Miriam Unruh (mkunruh)'s Public Profile in the Diigo Community

Member since May 23, 2007, follows 3 people, 1 public groups, 35 public bookmarks (36 total).

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A welcome face at the end of a long journey #27 of 100 on Flickr - Photo Sharing! on 2009-12-08
A91-445672.jpg (JPEG Image, 170x113 pixels) on 2009-08-01
Between The Tides on 2009-05-11
- From Me to Wii: Discovering the Millenial Student: Implications for Educators
  
  Mary Astorino, University of New Brunswick (Saint John)
  
  Lisa Best, University of New Brunswick (Saint John)
  
  Sandra Bell, University of New Brunswick (Saint John)
  
  Judy Buchanan, University of New Brunswick (Saint John)
  
  David Creelman, University of New Brunswick (Saint John)
  
  Rob Moir - University of New Brusnwick (Saint John)
  
  Full Day 9:00 a.m. - 4:30 p.m.
  
  To paraphrase Shakespeare, “The Millennials, by any other name, would be just as sweet.” Educators, marketers and researchers have labelled the current/upcoming generation Millennials, Generation Y, Net Generation, IPOD Generation, and more. Regardless of the label, students from this generation are currently in post secondary institutions, bringing with them a diverse set of characteristics, motivations and skills. Although different authors cite a different range of ages for the Millennial generation, most agree that they start from 1985 – present.
  
  As educators, we need to understand the hallmarks of the generation in order to find ways to both engage and retain Millennial students. This workshop will take a discovery approach in understanding Millennials’ impact on post-secondary education and in considering practical teaching and learning strategies to meet their needs and unique abilities. As a new generation of students, with some unique and distinct characteristics, begins to appear before us we need to know who they are, and how we can best reach them, engage them, and allow them to successfully enter into the university experience.
Between The Tides on 2009-05-11
- Imagining the Possibilities of Digital Education: Critical Educational Components Worth Considering
  
  Dieter Schonwetter, University of Manitoba
  
  Guided by current research and best practices, participants will explore the complexities of transformative and distributed digital curriculum preparatory practices to develop a more engaging manner of education that not only increases students’ retention of material learned but also advances their clinical skills through computer technology.Delivering education to students that is engaging challenges many educators. Added to this challenge is the lack of knowledge transfer that many students bring to the learning environments, especially in professional schools. Moreover, with limited classroom time available, much of what is being taught in the student’s early years is content rich but not directly connected with the paralleling kinesthetic skill development necessary for practice. Curricula that addresses students’ cognitive, psychomotor, and affective needs while not only informing, but also enhancing the transfer of their learning from the didactic classroom to the practice is needed. This session identifies critical educational theories and principles foundational for development of digital curriculum. Models of education that parallel those found in aviation, engineering, and medicine that combine various learning modalities will be explored. An understanding of the fundamentals of gaming technology that effectively incorporates 3D learning and motivates players in advancing through various stages and levels of the game will also be discussed.
- C4.01 Meeting Growing Performance Expectations in a Context of Declining Resources Through the Effective Use of Undergraduate Teaching Assistants.
  
  Carol Roderick, University of New Brunswick (Fredericton)
  
  Pierre Zundel, University of New Brunswick (Fredericton)
  
  Meeting growing performance expectations in a context of declining resources is a major dilemma currently faced by universities.Student engagement in teaching may be one of the ways to partially transcend this dilemma.In particular, undergraduate teaching assistants (UTAs) may be a valuable resource for increasing student engagement and improving educational quality by decreasing faculty-student ratios, increasing the potential for faculty-student interactions, and making it possible for faculty members to adopt more active and engaging pedagogies. Through the effective us of UTAs, institutions can add considerable educational value in a cost effective manner.
  
