Stay Tuned…

Ah, poor little blog, so sadly neglected!

As I am sure many of my educator colleagues know, this past year has been… surreal. Exhausting. Challenging. Terrifying. Exhilarating.

We appear to be moving toward the next phase. I am deliberately avoiding “getting back to normal” for a few reasons: first, what the heck is “normal,” anyway? Second, I don’t think we will resume all our activities exactly as they were before the pandemic. Finally, I hope that we won’t just fall back into doing everything the way we’ve always done it.

So, over the summer, I am working on a few things, inspired by this shift:

  • with my very awesome co-author Erin Reid, a paper on how Canadian university and cegep educators coped with the sudden swerve to emergency online teaching in March 2020, and the shift to teaching online long-term over the past academic year;
  • reflecting on the social media aspect of the past year, and how we used SM to create or expand communities of practice, to provide peer mentorship (and much needed virtual shoulders to lean on)
  • researching online assessment and all the pearl-clutching around ‘cheating’ – I think we need to examine our ideas of what cheating is, and whether our expectations of assessment are realistic, not just in the context of the pandemic, but in the larger context of the digital era.

I would love to hear your thoughts on any of these projects, whether in the comments here or by email maggie[dot]mcdonnell[at]concordia.ca

I will also be drinking iced tea on the back deck and hiking with the dogs, so it’s not all fun and games.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *