Last month I posted about why it's important for my students to be careful when (not if!) they use AI chatbots like Bing / ChatGPT. Today, I turned on Bing and noticed this disclaimer: Frankly, that's good to see. These chatbots are interesting and potentially useful tools, but one must be cautious when using them. […]
On August 4, 2023 the YorkU community was told that just days earlier the whole University, including students, was no longer requiring physical identification cards: "As of July 31, all incoming students to York University will receive their YU-card digitally" By "digitally" we mean having identification information on a cell phone or "smart watch" similar, […]
When we talk about the "leaky pipeline" in STEM we're talking about women leaving or being forced to leave their chosen profession. Here are three versions of an animation that I made up that I hope helps illustrate the concept. Feel free to reuse. Images are free to re-use without attribution in both commercial and […]
Introduction COVID has changed everything about campus life. In order to maximize the safety of students, staff and faculty at York University, we, as a community, need to focus on multiple factors, including: Vaccinations Ventilation (and air filtering) Masking Progressive work / study policies Last week, our university partially caved to pressure from the YorkU […]
The Teaching in Focus (TiF) conference at York was held online in 2021 due to the pandemic. Here's a list of the abstracts. My "Welcome to my Classroom" talk was based on the work I did in EECS 1011, 1021 and 2021: Giving students rapid and accurate feedback is vital. We can do so with […]
[updated 2021 & 2022] We don't hire enough women in Engineering and Computer Science faculties. It's a peer-reviewed fact. And, yet, hiring committees continue to refuse to use the same rigour and critical thinking in finding a new colleague that they demand in their every-day research. Where's the evidence that your ad-hoc, "mmmm.... feels good" […]
To new students (and their parents) who are looking to get a computer for the upcoming university school year, here are some tips (via my Twitter thread) Update (Nov 2020) Thinking of getting a new Mac in 2020 or 2021? Think again. Details below. How much? Get what you can afford. Most people will spend […]
There are plenty of reasons to schedule interactions with students. Office hours are one reason, and student presentations are another. The Moodle scheduler allows you to set up these meetings, as shown in the figure below. once the student has looked at the schedule, she can then select a time slot. Once she has "booked […]
During my sabbatical year in Strasbourg, France, I took both German and French language classes. This blog entry is about the French course I took. Before getting into the details about how I took French lessons during my sabbatical, here is some background. We chose to raise our kids as francophones in Toronto. They went […]
Many professors in Canadian universities get a "sabbatical year" once every few years. My first sabbatical year was from July 2018 to June 2019 and I spent most of it in Strasbourg, France, with my wife and kids. Unlike what many people outside of academia think, it's not a vacation, but is generally considered a […]