  This session reports on recent research aimed at understanding good practices in the use of UTAs, and at assessing institutional performance at Renaissance College, University of New Brunswick relative to these practices.Through a review of the relevant literature and qualitative interviews with UTAs and faculty members at the College, we found that good practices include:
  
  Transparent selection process,
  
  Negotiated responsibilities,
  
  Training and mentoring,
  
  TA visibility.
  
  Engagement in student learning,
  
  Everyone learns, and
  
  Fair compensation.
  
  This study can inform teaching and learning by providing a foundation for faculty members to reflect upon their experiences and enhance their practice.
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- - Encouraging the Swell of Learning Objects
    
    Caterina Valentino, Ryerson University
    
    While researches attempt to define and classify learning objects, instructors are busy developing and shifting the focus from a technical to a practical application. Rather than quibble about the definition of learning objects, this presentation highlights how they are used. What is it about a learning object that engages students? What do students find contextually appropriate? Can a learning object move beyond its neutrality and motivate the learner? Should learning objects be reusable? How can learning objects ease the online instructional process? This presentation takes the learner on one instructor’s journey to get past the perception of learning objects as only digital resources and, instead, transform them into teachable moments. Information in this session draws upon the presenter’s personal experience with learning objects as both an instructor and a student, and data collected from her current research into students’ perceptions of learning objects
  - What’s In It for Me? Adding Value to the Physical Learning Environment
    
    Joan Forder,
    
    University of Toronto (Scarborough)
    
    In this time of streamlining budgets while trying to provide the most efficient and effective learning environments, virtual learning options in higher education are both cost effective for the administration and easily accessed by the students. But are they enough and will they replace physical environments? This shift to online environments provides us with an opportunity to explore the objectives in providing physical learning environments and increase components into this environment that students are unable to obtain online. This interactive workshop will provide participants from all avenues of higher education to explore ways to examine the learning objectives embedded within curriculum and develop positive pedagogical learning options into the physical environment that will add value for the students that can be augmented by online learning tools. Learning options such as dialogue, discussion, visual aids, practical demonstrations, and games will be utilized. Discussions regarding how the challenges and benefits of adding such options to meet this new paradigm will be encouraged.
  - Learning in the Learning Commons – How Libraries Contribute to Student Engagement
    
    Lesley Balcom, University of New Brunswick (Fredericton)
    
    Student Engagement is a popular phrase on university campuses, used to describe “… the time and energy students devote to educationally sound activities inside and outside the classroom, and the policies and practices that institutions use to induce students to take part in these activities.” Kuh, G. (2001). Assessing what really matters to student learning. Change, 33, 10–17. The University of New Brunswick is one of the hundreds of colleges and universities that has attempted to measure student engagement by participating in the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE). In response to NSSE results, the University of New Brunswick’s “Engagement Challenge” was issued in the fall of 2008 with the objective of developing a focus on student engagement across all faculties of the Fredericton campus. UNB’s Libraries responded to the challenge with the enthusiastic creation of a lengthy list of action items, and a commitment to exploring and enhancing our contribution to student engagement. This session will focus on a variety of library-related strategies, across all NSSE benchmarks, to enhance engagement and will address the opportunity NSSE provides to increase awareness of the libraries’ contribution to the learning enterprise.
  - Wikioogleopia vs. Your Library: Helping Your Students Become Critical Researchers
    
    Barry Cull, University of New Brunswick (Fredericton)
    
    James MacKenzie, University of New Brunswick (Fredericton)
    
    Wikipedia is a frequent stop for many Internet searchers, while Google remains the most used website in North America. Your students probably use both on a daily basis, while they likely visit their library’s website, not to mention the library stacks, considerably less often.
    
    Tired of ranting to them about it? Perhaps this general scenario provides a brilliant “teaching moment” in which you can help your students move from what they know, to what is expected of them as they evolve into competent university-level researchers. Maybe you should also consider bringing in a “hired gun” to help: your local librarian.
    
