Microscopes are nothing if not a symbol of scientific progress. If someone is using a microscope, odds are they’re in the midst of some important work. And yet Mike Wiley, U of T anatomy professor, found that microscopes were a real hindrance for his first-year histology courses, which used them to study slides for organ […]
The beginning of the millennium was a famous time for video gaming. Sony’s PS2 and Microsoft’s Xbox consoles signaled the final turn for gaming from rudimentary arcade stands to high-powered home machines. The most popular titles included classics like Grand Theft Auto Vice City, Madden NFL 2003, and Kingdom Hearts. But at the same time,
If you’ve ever seen a mock-up drawing of what people in the past thought the future would look like—robot maids are usually involved—you know that technological advancement is hard to fully grasp. Sometimes, the best that real-world technology can offer is a bland placeholder (looking at you, vacuum cleaners) until further and more widespread innovation
If I told you that the practice of holography produces holograms, well, technically, I’d be right. But I’d lack the poetic flair of U of T Optical Sciences professor Emmanuel Istrate. He calls them holograms too naturally, but he also has another phrase — Windows with Memory. It’s the perfect sequence of words to cut
Holograms at the Intersection of Art and Science Read More »
Sian Meikle has also been involved in two other projects with the Provost’s Instructional Technology Fund, expanding and improving the framework for some useful existing websites. The first, in 2006, was with the REED project—Records of Early English Drama. Their website, which Meikle originally helped build in 2003, contains a variety of information on the
The Provost’s Instructional Technology Fund is supposed to be the gear that sets great ideas in motion, but sometimes its mere existence can spark a great idea in the first place.
Four years ago, the H1N1 Swine Flu pandemic made its way around Canada, approaching the University of Toronto just in time for the fall semester. With the possibility that thousands of students would be encouraged to stay home, the problem of how the afflicted would be able learn outside the classroom needed to be solved,
It was 1998, and Gordon Belray, working for the Department of Art slide library, was given the incredibly tedious task of digitizing Professor Douglass Richardson’s Canadian architectural slide collection. Technically, he was moving U of T into the next century of teaching art and art history, where a few mouse clicks could replace the age-old
BIOME wasn’t the only project that Corey Goldman collaborated with the ITIF fund to create over the years. In 1998, he got a grant to create a website that helped teach one aspect of biology to his BIO 150 students. The website goes over the Theory of Evolutionary Cooperation, and more specifically game theory, highlighted
Before Facebook, and before Reddit, there was BIOME—the social networking site at U of T that rivaled both at its peak. Helmed by Corey Goldman, now the Associate Chair of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, BIOME was just a simple single-threaded discussion board for his biology students when it first went online in 1998. But after
U of T’s First Social Network Casts a Long Shadow Read More »
