alumni UBC Book Club - The Wars by Timothy Findley

Margaret Munro – Muzzles, Media Offices and Message Control

January 17, 2014

Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by Open UBC Week. The open system that used to encourage and trust federal scientists to discuss their work has been replaced by a tightly controlled system that churns out “approved lines.” Margaret Munro’s stories exposing how the Harper government has muzzled and silenced its researchers have attracted national and international attention. Her talk will focus on Ottawa’s muzzles, media offices and message control.

Speaker:

Margaret Munro is an award-winning science writer with Postmedia News, which reaches millions of Canadians through its chain of newspapers including the Ottawa Citizen, Vancouver Sun and Montreal Gazette. Margaret has been to the Arctic to write about global warming, to Cape Canaveral for space launches and to remote First Nations communities to report on devastating diabetes epidemics. She has also documented the remarkable change in federal communication policy.

Select Articles Available at UBC Library

Munro, M. (1969). The psychology and education of the young: A guide to the principles of development, learning, and assessment. New York: American Elsevier Pub. Co.

Munro, M. (2011). ‘Talking dictionary’ could help dying languages survive. Geolinguistics, 37, 95-96.

UBC Library Research Guides

Paul Stacey – Open Freedoms / Open Practices

January 17, 2014

Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by Open UBC Week. Contemporary open education practices are based on free software and free culture movements. Join Paul Stacey from Creative Commons as he explores the extent to which Open Educational Resources, MOOC’s, open access, and other open education innovations are embodying and leveraging these movements. Add your ideas to Paul’s as he imagines the possibilities open freedoms and open practices bring to education for faculty, students, and institutions. This wide ranging session will show how open is affecting every aspect of the university’s core mission – teaching, research, data, infrastructure, and community. Open freedoms have a corresponding set of ethical practices. There is growing expectation in the digital age, where the cost of copying and distributing resources is close to zero, that public funds should result in public goods. Governments and funders are increasingly putting in place open policy that requires grantees to openly license research and curricula created with public funds. Join Paul as he explores the ways in which digital technologies and contemporary open education practices are affecting the economics and traditional business models of education. Is open a major transformation of education? Decide for yourself at this Open Freedoms / Open Practices event.

Speaker Bio:

With over 25 years as an educator in adult learning, Paul has delivered high-tech educational programs in the private and public sector around the world. AT BCcampus, Paul led initiatives to forward use of educational technology for online learning, development of open educational resources, and professional development services for educators across all of BC’s public post-secondary institutions. Now at Creative Commons Paul is working to support the build out of an education and culture commons around the world.

Select Articles Available at UBC Library

Stacey, P. (2013). Government support for open educational resources: Policy, funding, and strategies. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 14(2), 67-80. [Link]

Stacey, P. (2011). Opening up education: Creative alternatives to access copyright.

Stacey, P. (2008). “Wikivism”: From communicative capitalism to organized networks. Cultural Politics: An International Journal, 4(1), 73-73. doi:10.2752/175174308X266406. [Link]

Chapman, P., Stacey, A., & Stacey, A. (2003). Students internet searching exposed. Library + Information Update, 2(6), 48-50.

UBC Library Research Guides

David Vogt and Christina Hendricks – The Whys and Hows of Open: Transforming Learning Through Open Pedagogies and Practices

January 17, 2014

Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by Open UBC Week. Open education can be understood as a collection of practices that utilize online technology to freely share knowledge and to increase access to learning. The creative act of designing an open course or project can also lead to new pedagogical approaches. This session will feature two UBC faculty members who are creating and participating in innovative open projects and courses, including:

M101 – a localized, open online course on mobile education that is designed as knowledge asset and professional network
Why Open? – a facilitated and collaborative course that explores the different meanings of open in various industries as well as the benefits and issues with open
#ooe13 – an open professional development course on educational technologies
DS106 – an open, online course on digital storytelling that is hosted by the University of Mary Washington and that is currently being offered as a “headless” version this term with volunteers in charge of facilitating particular weeks during the course ETEC522, PHIL102, Arts One & More – on campus courses which are incorporating student blogs, wikis, backchannels and more.
In addition to hearing their stories, the session will also explore the motivations, experiences, and challenges in embracing open. We will discuss the impact openness had on their pedagogy and use of technology as well as explore how to determine if these efforts are meeting the instructors goals and improving the student experience.

Speakers:

Christina Hendricks is a Senior Instructor who regularly teaches both in Philosophy and in Arts One. While on sabbatical during the 2012-2013 academic year, she did research on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, particularly on the topics of peer feedback and assessment and learning communities such as Arts One. She also participated in several open online courses (some of them “MOOCs”), including ETMOOC (Educational Technology and Media MOOC: http://etmooc.org) and DS106 (Digital Storytelling 106: http://ds106.us). As a result of these experiences she got involved in planning and facilitating a couple of other open online courses, and has started to make her on-campus courses more open and available to others to view and possibly participate in.