    In this session we'll take a close look at Wikipedia and the community that makes it happen. We will also look at the promises delivered by Google, and two of its brightest offspring, Google Scholar and Google Books. Find out who is left standing as we pit Wikipedia and the Google sisters against both the online resources and the old fashioned books available from academic libraries.
  - Using Web 2.0 Technologies to Teach First-YearEnglish
    
    Adam Crowley, Husson University
    
    This live blog presentation details my ongoing experimentation with Web 2.0 technologies in first-year English courses at Husson University. Over the past academic year, I have created a series of YouTube videos and Blogs to establish a firm middle ground of instruction for students with asymmetrical educational aspirations. Beginning with the guiding principal that classroom technology should be no more complicated for students to use than a basic website, I have developed an on-line curriculum that encourages both peer-editing and peer-to-peer commentaries on classroom discussions. My project foregrounds a range of technological approaches for writing instruction that are especially relevant for post-secondary writing courses offered within the Maritimes and Northern New England. The applicability of my project stems from its focus on mitigating the instructional difficulties instructors traditionally face when working to inspire the communal progression and advancement of students from these historically socioeconomically fragmented regions.
  - Concept-Based Learning: Enhancing Critical Reading Skills in Undergraduate Neuroscience Students
    
    Janelle LeBoutillier, University of Toronto Scarborough
    
    Andreea Moraru, University of Toronto Scarborough
    
    Concept-based learning is a three-step pyramidal model of learning that emphasizes a structured approach to analyzing and interpreting scientific articles. To date, previous research on teaching and learning in the sciences has not addressed the importance of developing potential models to enhance critical reading skills that aim to increase students’ understanding of concepts embedded in empirical and/or review articles. Furthermore, the application and integration of learnt concepts has not been documented. The objectives of this study are to teach undergraduate neuroscience students to read critically by identifying content-related concepts and to implement the learnt concepts by writing potential exam questions. The results of this study can be translated across disciplines to courses that use journal articles as part of the reading requirements and can further impact course development to better facilitate student learning.
  - An Open Access Online Tutor Training Course: Analysis and Future Directions
    
    Liv Marken, University of Saskatchewan
    
    Holly Fraser, University of Saskatchewan
    
    In 2008/09, the University Learning Centre (ULC) at the University of Saskatchewan developed and piloted a non-credit, online tutor-training course for its math and writing tutors. Created with the help of the Educational Media Access and Production unit, Disability Student Services, and a Toronto Film School graduate now attending the U of S, the course includes several video vignettes of common tutoring scenarios. Intended as the first course in a series of three, this course is designed to prepare beginning tutors for a range of face-to-face tutoring challenges, including such topics as questioning techniques, conflict resolution, interpersonal skills, active listening, and learning styles. This course can be used and/or adapted by other institutions.
  - Treading water between the tides: TA stories of [in]experience
    
    Jill Grose, Brock University
    
    Many university teaching assistants (TAs) find themselves in front of a class of undergraduates without having had training, support or mentorship in their teaching roles and responsibilities. Caught between the tides of both faculty and student needs, they either surf the waves or tread water while coming to terms with the mixed messages they receive about their roles, the value of teaching in higher education and, more broadly, the expectations of the academy. In this session, I will share the themes identified from an in-depth qualitative inquiry into the academic lives of 5 TAs where they described both positive and negative critical incidents that impacted their TA experience. Each of these incidents helped shape the TAs’ understanding of their roles in the institution and also contributed to a developing identity of who they are as facilitators of student learning. Their personal narratives provide the context for a discussion on the support needs of TAs who, too often, find themselves cast adrift between the tides.
  - C7.01 Imagining the Possibilities of Digital Education: Critical Educational Components Worth Considering
    
