14.Jul.2011 “Explaining Science” – A presentation at the Western Conference on Science Education
I had a brief, but enjoyable, visit to the Western Conference on Science Education at UWO (July 6-8, 2011). I attended on the Thursday to share with educators in attendance some of the things we’re experimenting with in the Science Literacy component of iSci. The format was interesting – speakers were paired up by topic [...]
03.Apr.2011 Three Models of Embedded Librarianship at ACRL 2011
On Thursday March 31st, Krista Godfrey, Karen Nicholson and I participated in a panel presentation on three models of embedded librarianship at ACRL 2011. In an unusual twist, we had no convener to introduce us, so we ran the show ourselves. We were playing to packed house, probably due to a combination of talking about a hot topic, and [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
14.Sep.2009 Library 101 for iSci 2009
Technically, my first information literacy class. The first hour and a bit was taken up with this ‘lecture’, which included some opportunity to discuss evaluation criteria for websites, and a source jeopardy game. Part II, the second hour and a half, required the students to find, collect, checkout, photocopy, print, and cite. They did this [...]
28.Aug.2009 Science 2.0: What Every Scientist Needs to Know About How the Web is Changing the Way They Work
Toronto, MaRS Centre – July 29th, 2009 – Free Admission Slides and Speaker List available The title of the conference was slightly misleading, as it suggested a broad view of science 2.0 landscape. Instead, I found that at least half the talks were aimed at a specific type of researcher: those that do computational science [...]
07.Jul.2009 Ignite-style Presentation Session for Shad Valley 2009
McMaster annually hosts Shad Valley students for one month during the summer. The integrated science program (starting this summer), iSci, was asked if they wanted to contribute. So, in that capacity, I volunteered to lead one 3-hour session to conclude the topic of communication and the media. I chose to make the students the communicators: [...]