Learning through community service
In 2012, UVic offered its first two courses focused on community service learning (CSL). UVic Co-op and Career partnered with the Faculty of Social Sciences to provide a 300-level CSL course called Working in Community (SOSC 300) in the Fall and Spring 2012 semesters. Co-op and Career and the Department of Pacific and Asian Studies also offered a second-year CSL course called Intercultural Service Learning (PAAS 209) last September, which had 15 participants and was supported by the Learning Without Borders Fund offered through UVic’s Learning and Teaching Centre.
Coast Salish traditions shared
“Learning Coast Salish traditional knitting from Elder May Sam, and knitters Joni and Adam Olsen was a wonderful experience,” says Rosa McBee, anthropology student. May Sam, Joni Olsen and Adam Olse—all knitters from the Tsartlip First Nation—taught students the basic art form of traditional Coast Salish knitting each week as part of the third-year Anthropology of Art course last term.
Ring around Andromeda challenges galactic ideas
A surprising discovery about dwarf galaxies orbiting the much larger Andromeda galaxy suggests that conventional ideas regarding the formation of galaxies like our own Milky Way are missing something fundamental. In a paper published Jan. 3 in the prestigious journal Nature, an international team of astronomers including two University of Victoria professors describes the discovery that almost half of the 30 dwarf galaxies orbiting Andromeda do so in an enormous plane more than a million light years in diameter, but only 30,000 light years thick.
‘Migrants’ rights are human rights’
From the movement of the early Homo Sapiens out of the continent of Africa, to the ancient exchanges between Indian and Chinese merchants and monks along the Silk Road, to the boat people who fled the aftermath of the wars in Vietnam and Cambodia in the late 1970s, to Canadian retirees who today are selling their belongings and moving south, the process of human migration is by no means new. It has facilitated exchanges and interactions between people that have powerfully shaped human history, thought, religion, politics, language and more.
UVic selects its next president
Professor Jamie Cassels will serve as the University of Victoria’s seventh president. The appointment was announced Dec. 20 by UVic Board of Governors Chair Susan Mehinagic at the university’s Welcome Centre.
Cassels, 56, was vice-president academic and provost at UVic from 2001–2010, and before that, dean of law. His five-year term as president will begin July 1, 2013.
NEPTUNE Canada celebrates with a new book
Three years ago, the University of Victoria made scientific history by streaming live data from NEPTUNE Canada, the world’s largest and most advanced undersea observatory network. Now, a new book highlights the ocean network’s first year of research and operations. An Invitation to Science is an overview of deep-sea technology and research projects at each of the five node sites along the 812-km cabled undersea network.
Starring…UVic’s world-leading microscope
Small has been really big at UVic ever since the Scanning Transmission Electron Holography Microscope (STEHM)—the most advanced microscope in the world—began its installation in the basement of the Bob Wright Centre in May 2012. But small has been huge for Dr. Rodney Herring, associate professor in mechanical engineering, since he began his career as a research facilitator with the Canada Space Agency years ago.
“We live in the future”—George Dyson
By his own admission, George Dyson isn’t exactly a poster child for higher education. The kayak-builder-turned-science-historian dropped out of high school in the ’60s and moved to Canada at age 17 to crew cargo ships and live in a tree house on Burrard Inlet for three years, opting to study the world in the vein of Huckleberry Finn while dreaming up kayak construction at impossibly grand scales. Though he was essentially born at Princeton (to celebrated theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson and mathematics genius Verena Huber-Dyson), his honorary degree from the University of Victoria is actually his first degree, period.
Brain to brawn: Training one leg strengthens both after stroke
To recover strength and ultimately perhaps the ability to walk, the best bet after a severe stroke might just be to forego working the weaker, more-affected side. It seems counter-intuitive, but high-intensity strength training on the less-affected side could have remarkable potential for helping recover mobility after a stroke, new UVic research indicates.
High-energy physics gets big jolt from supercomputing
An international team led by UVic, the California Institute of Technology and the University of Michigan sent another mega jolt of data down the supercomputing highway in November. The researchers broke a high-energy physics record at the world’s premier supercomputing conference, the SC2012 in Salt Lake City, by transferring the equivalent of one million full-length movies per day.
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