Been there, done that, got the t-shirt: Kim Campbell, who served a four-month term as the 19th prime minister of Canada (and first woman prime minister), visited campus twenty years ago today. In a whirlwind hour-long event at the Davis Centre she saw children from two day camps, met researchers, admired Midnight Sun II and other student-built experimental cars, and held a round-table conversation with co-op students and graduate students. There was also time to try on a Waterloo T-shirt, presented to her by Catherine Coleman, who served 1993-94 as the first woman president of the Federation of Students.

Photograph and text from "Lions and Chevrons: A Fragmentary History of the University of Waterloo" by Chris Redmond.

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Homepage celebrates first anniversary

with files from Digital Initiatives, CPA

The latest version of the university's homepage launched August 16, 2012, making it the 111st (eleventy-first?) website in the Waterloo Content Management System (WCMS).

They say it takes a village to raise a child, making the homepage a particularly spoiled little tyke - Waterloo's homepage is a collaborative effort involving more than 100 contributors. Many assisted with the launch, and many more still support its ongoing maintenance.

"We have a team dedicated to updating the homepage, but the content comes from our partners right across campus," said Jonathan Woodcock, Manager of Digital Communications and Content Strategy in Digital Initiatives. "To keep our content relevant and timely, we collaborate very closely with our colleagues who best understand their respective audiences."

The homepage site encompasses content from a number of sub-sites including News, Events, Stories, About Waterloo, and a several directories.

Some statistics from the homepage’s first year:

• 8.2 million pageviews (500k to 800k monthly depending on time of year)
• 94% of visits were from a computer, 3.8% from a mobile device and 2% from a tablet.
• Top 5 exits were email, learn, undergrad programs, bulletin, grad programs
• 46.6% of traffic came from search sources, 20.5% from referrals and the reminder from direct traffic
• Google accounts for 91.5% of search traffic.
• Top referral sources are Facebook, the Daily Bulletin and Library websites.
• Traffic comes from roughly 2:1 external to internal to Waterloo users.

Of particular interest to those of the techie persuasion is browser use: fully 33% of users navigate to the site using some version of Internet Explorer. The balance is split along roughly equal lines between Chrome, Firefox, and Safari.

Content on the homepage is updated nigh daily, to meet the varied needs of key stakeholders in a timely, relevant way.  "The job of the homepage is to get people to the content they're looking for as efficiently as possible," says Woodcock.

"We continually review how users are interacting with the site, to inform our decisions on how to generate the best possible content for them. In the coming months we'll apply some of that learning to enhance the user experience and keep the site fresh."

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Tales of a Teacher: Katie Misener

by Victoria Faraci. This is the third of three Teaching Stories published by the Centre for Teaching Excellence. Read the full story on the CTE website.

As a junior faculty member in the Recreation and Leisure Studies department, Dr. Katie Misener works hard to foster an active learning environment in her classroom. Given the early stage of her career, Misener has a significant amount of teaching practice under her belt. She has experience mentoring fellow graduate students through the University of Western Ontario’s Teaching Assistant Training Program and teaching online, hybrid, and classroom-based courses at Ryerson University. Misener also has her own set of teaching beliefs that she enacts in her classroom. As a recently hired faculty member, Misener’s invitation to Waterloo’s Teaching Excellence Academy in 2013 was an impressive feat. So, how has her teaching evolved during her short time at the University of Waterloo? Misener says that she is “definitely less of a lecturer now whenever possible, using a lot more active techniques in the classroom to engage students and let them facilitate the class.”

During what Misener terms “pivotal years” in the life of a university student, she aims to be a positive influence for them, beyond just attending to their educational needs. “I never view it like I am the expert coming in with all of this knowledge to impart. I think that that teaching philosophy has had its day.” Instead, fostering an active learning environment with the students “is more of a dialogical process and the co-learning model is definitely more in line with who I am and who I want to be.” This sentiment is no doubt echoed by her students, especially Mia Weston, a 2A student in Recreation and Leisure Studies who says that her positive experience in Misener’s REC 101 course can be attributed to the effort Misener made to make every class interactive. “She made a point to get to know her class and make them active in learning,” Weston says, adding that Misener organized the course content to reveal clear connections between subject matter and detailed information.

Integrating her research with her teaching is a fluid process for Misener. Her research relating to organizational studies in community sport and recreation resonates with students in the classroom because the topic is so pervasive in our society. With this seamless connection between her teaching and her research, Misener continues to find inspiration for both from her colleagues and, especially, from her students. “It's exciting to work in a university environment because students are fresh and smart and have all these new and bright ideas,” says Misener. “They think about the world in dynamic and complex ways.”

Engaging students in the classroom environment is a must for Misener, regardless if it is a first-year or senior-level course. Recently, she implemented weekly tutorials in her first-year course. This was a way for Misener to help the material come alive for her students, giving them a way to “have more ownership over their learning strategies and techniques.” In a fourth-year course, she really pulls back on lecturing, saying “small group work and student-led presentations are really effective,” seeing her role as “more of a facilitator in senior level courses” than as a teacher.

Another noteworthy practice in Misener’s teaching is her commitment to making the material applicable outside of the classroom. Her students have the chance to work alongside an organization, or at least to study one, and understand what they think could be different, using problems that are self-defined by the organization. With this type of experience, students are able to apply their knowledge beyond the classroom and to real-life situations. Julie Leeming, a recent graduate of the Recreation and Business program, took Misener’s REC 413 course. She draws on her experience working with an organization, saying that the final project allowed her to gain contacts outside of uWaterloo to prep her for graduate studies or potential job opportunities after graduation. Leeming also notes that Misener’s passion for learning and research in Sports Business was clear through “the creative and engaging ways she taught the material.”

Though Misener has honed an effective teaching style, she insists that she is not doing anything “wickedly out there” but, instead, just tries to maintain a consistently active classroom. This approach, though maybe not wildly new and innovative, “sets up that nice culture of active participation in the classroom that keeps students a little bit more on their toes because their interest is piqued.” It is establishing this balance that is important to Misener, allowing students to come to a comfortable place where they are able to learn well.

Misener’s advice on how to establish an active learning environment is quite simple: “I think it is about setting up a classroom culture and expectations around active learning” from the very first day of class. Still, Misener admits to occasional butterflies before teaching. She says, “I don’t know if that will ever go away, and I’m not sure I want it to because I feel like what I am doing is important and that it matters. I want to know student responses on a really genuine level.” Simply put, Misener says, “I care.”

Read the full story on the Centre for Teaching Excellence's website.

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Notes as music camp marks 30 years

Alumni of the Ontario Mennonite Music Camp (OMMC) will be gathering at Conrad Grebel University College this weekend to celebrate the group's 30th anniversary. The OMMC is a program for 12 to 16 year-olds hosted at Conrad Grebel University College and is supported by Mennonite Church Eastern Canada. The 2013 edition of the camp has been running since August 11 and will continue until August 23.

The Canadian-American-Mexican Graduate Student Physics Conference is gracing the University of Waterloo with its presence as we speak, running from August 15-18. Highlighting the conference Saturday will be a public lecture by Miguel Alcubierre, a Mexican physicist known around the world for his famous paper on how "warp drive" is possible within the confines of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. Free tickets and more info available.

A reminder that the university has changed preferred travel providers, and now has a contractual relationship with Frederick Street Travel. The contract with VIP has expired, and effective August 31, VIP will no longer be able to direct bill the university for travel charges. Here are the details.

Economics professor Larry Smith recently sat down with the B:Wise Owl B-Talk podcast to discuss his career and entrepreneurialism, among other things. Give it a listen.

Human Resources is reporting that Gordon Paterson "Pat" Dobbin died June 5. Dobbin started working at the university in March 1973, and worked in Co-operative Education and Career Services (now Co-operative Education and Career Action) as a Co-ordinator until his retirement in April 1989. He is survived by his wife, Beryl.

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