Daily Bulletin

Online courses from UW's factory

Introductory page on the Biology 239 CD-ROM, showing students some of the parts of their online course. Discussion with the instructor and other students takes place using BlackBoard or WebBoard software on the Internet.

"We now have approximately 23 courses entirely on-line," said Les Richards, who splits his time between the distance ed office (at its new home in an industrial building on Gage Avenue in Kitchener) and the LT3 learning technology centre (in the Dana Porter Library).

Of those courses, about 15 are being offered this term, to a total of 650 students, Richards said. The people in distance ed are working on converting other courses to that format, at a speed that will let them add 9 to 12 courses a year with current staffing, he added.

An informal tour of the web course department was going on yesterday morning, mostly for the benefit of staff in other parts of the distance ed operation, whose biggest activity still involves more than 200 courses delivered by audiotape. They let me tag along on the tour, seeing, for example, how Sue Haché puts the pieces of a course together into Flash animations. One of her colleagues is beta-testing a piece of software that was recently developed right there, dubbed SmilePublisher, to link pieces of a course together smoothly so the student can see them using RealPlayer.

An on-line course begins with live lectures by the UW faculty member who teaches the course, Richards explained. "We go in and videotape, right in the classroom," he said. But the video part of the tape is generally thrown away, while the audio -- with the ums and ahs and digressions taken out -- becomes the backbone of the course. Then new visuals are added, ranging from historical photographs (sometimes even video clips) to animations based on the overhead transparencies that an in-class instructor would use.

"Just because it's an educational project," Gillian Dabrowski told my tour group, "doesn't mean it has to be drab and boring. But I don't want to add flash just for the sake of adding flash, either."

The main content of the course is distributed to students on a CD-ROM, though it's also available from the distance education web server. Students will connect to the Internet to submit assignments and get them back with professors' comments, e-mail other students, carry on group projects (most of the online courses do require some kind of group work) and receive announcements as the course goes on. "We're in the process of creating an automatic random group generator," Anuja Aggarwal told us.

Show opens (sort of) in UW gallery

The show, of work by Kelly Mark and Ben Walmsley, is titled "Compulsion". Gallery I will show "installation work" by Mark and paintings by Walmsley, including the liquor bottles (the one shown here is 68 inches wide, or about 1.7 metres). Gallery II will present several video works by Mark, including "33 Minute Stare".

Carol Podedworny, curator of the UW gallery, put the exhibition together in cooperation with the Burlington Art Centre. It's been on show in Burlington since mid-January, and will continue at the UW galleries until March 24.

Says Podedworny in the exhibition catalogue:

The paintings of Ben Walmsley and the installations of Kelly Mark seem visually quite simple. Walmsley's paintings appear to change only slightly in terms of palette and almost not at all in terms of image. Each canvas presents yet another human-sized bottle of liquor beautifully articulated. Mark's installations present collections of common, home and hardware items and/or the products of mundane tasks repeated over and over again. They are surprisingly attractive in a mesmerizing kind of way, despite their common birth. Yet, regardless of this apparent simplicity, the artists' thematic intentions are quite complex and reference many areas of social and cultural concern.

Maclean's editor speaks tonight

The conference itself is bringing some 30 people from campus media across Canada, and UW students are also welcome to attend, says Ryan Matthew Merkley, conference coordinator for Imprint. It carries a $125 registration fee.

Seminars will include panel discussions, workshops on photography, graphics, layout, and writing for news, sports, entertainment and features. Independent campus news organization uwstudent.org -- which has been seen as a rival to Imprint although they look at news coverage from very different angles-- will offer insight into "bringing your news coverage to the Web with speed and accuracy". The New Quarterly, one of Canada's oldest literary journals, "will expand your horizons with a workshop on editing fiction".

But there's no charge for tonight's lecture, which starts at 7:30 in the Humanities Theatre. Wilson-Smith (left) is national affairs editor for Maclean's and director of online media for its parent company, Maclean-Hunter. He previously served as the magazine's Moscow and Ottawa bureau chief, and has covered major international stories from Haiti to Afghanistan.

What else is happening on campus

The joint health and safety committee will meet at 1:30 in Needles Hall room 3001. Agenda items range from the perennial (air quality in Needles Hall) to the detailed (emergency access to Ron Eydt Village) and the routine ("certification training part two").

The department of statistics and actuarial science offers a seminar at 3:30 (Math and Computer room 5158) by Yun Yi, a two-year visitor to the department. Topic: "Weighted Estimating Equations for Clustered Incomplete Longitudinal Data". As a poster to uw.general pointed out the other day, coffee and cookies will be available after the talk.

The school of optometry presents the 12th annual Clair Bobier Lecture in Vision (the name commemorates a former faculty member) at 7:30 tonight in Optometry room 347. Speaking will be John Flanagan (right), who moves between Waterloo and Toronto as a professor of optometry here and a professor of ophthalmology at the University of Toronto, not to mention two hospital appointments. His research field is glaucoma -- an irreversible loss of sight caused by damage to the optic nerve -- and tonight's lecture is titled "Neuroprotection in Glaucoma: What's All the Fuss About?"

History professor Geoff Hayes is the speaker tonight as the Joseph Schneider Haus museum in Kitchener presents its annual Fellows Lecture. Hayes will talk on "Fixing Waterloo Region -- A Look Backwards", giving a historical perspective on that endless topic, structural reform of government in Waterloo County. Admission is by donation -- which goes to support the Edna Staebler Research Fellowship -- and the talk starts at 7:30.

Finally . . . I wrote at length yesterday about Tuesday's launch of the Odin research satellite, but managed to omit mention of one of the Canadian organizations involved in creating it. The Canadian Space Agency is a multi-million-dollar sponsor of the satellite project.

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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