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Ready for the United Way campaign

They’re departmental representatives in the on-campus United Way campaign for this fall, which gets rolling Friday and is aiming to raise $142,000 before October is out.

This morning’s tour will drop in on three agencies among the 50 that the United Way supports, says Jenny Treutlein in the UW-UW office in the Davis Centre.

Picked for visits this morning are Big Sisters, the Canadian Hearing Society and the 4C’s (Canadians Concerned with Crimes against Children.

But the UW delegation could just as easily have gone to see Focus for Ethnic Women, the March of Dimes, and the K-W Friendship Group for Seniors, or the John Howard Society, the AIDS Committee and St. John Ambulance. That’s the sort of range covered by the United Way of Kitchener-Waterloo and Area, of which UW’s campaign is a part. The 50 agencies operate a total of 80 programs that will receive United Way support this year. Community-wide, the 2000 campaign is seeking to raise $4.8 million, and most of it will come from workplace campaigns like the one at UW.

A campus-wide "Dress Down [or Up] for United Way" event this Friday, October 6, marks the official beginning of the campaign, but activities have been going on for some days now. Jim Kalbfleisch, UW’s provost, hosted a special reception last Thursday for the sixty faculty, staff and retirees who have contributed at the "Leadership" and "Friends" giving levels in past years.

The registrar’s office held a sales party Thursday as a fund-raiser, and information and public affairs had a used book sale on Monday (it raised about $130).

Chairing the on-campus campaign are Chandrika Anjaria of the information systems and technology department and Winston Cherry of statistics and actuarial science.

And strongly supporting it is UW president David Johnston, whose letter to staff, faculty and others on campus appears as part of a United Way ad in today's Gazette.

"There is always a need," he writes. "There are always those less fortunate in our midst who need assistance. . . . By reaching out as a community to support the work of the United Way, we can… restore hope to some of the lives we touch. I urge you to find it in your hearts to give."

UW helps assess on-line resources -- by Barbara Hallett

The non-profit organization could, in fact, become the Consumer Reports of on-line teaching resources, predicts Tom Carey, director of UW's LT3 (Learning and Teaching through Technology) Centre, and he's keen for Waterloo to be a part of the action.

Started in the California State University system in 1997, MERLOT has since expanded with partnerships to include institutions and systems of higher education across North America, offering those partners a source of learning materials, sample assignments showing how the materials could be used in the classroom, and evaluations of the materials by panels of faculty, as well as by individual users. Some of the resources are ones that are offered for sale; others will be free material.

Carey sees MERLOT as a chance to "give people who have laboured on their own the collegial atmosphere that the more traditional scholarly streams have always had." For UW participants, that means the opportunity to help set up an evaluation process for online resources, which "continues to build on our momentum on campus in increasing the quality of our LT investments.

"For our faculty, MERLOT gives them a community of scholars with whom to work, plus recognition for their work -- a forum to demonstrate the quality of what our faculty are building."

Carey sent out a call to deans last month for the names of faculty members who would be interested in serving on "editorial boards to help establish a scholarly review process for educational multimedia in their discipline."

Of the 12 disciplines included in the project, UW has been asked to nominate faculty to nine: biology, business, chemistry, health sciences, history, languages, mathematics, music and psychology.

"Each discipline involved has a Discipline Committee of 12 to 14 members," said Carey, "who will work on standards for review of educational multimedia in their discipline and establish a review process for submitted materials . . . much like an editorial board for a scholarly journal."

So far, eight UW faculty members have joined up, and Carey expects others to come on board, with, ideally, two representatives from UW for each discipline.

"Clearly there is a lot of interest in the goal of making the process of evaluating learning technology a more scholarly process," he said. "Since it was not previously a scholarly activity, there are issues about how fast we can bring the promotion and tenure committees up to speed in providing recognition for this activity."

No online resources developed at UW have yet been submitted for review, he said, but some science faculty members here are already using materials they found on MERLOT.

Her first time on the water: Shannon Webster makes her first outing on Columbia Lake in a single racing scull belonging to the UW Rowing Club. Photos by Barb Hallett, capturing the launch-of-a-lifetime experience, make a feature on page 6 of today's Gazette.

Urban planning: the old and the new -- a release from the UW news bureau

Planning professor Pierre Filion will deliver the third annual lecture, sponsored by the faculty of environmental studies, beginning at 7:30 p.m. in the Theatre of the Arts, Modern Languages Building. The talk is entitled "Planning in a Post-Modern World: the Weight of Tradition and the Need for Innovation". Admission is free.

"Concentrating on continuities and transitions, the evolution of urban development since World War II will be explored," says Filion, in a summary of his lecture. "Reasons for an enduring predominance of modern urban planning principles widely adopted in the early post-war years will be examined: functional and social land-use segregation, a well-defined road hierarchy and low-density suburban development."

He adds: "Urban tendencies will be identified associated with rising post-modern values: heritage preservation, some mixed-use developments and a growing interest in urban life."

Finally, the lecture will relate the relative importance of modern and post-modern urbanization to differences in the size of the two constituencies that hold contrasting views of the city.

A faculty member at UW's school of planning since 1985, Filion has research interests in downtown and inner-city planning, metropolitan region planning and socio-economic change.

Entrepreneurs meet, and more today

The new Entrepreneurs Association of UW today presents a talk by Michael Lalonde, founder of Datagistics. He'll speak on "Supercharged Emerging Hi-Tech Companies: Expectations vs. Reality and Intangible Valuation". The talk starts at 4:30 in Davis Centre room 1302. Fazil Rasheed, a math student who's one of the organizers of EAUW, adds: "There will be demonstrations of the company's technology, and they will also be accepting resumes. The session is expected to last a little over an hour and there will be free pizza and pop. The EAUW also has some very informative and interactive events planned for the rest of the semester, and particulars can be found on our website."

Sports tonight: the men's and women's swimming teams host Guelph in a meet that starts at 5:30 in the Physical Activities Complex pool. The women's field hockey team is at Western for a 6 p.m. game.

The Graduate Student Association says its next legal aid clinic will start at 1:00 tomorrow afternoon. "Please contact Bob Sproule at bsproule@online.net for an appointment," grad students are told.

Scheduled for next week: a session on "teaching dossiers", in the series of workshops (mostly for graduate teaching assistants) sponsored by the teaching resources and continuing education office. The session will be offered Thursday, October 12, at 3:30, and repeated at the same hour on Monday, October 16. Preregistration and more information happen on the web.

And for the record: I said yesterday that the state funeral for Pierre Trudeau was being held in Marie-Reine-du-Monde Cathedral. In fact, it was in Montréal's Notre-Dame Basilica. Among the thousands at the church was Sue Ann Campbell of UW's department of applied mathematics, who's on sabbatical this fall at the Université de Montréal. "There was a large screen set up, and a very good sound system," she reports, "so even though I was in the crowd outside, I felt I had attended. It was a very beautiful and moving service, especially the spontaneous round of applause from the crowd outside when one of the speakers said that Trudeau had 'taught us that bilingualism is an asset and not a liability'."

CAR

Editor of the Daily Bulletin: Chris Redmond
Information and Public Affairs, University of Waterloo
credmond@uwaterloo.ca | (519) 888-4567 ext. 3004
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