This is the first semester that I've taught 100% online. The Fall 2020 lockdown and the YorkU strike in 2018 gave me a taste of what it would be like and alerted me to the need for restructuring of my classes in order to make them more favourable to learning. During the pandemic, students are […]
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 […]
In the winter semester of 2019 I helped teach a mechatronics class for senior engineering students at INSA Strasbourg. Like many of the classes at INSA, the course focused on lab work. In this case, the students were working on moderately open-ended design work for mechatronics systems, combining earlier material that they had learned such […]
During my 2018-19 sabbatical year I worked with colleagues at engineering schools in Strasbourg, France and Karlsruhe, Germany. These schools have well-developed exchange programs and wished to establish an exchange program with York University. I had many productive and insightful conversations about ideas, challenges and opportunities for exchanges with Angelika Hammann and the staff in the […]
While on sabbatical in Europe I decided to see if I still had it in me to be a student again, so I decided to take language lessons. Given Strasbourg's mixed franco-germanic history and culture I decided to take formal classes in German and French. (and picked up a few words in Alsacian along the […]
While I was on sabbatical from York University I had the opportunity to teach twice at the University of Applied Sciences in Karlsruhe, Germany (Hochschule Karlsruhe, a.k.a HsKa). I had been invited to do so by Professor Klemens Gintner, a colleague and friend who I had hosted during his sabbatical in Toronto in 2015. It […]
As part of my sabbatical activities I took on the "Temps Pratiques" microcontroller laboratory sessions for electrical engineering and mechatronics students at INSA Strasbourg. In pre-sabbatical discussions with faculty and staff at INSA Strasbourg I found out that the students were learning using what I considered to be outdated technologies. The PIC16F84A microcontroller chip used […]
While on sabbatical I started getting serious about writing a book. In spite of having wanted to write a book for years, writing one while on sabbatical wasn't my primary goal. But as visa issues in France became more difficult and made more traditional research work harder the book writing became a bigger focus for […]
During my sabbatical from York University, I taught IP 411 "Embedded Systems for Engineering Applications” class at Hochschule Karlsruhe (HsKA) in April and May, 2019. This page is an update to the Fall 2018 version of the course that I also taught at HsKA. The Spring version of the course take place over six days: […]