    Dieter Schönwetter, University of Manitoba
    
    Guided by current research and best practices, participants will explore the complexities of transformative and distributed digital curriculum preparatory practices to develop a more engaging manner of education that not only increases students’ retention of material learned but also advances their clinical skills through computer technology. Delivering education to students that is engaging challenges many educators. Added to this challenge is the lack of knowledge transfer that many students bring to the learning environments, especially in professional schools. Moreover, with limited classroom time available, much of what is being taught in the student’s early years is content rich but not directly connected with the paralleling kinesthetic skill development necessary for practice. Curricula that addresses students’ cognitive, psychomotor, and affective needs while not only informing, but also enhancing the transfer of their learning from the didactic classroom to the practice is needed. This session identifies critical educational theories and principles foundational for development of digital curriculum. Models of education that parallel those found in aviation, engineering, and medicine that combine various learning modalities will be explored. An understanding of the fundamentals of gaming technology that effectively incorporates 3D learning and motivates players in advancing through various stages and levels of the game will also be discussed.
  - Limit to Unlimited Access: Copyright and Virtual Teaching
    
    Joshua Dickison, University of New Brunswick (Fredericton)
    
    Considering the direction of academic teaching resources, from photocopying and projector presentations to the virtual platforms of blogs, wikis, course management systems and even social networking sites, how will any attempt to create acceptable copyright legislation balance the demands of the publishing industry and the needs of the educational community? Over the past three years, the federal government has twice brought academic institutions to the edge of their seats in attempting to bring about very significant changes to the Canadian Copyright Act. One of the most important issues that the new legislation has attempted to address is the growing influence of digital content. While both attempts have been short-lived, and met their demise on the floor of Parliament, the details of these efforts characterize the direction in which the federal government sees the future of copyright in Canada. Session participants will be invited to share examples from their own teaching experience. By touching on numerous actual and potential obstacles that confront instruction for higher learning, this session will focus on copyright as a key consideration in defining new directions for teaching and learning in physical and virtual environments.
  - Who died and made you teacher?: Punk pedagogy
    
    Andrew Titus, University of New Brunswick/ St. Thomas University
    
    ‘Punk’ is generally taken to mean a musical genre, fashion statement, or ideological position. However, it has also become a taken for granted aspect of modern Western individuality and is as pervasive in the mindset of our youth as the economic/ capitalist mode of thinking is in every part of our social existence. Considered from an educational standpoint, two questions then demand reckoning: how does punk educate, and what place does it have in our classrooms? Although often seen as an extra-curricular activity, its presence in the way youth see themselves in society, and in how they view authority generally and authority figures specifically, ensures that if we are to engage students meaningfully then punk as a potential classroom pedagogy needs be taken into consideration.
    
    This session will approach punk from an aesthetic view primarily and work its way towards an experientially based, narratively driven analysis of how I have integrated this significant paradigm into both education and English literature classes. Of special concern will be how the form (the punk aesthetic) and the content (the curriculum of the classes themselves) play together to create a successful, working pedagogy for post-secondary students in the 21st century.
  - Rip-tides and Undertows in Academics: Exploring Student “Demotivation” in Traditional and Blended Learning Environments
    
    Jeffrey Stewart, Niagara College
    
    Frank Bieri, Niagara College
    
    “Demotivated” and unmotivated are not the same word furthermore, some would say “demotivated” as a word does not exist. The authors respectfully beg to differ and will prove the existence of this new word. “Demotivation” as a word is so important, faculty should not be allowed to teach without fully understanding how they can affect a student’s desire for success. As content experts in a learning environment, faculty can become unbalanced between the drive for further subject expertise without fully understanding their craft as an instructor in the learning context.
    
