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[Fall Workshop 2011] Recap with Photos


On November 4th, 2011, ETUG headed to Kwantlen Polytechnic University located in the hub of Richmond, BC to participate in this year’s Fall workshop  “You Are Here: Supporting Mindful Journeys in our Practice”. Members gathered to share their experiences and “mindful journeys” and  consider where we are, where we want to go in the world of teaching, learning and technology.

Over 100 participants from post secondary institutions around BC attended our workshop.

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Amanda Coolidge

Amanda is the Chair of the Steering Committee for ETUG (SCETUG) kicked things off by welcoming all participants to the Fall 2011 ETUG workshop. Acknowledgements were given to the Ministry of Advanced Education and BCcampus for their funding and support of ETUG. Also big thanks were given to Kwantlan Polytechnic University, for providing the workshop venue and to session facilitators and the SCETUG workshop organizers for making this event possible. All participants were encouraged to use the hashtags #ETUG and #youarehere to tweet about the Fall Workshop. A full recap of tweets can be found here. 

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Stillness in Motion: An Experiential Workshop on Mindfulness and Creativity

Scott Leslie, BCcampus

The day began with  Stillness in Motion: An Experiential Workshop on Mindfulness and Creativity. led by Ross Laird (Kwantlen University/rosslaird.com),  Brian Williams (DIYDharma.org) and  Scott Leslie (BCcampus). This morning session set the tone of the day with quiet reflection and meditation and then a playful  exploration of ourselves and our relationship with technology through a simple drawing exercise. We then discussed strategies for more mindfulness, focus and intent in our use of technology, as well as, shared techniques for coping with the challenges and distractions of technology and the multi-tasking modern life.
Ross Laird, Kwantlen University

Brian Williams

Review and reflection of our drawings.

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Journeying the Professional Development Landscape through Interactive Theatre

Journeying the Professional Development Landscape through Interactive Theatre

In the second session, Bonita Bray, Cindy Underhill, Luisa Canuto, Zack Lee and Judy Chan from the Centre for Teaching Learning and Technology at UBC took the stage.
They entertained us with a highly interactive workshop, performing a project meeting that does not go quite as planned. In this session, those of us in the audience were able to stop the action at any point, “rewind” and go forward with what we thought was a better approach in the communication between project team members.  It was great to have the opportunity to practice communication strategies and reminded us to be more aware in how we consider the often diverse perspectives of all involved in a project.
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Faculty Development: Mindful Journey or Bad Trip?

B.J. Eib and Mary Burgess, Royal Roads University

In the third session, B.J. Eib and Mary Burgess from Royal Roads University provided an engaging mix of presentation, conversation and group work. They shared RRU’s current Faculty Development plan and the strategies that brought it about.
Throughout this session, we talked in small groups on our experiences with mindful faculty development journeys or  “bad trips”! Mary & B.J. finished by  sharing  some great tools and tips developed for their Faculty Development Program.
 
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Finally – Evernote

Jason Toal and Lynda Williams, Simon Fraser University

Organizing information has never been more demanding but making a commitment to a solution has overheads.  Lynda and Jason shared their experimentation and strategies in using Evernote. Many features of Evernote were explored on various platforms – mobile, tablet and web. They illustrated Evernote’s features such as email forwarding and web clipping; also best practices such as “heap” strategy for reducing number of notebooks and ability to evolve tagging. With the help of Evernote, sharing and working collaboratively should be easier. A lot of attendees left this session learning a new tool. It’s a great tool for work and leisure!
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E-Portfolio Story

Lesley McCannell and Meg Goodine, Kwantlen University

The last session of the day —E-Portfolio Story —was a tale told by Lesley McCannell and Meg Goodine of Kwantlen PolytechnicUniversity. They shared their experiences with implementing a program-wide e-portfolio system at Kwantlen using Mahara. Leslie and Meg talked about the curriculum change required to incorporate e-portfolios into each course, the challenges associated with supporting technology that is in “pilot phase”, the student and faculty reactions and the lessons learned. Samples of student e-portfolios were shared with us and to wrap up, we took a moment to reflect on our learning for the day.  Leslie and Meg asked us to think about these questions:
What happened here today? So What ? (Did you learn a new skill? Did anything surprise you?); Now What? (What will you do differently as a result of being here today?)

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Coming to a Close

As we paused to reflect, it was terrific to put something we learned immediately into practice. To ask ourselves, “what was the learning”? And will we do anything differently in our practice? We look forward to hearing from participants…Have you changed your practice to incorporate more mindfulness in your planning, support or use of technology? If so, what?  Let us know!  
We are gathering feedback from the workshop. Please send us your thoughts in the link below:

More Photos

The photos below were kindly provided by Novak Rogic, CTLT, UBC. All photos can be viewed in a slideshow here.

Resources

Faculty Development: Mindful Journey or Bad Trip? PDF

Finally – Evernote

E-portfolio Story PDF

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