The New Colleague (Again)

In 2010, Dr. Doug Wardell, who regularly taught the Department of Psychology's very popular courses in abnormal and clinical psychology, retired. Even though there was funding for his Faculty Lecturer position (obviously), after he retired, the Faculty of Arts did not provide funding to hire a replacement--which is kind of strange. (There have been a lot of budgetary ups and downs over the past decades.)

After a few years, though, funding did come through. The Department went through the arduous hiring process, and we found a great candidate. Unfortunately, literally the day after the offer was made to her, the Government of Alberta introduced their infamous slash-and-burn budget that brutally cut funding to post-secondary education. Understandably, the candidate said "no thanks" and did not join the University of Alberta.

The next year, we went through the process again. And then again the year after that. It's not easy to find someone who has clinical qualifications and also wants to teach. (Plus, you don't become a university instructor to get rich!) Happily, last year we were able to find someone who was in the process of graduating and we hired her. (In an it's-a-small-world twist, she was the wife of an old friend of mine from high school/university days.) Unfortunately, she was presented with a great opportunity elsewhere, and only taught for us for one semester. So...back to square one.

Going through the hiring process is not trivial. An ad has to be worked up and approved. You then get applications from people from all over the world (including some people with no psychology qualifications whatsoever). A screening committee has to do their due diligence and read through every one of these (cover letter, teaching statement, teaching evaluations, sample syllabi, multiple letters of reference) to come up with a shortlist. The shortlist is then scrutinized by the actual hiring committee. A small number of candidates will be invited to give a talk, a sample lecture, and be interviewed. Doing this for the third time is exhausting.But, third time's the charm, apparently. (No endorsement of superstitious beliefs is made or implied. Void where prohibited.)

I'm happy to introduce the Department of Psychology's new Faculty Lecturer, Dr. Jay Brinker. She comes to us from Calgary via Australia. (Don't hold the Calgary thing against her.) Dr. Brinker will be teaching courses like PSYCO 239: Abnormal Psychology, and PSYCO 335: Introduction to Clinical Psychology.

Please give her a warm welcome!

In other news, the Department also has a new Chair: Dr Chris Sturdy. He's not new to the Department, which is a good thing. There are deep, divisive issues facing the Department. Dr. Sturdy is going to need all the help he can get. I'm glad to see that he's prepared himself well over the summer, er, spending some time in Hawaii. Hey, everyone deserves some rest & relaxation before they get chewed up and spit out. Um, what I mean to say is, Good luck, Dr. Sturdy.



Why aren't you studying?

The Calendar

Although I've written about my use of Google Calendar before, I want to revisit this topic to clarify some things, help you use it better, and offer a cautionary tale.

I am still using Google Calendar a lot. It helps me keep track of where I need to be, where I am, and where I was. Yup, where I was. Like, when was the last time I saw my dentist (Dr Xing Wu, highly recommended, BTW) for a cleaning? I look it up in my calendar. Last oil change? Look it up. Last haircut? It's all in there.

But most of the time, I don't actually go to calendar.google.com.

Although the events in my personal calendar live somewhere in Google's cosy cloud data centres, the calendar itself can be accessed as a standard ICAL (.ics format) calendar. That means you can use whatever app you want to access your Google Calendar--or any other publicly accessible calendar.

For example, in addition to my personal and family calendars, also I subscribe to CanadaHolidays. To see my calendars on my phone, I use Calendars 5 by Readdle, which shows all of my personal and subscribed calendars. On my computers, though, I prefer to use Thunderbird with the Lightning Calendar add-on. Or, yes, sometimes I go to Google's calendar website. But I don't have to.

Subscribing to a calendar is not hard. You just need a link to the ICAL URL. Here, Google tells you how to Add someone else's Google calendar, if you're using Google calendar yourself. No? S'ok, there are also instructions on how to Sync calendar with a phone or tablet (Android or iOS). One of the greatest strengths of subscribing to another calendar is that you can get notifications of events via SMS texts or email.

For a few years, I've been creating a custom calendar for each class I teach. You can subscribe to it, and get notifications of exams and assignments. Useful! If you don't use a calendar app, or don't subscribe to the course calendar, well, you won't get notifications and will have to rely on your brain.

Here's the cautionary tale. This past term, despite information on my syllabus, in Bear Tracks, in eClass, in my course calendar, and even in an email reminder I sent out, a student missed the final exam, thinking it was the next day. Oops. Your Faculty is not going to approve a deferred exam for that reason, and you will end up getting a zero on the final--and maybe even failing the course.

Why not just figure out how to subscribe to calendars? If any of your courses don't have custom calendars, you can manually enter important dates and events, set up your own reminders, and never miss an assignment again--or a dental appointment.

(I've written a bit of Javascript that updates the calendar icon on some of my course pages. Now the icon will show what day of the month it is. Sorry, it doesn't show the month. Or the year. You're on your own there.)

Why aren't you studying?