Blog – Aurelea Mahood

2019-05-092019-05-10

End of Term

One of my favourite things about May is the messages that we often receive from graduating students.

Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of receiving a handwritten and hand-deliverednote from Alicia Neptune, a graduating Communications student. Last Spring, Alicia was in my Electronic Literature course. She then went on to serve as one of our portfolio peer mentors this past academic year supporting fellow Capilano students with the building out and organization of their portfolio sites. She was lively and passionate advocate for the value of student portfolios, and I look forward to following her future projects.

The reflections she shared with me were wonderfully affirming and, in turn, she has reminded me of the importance of slowing down and reflecting on my own year. As Alicia sets out on her post-Capilano journey excited to explore what it might be to harness ePortfolios, reflection, and digital technologies for storytelling and educational journeys, I too am excited to actively consider how I might harness my own interests in these areas to shape my career going forward.

I think this morning’s CTE Teaching & Learning Symposium presentation on “StoryMachines” with my colleagues from across campus, including my co-presenters (Tania Alekson, Sean Ashley, Christina Lee Kim Koon, Sylvia Kind, Kathleen Kummen, and Judy Snaydon), might be the perfect leaping off point for my own May reflections.

Thank you, Alicia, for the inspiration.

2019-05-092019-05-10

Newest Members!

Last week, Linda Buchanan, Mayor of North Vancouver, and Paul Dangerfield, President of Capilano University, signed an MOU to launch a CityStudio pilot partnership between the City of North Vancouver and Capilano University.

This announcement builds on the tireless advocacy of Carol Aitken (IDEA) who attended CityStudio Vancouver‘s Art of the Cities conference in Spring 2017 and the support of Laureen Styles, VP Academic & Provost, and Leanne MacCarthy, CNV CAO.

This Spring I’ve had the pleasure of working behind the scenes with Larry Orr, Manager, Business and Community Partnership, to hammer out the details of our new CityStudio North Vancouver partnership

CityStudio North Vancouver is now also a member of the CityStudio Network, a global movement of cities working with post-secondary institutions for civic benefit. Through the co-creation of experimental projects, students gain employable skills and city staff receive support to advance strategic priorities in the community.

Our first series of collaborations will be launched in September 2019

Excitingly, our first ever project generation workshop will be be taking place next Thursday at CityHall with the assistance of Duane Eleverum and Ileana Costrut from CityStudio Vancouver.

And our announcement was featured in yesterday’s North Shore News. Thinking that we are off a good start. Fall 2019 here we come!

2019-04-282019-05-10

SRS 2019

The third annual Student Research Symposium (SRS) took place yesterday. This was our biggest event to date with participation from nearly 100 graduating students from across the university.

While the entire day was bursting with interesting and provocative ideas, I was particularly pleased to have chaired a panel featuring students from Communications, Liberal Studies, and Motion Picture Arts. When my colleagues and I banded together three years ago to organize the first SRS, we imagined an event that gave students from across campus an opportunity to share their research findings with each other and other interested internal and external audiences. The delight that the panelists took in each other’s work and the collaborative way in which they tackled the thoughtful questions posed by the audience who had filled the classroom was inspiring.

My pleasure in the day only increased at the second session of the day when I had opportunity to hear Alex Levy, Liberal Studies and 2019 President’s Medal winner, deliver her research findings. I first met Alex when she was a second year student taking LBST 200 – our qualitative methods class. Even then she was interested in the topic of student homelessness and shocking number of students who find themselves precariously housed. Her survey of more than 250 Capilano students produced findings that have now caught the attention of Institutional Research and President Paul Dangerfield. Congratulations Alex!

I am already looking forward to April 2020!

2018-05-022018-05-08

CIRCLe 2018

Yesterday I attended CIRCLe 2018, a one-day symposium on ePortfolios hosted by the Faculty of Arts at UBC in collaboration with the UBC Centre for Teaching, Learning, and Technology. In addition to having the pleasure of giving the lunch address with Christina Schulz, Liberal Studies 2018 and one of our outgoing peer mentors, we heard from Tracy Penny Light (TRU and AAEEBL Board Chair), Thomas Lewis (Microsoft), and many inspiring UBC students and faculty.

I left with a sense that we are on the right track with our ePortfolio initiative here at Capilano University. We are striving to navigate the terrain between learning and career portfolios with care. We are foregrounding the importance of reflection and process in portfolio development. And we are setting out to cultivate a student-centred portfolio culture.

I left with new ideas for ways of moving forward. And I am excited by the possibilities for cross-campus collaborations that could emerge as ever more campuses explore the potential for portfolios to bridge academic learning and professional identities.

A warm thank you to Heidi May (Faculty of Arts, Office of the Dean & Arts ISIT) and Julie Walchi (Arts Co-op) for the invitation to join you yesterday.

2018-04-272018-04-27

Looking Back, Looking Ahead

English 335: Electronic Literature is not a course that I get to teach every year, and so it was with some sadness that I walked out of our classroom on the last day of classes earlier this month.

Today however I discovered Reigns: Her Majesty thanks to Rhizome News and Celine Katzman’s piece on Leigh Alexander’s new swipe-based iOS game posted on the Rhizome blog.

