Week 5 in Review

I’ve missed a few weeks, but the scope of my activity is increasingly centred on our big University of Guadalajara faculty development project which is about to launch its development stage.

Innovation: The big news of the week was this announcement of funding from Western Economic Diversification Canada for our simulation tool, Praxis (#jibcpraxis).  Getting to this announcement has been a 2.5 year work in progress with many highs and lows for the JIBC team involved.  Nonetheless, it was a big event of speeches and congratulations and included both the attendance and an earnest commentary from MP @MichelleRempel who flew in from @dlnorman– land (and who apparently used to work in Tech Transfer at the University of Calgary).   It was also nice to have a chance to comment on the importance of support for applied institutions who have many innovations that never see the light of day due to the challenges in getting them to the next level where they can make a broader contribution outside of our institutions.  While WED certainly helps with that gap–their assistance with our proposal was essential– there is still work to be done to make it easier to get there if we are truly serious about Canada’s innovation agenda.

Collaborations:  I’m expecting the highlight of next week to be a quick 2 day trip up to Kamloops to visit the TRU folks at the invite of @brlamb.  I’ve been following the YouShow chronicles hosted and created by Brian and @cogdog and there’s a lot to think about for our own application.  I expect I’ll ask a lot of dumb questions about what they are doing and the context for the project, and I’m hoping at the same time that sharing some of the what’s and why’s of what we are doing at JIBC will be useful as well.

Things that wow’d me:

This interactive data viz on Gendered Language in RatemyProfessor teacher reviews  tweaked the data/language nerd in me.