Mapping where Edmonton’s kids live and learn

On Friday evening, an interactive map I worked on with Edmonton Journal education reporter Sarah O’Donnell went live. Sarah’s first story based on the data was published in the paper today. Here’s our introduction to the project:
With five schools closing in Edmonton’s core and nine new suburban schools opening in September, education reporter Sarah O’Donnell [...]

Learning about the Edmonton Public Schools Foundation

Yesterday I attended an information session at Evansdale School on the Edmonton Public Schools Foundation, which launched on February 10. I admit I hadn’t even heard of the foundation until Jeremy mentioned the information sessions to me! I’m glad he did, because it was really interesting to learn about.
Our host for the session was [...]

Edmonton Public Schools & Open Data

Today I’m very excited to announce that Edmonton Public Schools has taken a big step into the world of open data by releasing a data set containing information on all of their schools, including the six opening later this year. I understand the data will be made available in the City of Edmonton’s Open [...]

Education is about grading – and that sucks

It is no secret that I have a lot of issues with our education system. I think there are lots of things that could be done better, especially fixing this:

“All through school, from kindergarten up, you were taught that mistakes are a bad thing. You were downgraded for the mistakes that you made.
It is perfectly [...]

Maclean’s sucks up to the U of A

I don’t know about you, but today I lost all remaining respect that I had for Maclean’s magazine. The annual ranking of Canadian universities came out, and the University of Alberta placed first in the reputational ranking. Kind of suspect, don’t you think, considering the U of A led the charge to boycott the rankings [...]

Vancouver students to get Olympic break?

I guess the 2010 Winter Games is a pretty good excuse to give students two weeks off, eh? Well, post secondary students at least, because they might be able to work or volunteer at the games. Nothing is certain yet, but a nice break for students definitely seems likely:

Spokeswoman Renee Smith-Valade said Vancouver’s Olympic organizing [...]

Podcasting University Lectures

BlogMatrix has a post up today about podcasting university lectures – particularly appropriate since I start classes again for the Fall semester bright and early tomorrow morning. While I fully intend to go to at least the first week of classes, all bets are off after that. And no, it’s not because I am lazy, [...]

NAIT to be Canada’s largest tech school

According to an article in today’s Edmonton Journal, it appears that the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology is planning to spend a ton of cash in an effort to become one of North America’s largest technical schools. The project sounds fairly ambitious:

A brand-new campus twice the size of the current main campus will be built [...]