a digital portfolio
I've been teaching Political Science courses at UBC since 2001. Graduate and undergraduate. I've taught the required quantitative methods course at both levels. Colleagues and I redesigned POLI380 to be a so-called 'flipped class' in 2012. Students have a lukewarm reaction to the material and the course design. I've also taught in my research specialties: elections & public opinion. But...
I have now rejected the 'standard' way of designing and teaching a university class.
In 2013 the Dean of Arts asked me to lead the Arts ISIT unit. I was always a geek and into learning technology. But the position really opened my eyes to all the challenges of management: helping a team of 25 people work together on a wide range of projects and services to help Arts faculty, staff, and students use technology for teaching and learning, research, and administration. In 2017-18 I served in a Staff position as Director of ISIT while also working as CEO of WeVu.
I've coached youth soccer from 2004 to the present. U6 to U18. Our VUFC Gold team won the 4-district league in 2016-17. I now coach U15 at VUFC (2019-2020). I emphasize learning how to play as a team and really understanding how the game works.
So we attack to the dead-ball line (the goal line) near the edge of the 18 and cut it back or play it across the six! That's where Man City scores from, so it's good enough for me.
With two UBC colleagues from Arts ISIT, I co-founded ISIT Technology, which provides WeVu.video. It lasted from 2016 to 2024. It's was a different video platform for education that emphasizds student self-recording of skills practice and instructors watching and giving feedback. It was a crazy ride.
I was a co-investigator on the Making Electoral Democracy Work project. Our UBC work involved experiments where subjects saw articles describing an election campaign in another province. The experimental conditions were different numbers of parties and parties with different degrees of policy extremity. We produced several research papers.
I was one of four PI's on the CES to study the 2011 and 2015 Canadian Federal Elections. The work involved planning a multi-mode survey in both elections, balancing continuity with past studies and innovation. My specialization was the online survey mode and comparison of survey modes.
I was a junior policy analyst at INAC in 1991 and 1992. I prepared briefing notes on Constitutional matters and international affairs relating to First Nations, Metis, and Inuit in Canada. This was challenging work at a time when Canada's constitutional politics and relationships between governments and aboriginal peoples came together in volatile ways.