    The session will explore the definition and research around “demotivation” while allowing participants to discuss approaches to student-centred models of learning. By taking a student’s perspective, participants will experience their own de-motivation and see how instructors can erode it very quickly by not paying attention to due process. At the completion of the session, participants will identify factors that can positively influence traditional and online classrooms while being cognisant of “demotivational” factors.
  - Fostering Thriving Learning Neighborhoods: Mapping out your Learning Campus Beverley Hamilton, University of Windsor
    
    Veronika Mogyorody, University of Windsor
    
    Erika Kustra, University of Windsor
    
    Increasingly, institutions of higher learning emphasize initiatives intended to promote student success. These efforts occur at many levels, from instructor activities, to departmental reform, to campus-wide programs. Whether grass-roots or top-down, attempts to improve student experience can run into challenges: how can we plan, implement, and support sustainable change that works at the local level, respects individuals’ and departments’ evolving needs, skills and cultures, and connects with the resources and mandate of the wider institution?
    
    A “learning campus” model balances local and central initiatives to strategically coordinate efforts to meet common needs. Unlike purely centralized initiatives, this model values disparate learning cultures and spaces and encourages independent endeavour. Participants will explore the learning campus model collaboratively, using principles of New Urbanism to analyze campus needs, identify guiding principles and develop a strategic repertoire for planning change. New Urbanism is an approach to urban planning that gives people the opportunity to make choices. It is the art of place-making, and promotes human-scaled autonomous neighbourhoods that help facilitate sustainable communities. By using the lens of urban planning, we hope to examine the needs and challenges institutions face, and gain new insights into their configuration. Can parallel principles be developed to inform institutional change?
  - Joining Spaces, Joining Forces: Holistic Teaching of Research and Writing at a University Library
    
    Pearl Jacobson, Carleton University
    
    Katie Bryant-Moetele, Carleton University
    
    Lori Rosove, Carleton University
    
    Canadian post-secondary institutions are increasingly witnessing the integration of learning support services within university libraries. In particular, university writing centres are finding physical niches in buildings once used exclusively for library instruction, collections and study space. This new proximity affords opportunities for teaching librarians and writing centre professionals to collaborate, and to explore the philosophical and pedagogical dilemmas that underlie these types of collaborative efforts. In fitting with this year’s conference theme of dilemmas in education, we describe an on-going collaborative workshop at Carleton University, designed to reconcile pedagogical tensions and alleviate some of the apprehensions students bring to the composition and research process. We examine writing and research from two perspectives—skills-based and disciplinary—and argue that collaboration between writing centres and libraries can bring about a synthesis of these educational constructs. By presenting a case study of our own collaboration at Carleton University, we identify ways that libraries and writing centres can join together to develop authentic learning activities that support flexibility, problem-solving, and critical inquiry.
  - Managing your Writing
    
    Laurie Waye, University of Victoria
    
    Valia Spilitopoulos, University of Victoria
    
    These days university instructors, staff and graduate students inhabit a location between the tides. We are all teachers and learners, but also writers. How can we approach our writing so that it can get done? How can we model and support the writing of others? Offerered in both French and English, Valia Spiliotopolous and Laurie Waye will guide you through a workshop that allows you to focus on a current writing project by employing project management concepts. At the end of the session you will be able to take your writing plan, the workshop format, and workshop materials with you to use again and share at your institution. This workshop explains, describes, and mimics the “Managing your Thesis or Dissertation” workshop Laurie designed for the University of Victoria. It was created for graduate students, with the following invitation:
    
    Is your research, writing, thesis or dissertation out of control? This hands-on workshop will help you map out your current writing project, and understand what you need to do, when, and how, by applying project management concepts to the process of writing academic work. Those in the depths of dissertation despair are especially welcome.
  - Between Two Worlds – English as a Second Language Learners at University
    
