UBC This Week 05-Sep-2013

At this year’s President’s Town Halls, the conversation begins with UBC student-elected members of the Board of Governors giving opening remarks on behalf of the Board.

Peter Klein, Director and Professor, Graduate School of Journalism (Vancouver), and Christopher Schneider, Assistant Professor, Sociology, Irving K. Barber School of Arts and Sciences (Okanagan), will then join Prof. Stephen J. Toope for a thought-provoking interview.

The UBC community will have an opportunity to ask senior administration any questions they may have. Questions can be submitted to Prof. Toope online or asked in person at the Town Halls. For more information, click here.

Vancouver Campus
Date: September 12, 2013
11:30 a.m.: Reception and light lunch served
12 p.m.: Town Hall begins
Place: Sty-Wet-Tan Great Hall, First Nations Longhouse, 1985 West Mall (map)

Okanagan Campus
Date: September 16, 2013
11:30 a.m.: Reception and light lunch served
12 p.m.: Town Hall begins
Place: University Centre Ballroom (UNC 200), 3272 University Way

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Dean Marc Parlange will oversee all teaching and research activities for the UBC Faculty of Applied Science which includes the School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, the School of Community and Regional Planning, the School of Nursing and all Engineering programs on both the Vancouver and Okanagan campuses.

Prior to his appointment at UBC, Parlange served as the dean of the School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland.

Together with 600 faculty and staff, Parlange leads the education of more than 5,000 undergraduate and 2,000 graduate students. His appointment began Sept 1, 2013. To view his biography, click here.

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The Faculty of Education and UBC Library have teamed up to introduce UBC’s first LOOC – or local open online course.

The offering, part of UBC’s Master of Educational Technology program, is meant to help UBC students, staff and faculty hone their digital literacy skills. The course, called M101, features topics including Mining (research), Meshing (idea creation) and Mobilizing (generating value from information and knowledge).

The LOOC is open to all members of the UBC community who have a campus-wide login. M101 is self-paced, and users can build their skills in any area, in any order that they wish. As the name suggests, a LOOC is a localized form of a MOOC – or massive open online course. MOOCs have been a big topic in online education recently and UBC’s first MOOC – which launched in January 2013 with Stanford University – attracted more than 130,000 registrants.

The LOOC project received a grant from UBC’s Teaching and Learning Enhancement Fund in spring 2013. Work began in April, and the LOOC was opened to co-authors of content, including UBC librarians, in July. The first set of students from the MET program will be able to contribute as of September.

For more, visit UBC Library’s site.

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As part of UBC’s start an evolution campaign, Development and Alumni Engagement has released two new advertisements featuring the Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health and the Chinese Canadian Stories Project. The ads have appeared in the Globe and Mail, and will be a part of multimedia online and print campaign starting in mid-October. Click here to view the ads. For more information, visit the campaign site.

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Yazan Boshmaf and his research colleagues at the Laboratory for Education and Research in Secure Systems Engineering received a Best Paper Award at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers/Association for Computing Machinery International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining. Their paper was titled “Graph-based Sybil detection in social and information systems.” For more information, click here.

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In the 2013 Vancouver Human Rights Lecture to be delivered at UBC on Sept. 12, Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, B.C.’s first Representative for Children and Youth, will cover living conditions and statistics on Aboriginal children in B.C. and how to address these appalling statistics. She will discuss recent work of the Representative’s Office and the government’s role in Aboriginal services over the past ten years. She will also look at education past and present and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as related to the rights described in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.

In 2007, the Indigenous Bar Association awarded Turpel-Lafond the distinction of Indigenous Peoples’ Counsel. Time magazine named her one of the 100 Global Leaders of Tomorrow in 1994, and one of the Top 20 Canadian Leaders for the 21st Century in 1999.

The 2013 Vancouver Human Rights Lecture is presented by UBC Continuing Studies, The Laurier Institution and CBC Radio One.

Date: Sept. 12
Time: 7 – 9 p.m.
Place: Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability, Modern Green Development Auditorium, 2260 West Mall (map)
Info: Register online or call 604.822.1444 to reserve a seat.

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Senator Donald Oliver will address the role of parliamentarians in shaping public policy, referring to his work as a Canadian senator over the last 23 years. He will discuss some key actors in the development of public policy and their roles and responsibilities. He will talk about the Privy Council Office (PCO), and focus on how PCO facilitates policy development by working with federal departments and agencies, including stakeholders such as scientists and university researchers, in the preparation of ministerial proposals for Cabinet. For more information, click here.

Date:  September 13, 2013
Time:  12 – 1 p.m.
Place: LSC Theatre 1, Life Sciences Centre, 2350 Health Sciences Mall (map)

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The Tandem UBC Language Exchange Program is available to UBC students, faculty and staff who are interested in pairing up with participants to learn each other’s language. Partners meet every week for an hour and a half from September 23 to November 29, 2013. The student-run program is free of charge and supports the pairs by providing space, advice and ideas for activities. Past participants have offered English, Mandarin, Spanish, Japanese, French, Cantonese, Farsi, Korean, Russian, Tagalog, Arabic, Swedish, Danish, German, Italian, Turkish, Hebrew, and Ukrainian. For information on the program, requirements and how to register, visit their website and Facebook page.

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