David Vogt is Director of Digital Learning Projects for the UBC Faculty of Education and Director of Innovation Strategy for the UBC MAGIC Lab. He has maintained a career-long interest in harnessing the learning potentials within emerging technologies. His unusual trajectory as an academic, innovator and businessman provides a unique perspective on the future of learning. He is author and instructor of ETEC 522 Ventures in Learning Technology.

Select Articles Available at UBC Library

Hendricks, C., & Oliver, K. (1999). Language and liberation: Feminism, philosophy, and language. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Hendricks, C. (1997). Fluidizing the mirror – feminism and identity through kristeva’s looking-glass. Philosophy Today, 41, 79-89.

Moulton, J. (2000). Language and liberation: Feminism, philosophy, and language. University of Chicago Press. [Link]

Hendricks, C. (2008). Foucault on freedom (review). The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 22(4), 310-312. doi:10.1353/jsp.0.0048. [Link]

UBC Library Research Guides

Philosophy

UBC Africa Awareness Initiative Conference Week 2014, January 20-24

January 16, 2014

Webcasts sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre

Brian Lamb, Jon Festinger, Will Engle – Reclaiming the Open Learning Environment

January 14, 2014

Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by Open UBC Week. The delivery of open online learning has become a more common practice (or at least a more desired practice) in higher education in recent years. In this session, two diverse universities will share their lessons learned in delivering open learning. UBC has long embraced open learning projects through a robust WordPress and MediaWiki publishing framework that helped advance a broad range of open educational activities, including student produced OER and open courses. UBC’s embrace of both a self-maintained open infrastructure as well as emerging third party platforms is creating new potentials for open education at UBC. Meanwhile Thompson Rivers University (TRU) has an “Open Learning” division with a long history of providing open access post-secondary distance education (online and print) by offering continuous enrolment, flexible scheduling and minimal admission requirements, as well as extensive capacity for Prior Learning Assessment and Recognition (PLAR) and a well-established transfer credit system. It is working to enhance its capacity to support learning and public engagement via open platforms as well, via alignment with the Open Educational Resources university (OERu) and by working with UBC to adapt its MediaWiki and WordPress framework for its own needs.

This session will examine how institutions and instructors can provide open educational experiences and develop the required expertise, capacity and support systems. The co-faciliators of this session will identify sharable and extensible tools, approaches and means of cooperation that will allow educators and learners to shape their open learning experiences.

Speakers:

Brian Lamb is the Director of Innovation Open Learning at Thompson Rivers University (TRU). Brian moved on to TRU after more than a decade with UBC’s Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology, where he was a Strategist contributing to a wide range of new media, open education and sustainability education initiatives. He founded some of the earliest campus services for blogs and wikis in higher education. He’s been a Research Fellow at Utah State University’s Center for Open and Sustainable Learning (COSL), and a Visiting Researcher at Barcelona’s Open University of Catalonia. He mutters ill-tempered observations on his weblog: http://abject.ca/

Jon Festinger, Q.C. is a Vancouver, British Columbia based counsel and educator. A Faculty member at the Centre for Digital Media (http://thecdm.ca) Jon teaches Video Game Law in the Faculty of Law at the University of British Columbia (http://videogame.law.ubc.ca) where he has now taught as an Adjunct Professor for two decades, is the author of the first edition of “Video Game Law” published by LexisNexis in 2005, and co-author of the 2nd Edition published in 2012(http://www.lexisnexis.com/store/ca/catalog/booktemplate/productdetail.jsp?prodId=prd-cad-01004). As a graduate of McGill University’s Faculty of Law, Jon began his legal career in private practice, in turn becoming General Counsel of WIC Western International Communication, Senior Vice President of the CTV Television Network and Executive Vice President, Business & General Counsel of the Vancouver Canucks. Jon practices law through Festinger Law & Strategy, is Vice Chair of Ronald McDonald House British Columbia, City Opera Vancouver and the Simon Fraser University Foundation. Twitter: @gamebizlaw Xbox Gamertag: cdmjon

Will Engle is a strategist at UBC’s Centre for Teaching, Learning & Technology. Will is engaged with open education initiatives that are leveraging emerging technologies, approaches, and pedagogies to support flexible and open learning. With a background in library science, Will is interested in understanding and supporting the removal of barriers that limit access to education, information, and knowledge. He occasional posts at http://blogs.ubc.ca/open or @infology on Twitter.

