Congratulations to Sandra Toze who was chosen for one of the Faculty of Management’s teaching awards.  Please see Dean Peggy Cunningham’s comments below:

It is with great pleasure that I announce this year’s winners of the Faculty of Management’s Teaching Awards: Ms Tammy Crowell, Mr Dan Shaw, and Ms Sandra Toze.  Please join me in congratulating each of them.  Formal presentation of the awards will take place at our annual Faculty retreat in November.

A wide range of factors were considered for granting the awards – students’ assessments of teaching quality, letters of reference from colleagues, the applicant’s use of innovative teaching methods and technologies to support learning, his/her support of students inside and outside the classroom, and contributions to knowledge related to teaching practice. This award is funded through the generosity of Mr. Bill Black, a long-time supporter of the Faculty and a passionate promoter of teaching excellence.  I am delighted to report that he has agreed to fund the award for the next five years.

The Committee tasked with selecting the award winners faced a daunting task this year.  Ten of our colleagues were invited to apply for the award.  Each application was of extremely high quality.  To me this is clearly indicative of our Faculty’s devotion to, and expertise in,  teaching quality.  Thus, while there are not enough awards to recognize all of our excellent teachers, I wish to congratulate and thank each and every one of them for the incredible work they do as instructors and mentors of our students.

Dr. Anatoliy Gruzd was quoted yesterday in an article that appeared in both the New Brunswick Telegraph-Journal and the Vancouver Sun.  The story is regarding the Canadian firm Radian6 and how it is monitoring Obama’s Twitter town hall meeting in the US.

Work on research projects occurs year round, but during the spring and summer faculty and students are often away from the campus presenting papers and posters at conferences and giving workshops based on their research findings. The number of speaking commitments this year is notable: by the end of the summer over 45 presentations will have been given at conferences and meetings throughout Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. The range of topics and venues is also noteworthy as the following paragraphs demonstrate. Moreover, the opportunities for students to speak about their research and gain experience are an important feature of the research projects and teams operating in the School.

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Dalhousie School of Information Management faculty member, Fiona Black, has been awarded an Insight Development Grant (IDG) from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). The project, “Developing Transnational Approaches in Print Culture: New Questions and Methods” involves an international team led by Dr Black including Dr Sydney Shep at Victoria University of Wellington (New Zealand) and Dr David Finkelstein at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh (Scotland). IDG grants are part of the new program design at SSHRC and are intended to support research that moves in new directions intellectually and methodologically.  The two-year project will innovate with digital media and methods and provide opportunities for information management students to do thesis research, contribute as research assistants, present at international conferences and co-author scholarly papers. The project plan is to explore an approach to transnational enquiry through the lenses of labour history and migration studies and concomitant skills transfer in the printing and allied trades. SSHRC is interested in research projects that contribute to knowledge and may also contribute to contemporary policy development. Immigration and skills transfer are highly topical in many regions. This project’s analysis of historical information and data will contribute potential new frameworks for immigration policy development.

Dr. Anatoliy Gruzd, Assistant Professor at the School of Information Management and Director of the Social Media Lab at Dalhousie University, has been awarded a $25,000 grant for 2011 from the GRAND research network. GRAND is a federally-funded Network of Centres of Excellence (NCE) research network and commercialization engine whose goal is to address complex issues in digital media and transform multidisciplinary research into user-centred solutions.

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Please join me in congratulating Dr. Vivian Howard on her appointment to Associate Dean (Academic), effective July 1st, on a two-year renewable term.

Vivian has been teaching in the Faculty of Management since 1996. She has a strong research record and has been successful in a number of major research grant applications. She was appointed as the Academic Director of the Bachelor of Management program in 2007. As Academic Director of the Bachelor of Management Program, Vivian has successfully introduced 7 interdisciplinary majors to the program, and co-developed a unified undergraduate office team along with the Director of the Bachelor of Commerce Program.

Vivian currently serves on the Associate Deans’ Council Committee and the Bachelor of Management Program Committee, working to improve student and program success through reviewing processes, policies, vision and goals within each of these committees. Vivian has also served on the advisory board for the College of Sustainability and the Faculty of Management Rapid Task Force on Teaching Quality, showing her commitment to our students and our programs in the Faculty of Management and beyond.

The School of Information Management is delighted to announce that Jackie MacDonald, an Adjunct Professor at SIM, has successfully defended her doctoral dissertation titled “The Information Sharing Behaviour of Health Service Managers: A Three-Part Study.” Dr. MacDonald’s PhD degree is granted by the Information School, University of Sheffield.  Dr. MacDonald has been associated with SIM for several years, both as a researcher, and an instructor in the MLIS program. 

Jackie manages Library and Knowledge Management Services Department  for Annapolis Valley Health, South Shore Health and South West Health.   Her service also supports the Dalhousie School of Nursing, Yarmouth Site.

(Reposted from http://socialmedialab.ca/?p=1711) When it comes to tweeting about the upcoming election, Canadians are showing their famous sense of humour. Based on a sample of over 14,000 messages posted on twitter with the hashtag #CNDPOLI (collected between March 26 – April 3), we found that of the tweets  that did express sentiment (6,860~49% ), about 65% expressed positive sentiment, and approximately 35% expressed negative sentiment.[1] This finding is contrary to what one would expect from a polarizing  topic such as  politics. It is also very different from previous analysis of election related tweets. For example during the 2008 Presidential election in the US, researchers from Rutgers University and Yahoo found that the majority of tweets posted during the live presidential TV debate were negative.[2] To find out why our dataset contained more positive tweets than negative, we decided to examine the actual content of the tweets in our dataset, using Netlytic, a web-based text mining and social networks discovery software package that we are developing at the http://socialmedialab.ca/and IBM’s ManyEyes to visualize our findings.

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Dr. Anatoliy Gruzd has been quoted in an article in this morning’s Globe and Mail; the story is about the role that social media will play in this year Federal election.  Anatoliy will be monitoring various social media platforms to see what people are saying about the election and whether social media will motivate voters to get involved and place their votes.  Stay tuned and visit Socialmedialab.ca for upcoming analyses of the federal election.