When I next have the opportunity to teach this course, or a course with an e-lit unit, I will surely have to consider adding this piece into the mix.

According to Katzman, “Reigns: Her Majesty complicates that straightforward idea of power by introducing and focusing on two other practices that have historically empowered women: witchcraft and the pursuit of self-knowledge”.

According to Environment Canada, the rain is poised to return this weekend. A perfect opportunity to stay inside and explore Alexander’s latest work.

2018-03-15

Riffs on E-Lit: A New Podcast from Wonderbox

I was excited to spot last week that Lyle Skains and Jordan Glendinning of Wonderbox have launched a podcast on digital fiction.

The Wonderbox Podcast (available on iTunes, Stitcher, and Podbean) will be a twice-monthly discussion with Skains and Glendinning delving into “the wondrous world of digital fiction”.

If you are new to digital fiction, they suggest (and I do too) taking look at Bell et al’s “Screed for Digital fiction” (2010), published on the Electronic Book Review, which defines e-lit as “fiction written for and read on a computer screen that pursues its verbal, discursive and/or conceptual complexity through the digital medium, and would lose something of its aesthetic and semiotic function if it were removed from that medium”.

According to Skains, the first few episodes of the podcast look at the digital fiction you’re already reading (even if you’re not really aware of it), interactive fiction and text adventure games, hypertexts, digital archiving, writing digital fiction, transmedia fiction, locative fiction, and the overlap of literature and games. Future episodes will include interviews and guests.

Looking to forward to taking my first listen!

2018-03-052018-03-07

Breathe: A Short Story for Your Smartphone

This week in my Electronic Literature class, we are reading Kate Pullinger’s Jellybone. For readers who want more Flo, more Pullinger, and more of her fantastic collaborations exploring storytelling on networked devices, then I suggest that they read Breathe next.

As Kate Pullinger puts it, “Breathe is a literary experience delivered through your smartphone that responds to your presence by internalising the world around you. Using APIs — application programming interfaces — the story leverages data about you, including place, weather, time, in order to create an experience that is personal and uncanny.”

2018-02-162019-05-09

New Essay from Jim Andrews

As Reading Break wraps up, it is a pleasure to know that my Electronic Literature class gets to begin next week with Jim Andrews who will be joining us for an artist’s talk and Aleph Null 3.0 workshop. In anticipation of Monday’s class with Jim, I am looking forward to reading his new essay “The Role of Programming in Digital Art” (.pdf).

For sense of what we will be playing with during our time with Jim, explore the framing material that he has prepared for us. I can’t wait to see what gets created on Monday afternoon.

2018-02-092018-03-07

A Manifesto for Ambient Literature

In my Spring section of ENGL 335 – Electronic Literature, we’ve spent the past two classes looking at manifestos with the objective of better understanding the ideas and ambitions of writers separated by an entire century but united in their commitment to exploring emergent aesthetics and technologies shaping poetics and stories. Next time round, I would like to include the Ambient Literature team’s Manifesto for Ambient Literature introduced by Tom Abba at last year’s Ambient Literature Symposium in Bristol:

This is an interdisciplinary project focused on understanding how the situation of reading is changing through pervasive and ubiquitous computing. Drawing on literary studies, creative writing, design, human-computer interaction, performance and new media studies, the research being developed looks to engage with the history of the book and see what that history is able to tell us about its future.

Ambient Literature is a two-year collaboration between the UWE Bristol, Bath Spa University, the University of Birmingham, and development partners Calvium, Ltd. established to investigate the locational and technological future of the book.

The aims of this interdisciplinary project are a multi-year collaborative investigation of the changing horizon of storytelling and bookmaking central to our own course. I am looking forward to continuing to follow the Ambient Literature team’s activities and taking inspiration for my own teaching and writing.

2017-09-212017-09-22

Peer Mentors on Deck

Portfolio Project Peer Mentors (Fall 2017)

The Fall term is now in full swing. Line ups at Good Earth. A busy Library courtyard on these sunny crisp autumn days. And increasing traffic in the Writing Centre (Fir 402). This term, there new faces in the Writing Centre.

The Writing Centre instructors and peer mentors have been joined by the Portfolio Project Peer Mentors.

Drop-In Hours

Monday 11 am – 2 pm
Tuesday 11 am – 2 pm
Wednesday 11 am – 2 pm
Thursday 11:30 am – 2:30 pm
Friday 11 am – 2 pm

The peer mentors are there to assist students and faculty alike with building out digital portfolios. This year, we have a growing mix of course- and program-based ePortfolio initiatives with participation from faculty and students in North Vancouver and the Sunshine Coast.

In my own teaching, we are using portfolios and WordPress sites in all three of my Fall term courses: English 109 – Contemporary Issues in Literature and Culture, LBST 200 – Refocusing Knowledge, and LBST 330 – Methods of Inquiry. In the first year literature course, students will be posting their book reviews of selected course texts.

In LBST 200 and 330, the Liberal Studies students will be returning to their sites, which they first begin working on in LBST 100. As students enrolled in an individualized majors program, the portfolio sites are particularly valuable as a means of capturing their emerging areas of expertise as they build their own degrees.

The Liberal Studies BA launched its program-based portfolio initiative in Fall 2015.