    Jill Cummings, University of New Brunswick
    
    This research examines the participation of English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) learners as they transition from ESL courses to mainstream courses in their discipline areas at university. I discuss findings of a goal-based study: “Goals for ESL: Contrasts between ESL Instructors’ Goals and University Professors’ Goals for ESL Writing (Cummings, Erdosy, Cumming, 2006), based on longitudinal research with ESL instructors, students, and university professors at a major university in Canada. The results are discussed according to three main questions: (1) How are the goals for ESL students’ writing different for ESL instructors and mainstream university professors?; (2) What are ESL students’ experiences as they make this transition from ESL programs to mainstream university courses?; (3) What do these experiences inform us about ESL learners’ transitions to university? After presenting the tensions involved in the ESL learners’ “between worlds” experiences, I discuss implications for teaching practice for post-secondary instructors and professors. My research and recommendations are framed within Vygotskyian sociocultural theories of second language learning (Lantolf, 2000; Lantolf & Thorne, 2006) and legitimate participation (Lave & Wenger, 1998).
  - C9.07 Why Do We Still Need the Idea of Learning Styles?
    
    Russell Day, Simon Fraser University
    
    “Learning Styles” writ broadly have been part of discussions about teaching and learning for decades. Many Education and Educational Development programs and workshops have included ‘learning styles’ as core content. Recently, some have questioned the utility of the whole construct as a way of improving student learning – the evidence is mixed. Despite the debate, I believe there are other reasons why we might choose to use, or to abandon, the ‘learning styles’ construct. In this workshop / debate / discussion, we will try to answer the following questions: Why use? Why not use? What are we trying to achieve? What are the implicit values we are trying to promote / support by using, or not using, ‘learning styles’? Can we make the implicit more explicit? With answers to these questions in hand, we will be better able to offer an honest rationale for the continued use of ‘learning styles’ – or not.
bell / 17 / 02 / 2009 / Views / Home - Inside Higher Ed on 2009-03-23
- So it is little surprise that faculty and students rarely use the library’s Web site to connect to content that satisfies their scholarly needs. Instead they invent their own backdoor routes to the content, but in doing so may miss related or new electronic resources made available by the library. You may argue that faculty and students forged their own paths to circumvent the library back in the print only days, but now the possibilities for and associated risks of missing important resources are astronomically greater.
Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0 | EDUCAUSE CONNECT on 2009-02-19
- We now need a new approach to learning—one characterized by a demand-pull rather than the traditional supply-push mode
- Demand-pull learning shifts the focus to enabling participation in flows of action, where the focus is both on “learning to be” through enculturation into a practice as well as on collateral learning.
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- - passion-based learning
Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0 | EDUCAUSE CONNECT on 2009-02-19
- The Internet has also been used to provide students with direct access to high-quality (and therefore scarce and expensive) tools like telescopes, scanning electron microscopes, and supercomputer simulation models, allowing students to engage personally in research.
- social learning is based on the premise that our understanding of content is socially constructed through conversations about that content and through grounded interactions, especially with others, around problems or actions. The focus is not so much on what we are learning but on how we are learning
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- - Apprentices traditionally begin learning by taking on simple tasks, under the watchful eye of a master, through a process that has been described as “legitimate peripheral participation”
Rhizomatic Education : Community as Curriculum @ Dave’s Educational Blog on 2009-02-13
- information
- information
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- - Knowledge represents “positions from which people make sense of their worlds and their place in them, and from which they construct their concepts of agency, the possible, and their own capacities to do”
  - in a nonrhizomatic model, individual experts translate information into knowledge through the application of checks and balances involving peer review and rigorous assessment against a preexisting body of knowledge.
  - information
  - freely available sources of information
  - offer a participatory medium that can allow for communal negotiation of knowledge
  - Both of these responses are inadequate:
Science Library Pad: Adobe adds AIR to cloud on 2009-02-11
- As well I wonder about the implications for searching. Our search engines mostly eat text or things that can be converted easily to plain text (Word documents, PDFs, PowerPoints). You can do a whole fancy site in Flash and to a search engine it will barely exist. If we move from building text-based web sites to interaction based web apps, how will we ever be able to find anything again?
The Economics of Giving It Away - WSJ.com on 2009-02-10
- Venture capital has dried up, Google is killing products rather than buying them, and Yahoo can barely support itself, much less look for others to fund. What does that do to Free as an economic model?