Yin Liu, Associate Professor, Department of English Why I did it In 2016-2017 I taught, for the first time, a full-year (6 credit unit) English course, “History and Future of the Book,” which is one of our Foundations courses –…
By Tereigh Ewert When I read the above article, I was immediately reminded of an article I read a few years ago, called “’I know the type of people I work well with’: Student anxiety in multicultural group projects.”[1] The…
By Carolyn Hoessler The familiar challenge: We are 6 weeks into summer, and in the pile on our desk about mid-way down is that proposal, paper, course redesign that there has yet to be time for. Each week offers 40+…
By John Kleefeld In the first part of this two-part piece, I discussed arborescent (vertical, discrete, hierarchical) and rhizomatic (horizontal, overlapping, interconnected) ways of acquiring and classifying knowledge, as well as the convergence of the arbor and the rhizome in modern knowledge…
By John Kleefeld In my previous post, I characterized the subject categories in the Requested articles page as idiosyncratic and mused that they might be better based on the Library of Congress Classification system. As it happens, Wikipedia does map…
By John Kleefeld In my previous two posts, I discussed how instructors and students can use WikiProjects to select articles for editing in Wikipedia-based course assignments. In this post, I discuss the creation of new articles, using WikiProject Requested articles…
By John Kleefeld In a previous post, I wrote about how WikiProject Medicine acts as a forum for determining the priority (also called importance) of specific health-related Wikipedia articles and assessing their quality (also called class). More generally, these three…
By John Kleefeld Every system has its biases, and Wikipedia is no exception. A common criticism of Wikipedia is its male bias. Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, agreed with the criticism after it conducted a 2011 survey indicating that up…
[social_share/] By Carolyn Hoessler Bolded words (those terms highlighted in textbooks), matter for they are the building blocks of every language that allow us to communicate complex ideas, convey how we see the world and shape our questions and…
By John Kleefeld In my last blog post, I wrote about the wide range of disciplines represented in student Wikipedia projects. Perhaps the most ambitious effort is the Wiki Project Med Foundation, whose goal is nothing less than “to provide the sum of…
By John Kleefeld This post has been updated to correct some initial errors. A spectre is haunting academia—the spectre of Wikipedia. And while there was a time when all the old powers would have entered into an alliance to exorcise…
[social_share/] By Carolyn Hoessler When we teach students research skills and ways of approaching being a researcher, we know that research is more than just plugging in numbers or following a script. In a statistical analysis, being able…