26.Jan.2011 Summarizing Müller’s “My System”
While visiting Slate recently, an article on a ’15-minute per day’ exercise routine caught my eye (check out the video associated with the article, below). I am no lover of exercise in general; I can abide and tolerate it, but I’ve never left a workout exhilarated or anything. Having said that, I recognize its importance, and so [...]
03.Nov.2010 Finding Creative Commons Stuff
Creative Commons is a non-profit company dedicated to providing flexible and free-to-apply copyright licences that go beyond the standard “all rights reserved”. Rather, media (of almost any kind), can have a licence attached that indicates how the owner of the content would like it used: Attribution, Share-Alike, Non-Commerical and No Derivative Works. For the purposes [...]
27.Oct.2010 Presentation skills, take 2
Another year, another take on teaching presentation skills. This year for iSci, we are teaching presentation skills in three classes. Class One Class was asked to think of principles or practices that one should consider when evaluating a presentation. The class came up with five (e.g. consideration of audience, flow, etc.), which we used like [...]
08.Jul.2010 An(other) afternoon with the Shads
This year, I spent another afternoon with the MacShads (Shad Valley students @ McMaster) along with my co-facilitator, Susan. We wanted to take an opportunity to do some non-library, non-information literacy instruction, free from all fetters of normal expectations. So, what we came up with was to riff off of the MacShad’s overall theme project [...]
14.May.2010 wilu 2010
As I write this, McMaster is hosting the annual workshop for instruction for library use, or more simply, wilu. Now, it’s not really a workshop, and it’s not always about instruction, but it is about librarianship and moving instructional roles forward. I was not on the organizational committee (who’ve done a great job, btw), but [...]
13.Apr.2010 A New Approach to Science Education – EDUCAUSE Review
This is an article that I co-wrote with the director of McMaster’s Integrated Science program about the some of the new ideas and collaborations we’re trying. It’s great to be able to share our ideas with a wide audience. The article was originally published in EDUCAUSE Review. Colgoni, A. & Eyles, C., January/February 2010. A [...]
Wolfram|Alpha
[This is an article I wrote for McMaster's Library FYI as a member of our Teaching with Technology committee, highlighting tools and technologies that some of our staff may not know about] “It is an intellectual travesty. The idea of jumping from concepts to numbers without any attention to how the numbers are produced and [...]
11.Mar.2010 Impact Factor
A presentation I made for a quick and dirty introduction to what impact factor is, how it is calculated, where to find it, and some discussion of its problems. The class might have had 10 students in it (max), but it was very difficult to engage them in a discussion about what kinds of flaws [...]
10.Feb.2010 Becoming Expert Searchers
An advanced search strategies presentation for iSci. Including boolean!
30.Oct.2009 An uptalking presentation about uptalking.
I was asked to contribute to a presentation/skit/demo for iSci, with the idea of showing some poor and good presentation techniques. Since one of my biggest presentation pet-peeves is uptalking, I volunteered to demonstrate that phenomena. During some basic prep, I started reading some articles about it, and decided to make the presentation ABOUT uptalking, [...]