Category: My Research
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MOOCs: Money Making Schemes?
Sally Roy from Visual Academy emailed me out of the blue–a cold call of sorts–and asked me to blog about what I thought of the infographic called “The Money Making Schemes of MOOCs” The first bit looks like this (see below). Originally, I hoped to blog on it myself, but I decided that it would…
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Austerity in academia
There’s been some shocking news lately from Alberta, of all provinces, in terms of budget cuts and changes to post secondary education. Thursday’s provincial budget announced a three percent funding cut, or a cut of $147 million. This is a pretty serious threat to the quality of higher education and to the student experience. Cuts…
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Academic Work-Life Imbalance
Back in November, I wrote about trying to achieve work-life balance as an academic mom with two small children, two demanding dogs, and an academic spouse. I must confess that I have not attained this goal, but rather have succeeded in attaining its opposite–academic work-life imbalance! That is, I tend to work a lot. Perhaps…
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Teaching with Blackboard Collaborate
Last night, I had my second “Virtual Classroom” session with students from my online graduate course called “E-Learning and Education.” This time, a smaller group of three students from the class and I were able to connect for a videoconferencing session for just over an hour. It was much more successful than last time. We…
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Academic work-life balance
Being the kind of parent, especially a pre-tenure academic parent, that I aspire to be to two small kids is no easy feat. Before I began an assistant professorship at UWindsor, I spent some time overseas and had a chance to observe differences between parenting practices in Europe (mostly France and Denmark, but also in…
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Redeploying FARGO at UWindsor
Conducting research as a faculty member is not without its challenges, especially when you are collecting data from students that you teach in your own classes. I’m a design-based researcher. This means that I usually collaborate closely with teachers and developers to implement designs of innovative technologies or instructional interventions. When I’m in the dual…
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Editor’s Perspective
Although I have served as a reviewer for various conferences (e.g., AERA, CSSE, ICLS, CSCL) and journals (e.g., Computers & Education, Discourse Processes), I only recently had the pleasure of overseeing the submission review process from the other side, from the perspective of the editor who oversees the journal article publication process. I used open…
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Motherhood and Academia – continued
A couple of years ago, I wrote a post about the challenges of blogging, writing and research as a first-time mother. At the time, I had just completed my PhD and was on maternity leave before starting my postdoc. It was a nerve-wracking time for me back then because I was just figuring out how…
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Windsor II: Writing
I managed to submit a SSHRC Insight Development grant application last week, which was a feat given that I have a two month old, a toddler, a spouse who is also an academic, and a demanding pug dog! I was fortunate enough to be able to get feedback on an early draft from the Research…
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Windsor I: Teaching and Research
It’s been about three months since I started working as an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Windsor. In that time, I set up shop both on campus and at home, and am only now getting to blogging about it. I teach six sections (4 primary/junior, 2 junior/intermediate) of an…