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Data Professor

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What is the meaning of life?

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I recently added this post to the eCampus Ontario mOOC, and thought I would share it here as well. I was asked to proctor an exam for a class that I was not teaching. Same students as I had that semester, but a totally different course. I think the subject may have been marketing, or perhaps math, I don’t remember. As I walked around the very large room supervising, a panicked student motioned me over. “Sir,” they whispered, “do you […]

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Post 9: Twitter

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This is my final post for 9x9x25, and what fun it’s been. Thank you for engaging, reading, and offering newspaper wrapped fish and chips. The best part is that this is late, and finally, after a semester of driving myself and my students crazy to get things in on time, this one last final paper with find its way to Terry fashionably late. Somehow this restores just a tad of balance and karma to the world. At the beginning of […]

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SoTL #2 – Engage with SoTL

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This is a rehash of my post on negotiated grading, but perhaps I’ll get into more of the idea behind it and less focused on the technical aspects of how it works in the class. I think there is an issue with feedback. I had papers that I put a huge amount of work into, and I handed them in on time, and waited for the verdict. I clearly remember getting back a paper and was surprised to see my […]

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SoTL #1 – Three Keys of SoTL

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I can imagine that you read the title, and are wondering, as I was, what exactly a SoTL is. Well, it seems you have come to the right place, as SoTL stands for Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.  I think this is a great activity because while I know alot about the subjects I teach, I do not always know a lot about teaching and it is something I am always trying to learn more about. I am very curious to […]

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Post 8: Given a second chance

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This post, the next in my series of 9 x 9 x 25, is about negotiated grading. I am currently involved in a project that uses negotiated grading and feedback for assignments. Essentially, the student hands in the homework and gets back detailed feedback without a grade. They then have the option to improve the paper and hand it back in, or request a grade, a process that involves meeting (in person or virtually) to review the assignment, reflect on […]

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Post 7: Open Education Ontario Summit

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I suppose my next post for 9x9x25 should be about the Open Education Summit I am attending today in Toronto. I think it’s interesting to think about the tension between students and textbooks. When planning our analytics program, we purposefully decided to choose textbooks that were accessible. We could have chosen expensive and fancy books, which of course meant that for one reason or another students probably would not purchase the book. I find this tension about requiring expensive books […]

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Post 6: Sir

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This is my next post for 9x9x25. This may be a little disjointed, but that’s how it happened in real life. When I first started teaching, I taught five classes a week and had a mixture of domestic and international students. Things went really well, I enjoyed teaching, and was having a lot of fun. The only thing that drove me crazy was when people called me Sir. I mean, how old did they think I was? Who did I […]

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Post 5: Being the Nice Guy

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This is my fifth post for 9x9x25. This is something I struggle with. I think a lot of other people do as well. The utopian version of what I imagine my teaching practice should be sometimes runs into the unfortunate reality of real life. The reason I like to teach is that I like to share interesting things. I like to be a communicator. I want to come to work and tell my students things that are new, interesting, exciting, […]

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Post 4: Drawing the impossible

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In this next 9x9x25 post, I am going to share my thoughts on the impossible. Well, perhaps a more specific example, and how thinking outside the box and encourage students creativity. In a recent class we discussed a high dimensional problem (if you’re interested, you can read more about it here). Since we can only visualize three dimensions, and the four dimensional video we showed in class made some students queasy, we decided to settle on something fun for our […]

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Lab Report

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For this module, I experimented with a number of new technologies. I created an animated GIF without using photoshop (which was fun and easy, I will probably use these for my course material development in the future) and I also played around with http://www.googlelittrips.org/ which seems like a really neat idea. As a huge fan of the geography guessing game https://geoguessr.com/ I can see how using maps and stories can create a really amazing learning object that has real world application. I […]

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