UBC Library Research Guides

Gregor Kiczales – MOOCs and On-Campus Learning

January 10, 2014

Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by Open UBC Week. What will higher education become as the MOOC innovation era plays out? Setting dire predictions aside it seems likely that students will have a vast range of resources for learning at their disposal. With MOOCs, MOORs, badge systems, learning communities and other innovations coming on line students will be able to get content delivery, active learning support, office hours and assessment from a variety of different sources. All of these will be available these at a wider range of price points and qualities than is possible today. What do we do with our on-campus courses in this environment? How can we use these innovations to offer students a better education than ever before? What will it be like running courses that make extensive use of open online resources? What will open online courses be best at? Worst? What must we excel at? These questions led us to develop a Coursera MOOC, which ran for the first time this summer. We are now offering that MOOC in parallel with an on-campus course, in a continued effort to understand the relative strengths of each modality. The talk will report on these experiences and present our current beliefs about the challenges ahead.

Speaker:

Gregor Kiczales is a Professor in the Computer Science Department. His work is directed at enabling programmers to write programs that, as much as possible, look like their design. He is best known for his work on aspect-oriented programming, and he led the Xerox PARC team that developed aspect-oriented programming and AspectJ. He is a co-author of “The Art of the Metaobject Protocol” and was one of the designers of the Common Lisp Object System (CLOS). He is an ACM Fellow and the 2012 recipient of the Dahl-Nygaard Senior Prize for his achievements in programming language design research. He is also the instructor for the Introduction to Systematic Program Design MOOC at Coursera.

Select Articles Available at UBC Library

Kiczales, G. (1996). Beyond the black box: Open implementation. IEEE Software, 13(1), 8-11. doi:10.1109/52.476280. [Link]

Davis, S., & Kiczales, G. (2010). Registration-based language abstractions. ACM Sigplan Notices, 45(10), 754-773. doi:10.1145/1932682.1869521

Wand, M., Kiczales, G., & Dutchyn, C. (2004). A semantics for advice and dynamic join points in aspect-oriented programming. ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS), 26(5), 890-910. doi:10.1145/1018203.1018208. [Link]

Hannemann, J., & Kiczales, G. (2002). Design pattern implementation in java and AspectJ. ACM Sigplan Notices, 37(11), 161-173.

UBC Library Research Guides

Computer Science

Erin Fields – The Future? Open Online Courses and the Library

January 10, 2014

Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by Open UBC Week. Open access to research has become a core goal of academic libraries. The growth of open access initiatives, such as digital repositories, supports a very democratic notion of openly accessible publicly funded research. However, transitioning the support of open access initiatives to courses (e.g. LOOCs, MOOCs, e.g.) has been received with mixed views by librarians. Using current examples of courses at UBC, this session will explore open online courses and the future of library practice in these environments. This session will draw on participants ideas and opinions to further develop the dialogue on this issue.

Speaker:

Erin Fields is the Teaching and Learning Librarian at UBC Library with a focus on flexible learning environments. Her current work involves collaborating on a TLEF funded open online course and supporting the flexible learning initiative at UBC.

Select Articles Available at UBC Library

Fields, E. (2010). A unique Twitter use for reference services. Library Hi Tech News, 27(6/7), 14-15. doi:10.1108/07419051011095863. [Link]

Fields, E. (2011). Managing gender diversity in asia: A research companion. Feminist Collections, 32(2), 22-22. [Link]

Fields, E. (2011). Feminist Podcasting: Delivering Scholarship Outside the University Walls. Feminist Collections, 32(1), 26. [Link]

UBC Library Research Guides

Gender & Sexuality Stuides

Mary Burgess – Open Textbook Workshop

January 10, 2014

Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by Open UBC Week. In October 2012, the government of British Columbia announced its support for the creation of open textbooks for the 40 highest-impact first and second-year courses in the province’s public post-secondary system. This project has generated a lot of interest in open textbooks in general, the financial benefits they may have for students, and the impact such open educational resources may have on curriculum development and flexible pedagogies. This session will provide an overview of open textbooks and will specifically explore: an update on the BC open text book project; individual faculty and institutional changes in practice; benefits and challenges of adopting an open textbook; options for finding, selecting, and building on existing open educational resources. We will also share experiences to gain insights into what we should be aware of when venturing into the use of OER, including a discussion of Creative Commons licensing.

Speaker:

Mary is responsible for the portfolio of programs and services at BCcampus that includes open education programs, the Open Textbook program, professional learning and training programs, and applied research projects such as the remote web-based science labs (RWSL / NANSLO).

Select Articles Available at UBC Library

Greene, J. F. (1974). The suitability of continuing education programs in open education for teachers: Instrument validation. International Journal of Continuing Education and Training.

Rogers, V. R., Church, B., & Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. (1975). Open education: Critique and assessment. Washington: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Rapp, D. (2011). LYRASIS program aims for open source education. Library Journal, 136(12), 18. [Link]

Bremer, A., & Bremer, J. (1972). Open education: A beginning. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

UBC Library Research Guides