Wednesday, August 7, 2024

Behind the scenes at the Olympic Games

By Jenna Braun. This is an excerpt of an article originally published on Waterloo News.

It takes all kinds of helping hands to make the Olympic Games run smoothly, including alumni from the University of Waterloo. According to Statista, the Paris 2024 Olympics have created approximately 150,000 jobs across the globe.

Recreation and Leisure Studies alum Tanya Casole-Gouveia (BA ’09), a digital producer at CBC Sports, is currently producing a daily show on CBC Gem for this summer’s Games.

In 2004—the same year that Facebook launched—Casole-Gouveia took on a social media role through a co-op placement with BlackBerry. After graduating from Waterloo, she became a social media pioneer at CBC, starting her career at a time before it was something that could be studied at school.

With this being her sixth Olympics, and having covered many storylines throughout the years, Casole-Gouveia shares that it’s not just the sport aspect she enjoys about her career, but the culture around the Games.

“I find sport is this microcosm of society, and that everything that’s happening in the world is happening in sports too, like equity issues, economics, the pandemic, the Black Lives Matter protests moving to the court,” she says. “Sport is a unifier; it brings people together.”

Touching on the matter of gender equality in sports, one of the goals of the International Olympic Committee, Casole-Gouveia shares that even though women are excelling and breaking Olympic records in swimming, soccer and many more, there’s still a long way to go in terms of covering their stories.

“There are women's stories in the big four games — soccer, hockey, football and basketball — you just have to look a little deeper to find them,” she says. “Every athlete has a story with challenges and barriers, and just being able to tell those stories, shining a light on their failures and successes, is rewarding.”

Read the full story on Waterloo News

Introducing the Keeping Copyright in Mind series

Over the next four weeks the Copyright Advisory Committee has prepared a series of reminders on keeping copyright in mind as you use materials when delivering your courses – everything from slides to course readings to audiovisual material.

Keep copyright in mind…when you create your slide deck or lecture materials

You’ve got a bunch of great visuals that will help your students understand the concepts in your course. How can you make sure you can use them, while respecting copyright?

It depends on the source of the image. We’ll cover one of the most common topics we receive questions about: reusing images found online. For example, if you wanted to use the Plains Zebra infographic available on the PBS Nature site, Infographic: All About the Plains Zebra in a slide deck in Zoology 100, and upload a copy of it to the LEARN space for the course. One way you could use this image would be under the Work available through the Internet exception in Copyright Act – this exception allows you to copy an entire work as long as you meet a set of five requirements:

1. You are reasonably certain that the copy of the work is a legal copy.
   1. The work was published on the PBS website and is labelled with the PBS and Nature logos. A search of tineye.com reveals that the image exists in two places online, according to their index, and the PBS website is where it seems to have been published first. These two pieces of information help us have confidence that the images are legal copies.
2. You do not bypass any technological protection measures (e.g., password protection, or digital rights management software [e.g., Adobe Digital Editions]).
   1. The PBS page is not password-protected, and the image does not have any form of digital rights management attached to it (you can right click and save the image without issue).
3. There is no clearly visible notice prohibiting copying on the website. The notice must be more than simply the copyright symbol (©).
   1. The image is labelled with the copyright symbol (©) alone. There are no notices on the webpage prohibiting copying.
4. You are providing access to only students registered in the course.
   1. Only the students in Zoology 100 will have access.
5. You'll provide attribution to the creator where available.
   1. On the slide that includes the image you’ll include a caption that states: Source: Brazell & Fulton (2013). 

This is just one example, and we know there are lots of ways you find material for your course. You can use the Copyright Decision Tool to help you figure out what applies to your situation or read through the Guide for slides (and other lecture material) for more information on how copyright comes into play with the visual material in your classroom. If you need help, reach out to copyright@uwaterloo.ca.

Participants needed for polling tool pilot

A message from the Office of the Associate Academic Vice President and Teaching Innovation Incubator.

As announced on May 3, the University obtained a one-year centrally funded site licence to pilot the polling tool Vevox, for both academic and non-academic purposes. iClicker is still currently supported since no single polling tool previously met all the requirements of our community of users. Both tools have recently added new features that need to be evaluated before assessing the results of the Vevox pilot.

The University has recently been provided with a short-term opportunity to thoroughly pilot iClicker and its new features, free of charge. Before this, iClicker has been available to Waterloo students via a paid subscription.

Instructional Technologies & Media Services (ITMS) is partnering with the Teaching Innovation Incubator (TII) to lead a pilot comparing these two polling tools to determine whether one of these tools would meet the needs of our users, or whether both will continue to be required for specific situations.

About the pilot

ITMS and the TII are looking for instructors, students, and staff with experience, or who are willing to use polling tools Vevox and/or iClicker to participate in a pilot during the Fall 2024 and/or Winter 2025 terms. Note: interested students can apply to join the pilot so long as they have experience using either polling tool; there is no requisite that students must join the pilot with their instructor.

During this pilot:

• Vevox will continue to be available for use as the campus’ centrally funded tool.
• iClicker will be made available at no cost for the duration of the limited time pilot. Participants need to be aware that there is no expectation that iClicker will continue to be provided at no cost at the completion of the pilot.
• Participants will be expected to use one or both tools over the course of the Fall 2024 and/or Winter 2025 terms.
• Participants will be expected to provide feedback on one or both tools as per the requirements document that will be developed for a suitable polling tool (approximately 1-to-2-hour time commitment). 

While all University of Waterloo students, faculty and staff can use either polling tool during this period, as participants in the pilot, your feedback will inform the decision on how the University will move forward.  Any future direction is dependent on budget approvals and must align with Policy 17: Quotations and Tenders which may result in a Request for Proposal to ensure a transparent competitive bidding process.

Register now to participate

Interested participants should complete the expression of interest form by Monday, August 19 at 1:00 p.m. to register for this pilot.

Additional details to be shared soon

Additional information on accessing the free option for iClicker, as well as the impact for students who have already purchased an iClicker subscription for the Fall term, will be shared soon. Support information for both iClicker and Vevox can be found on the EdTech hub under Centrally Supported Tools.

Questions about this pilot can be directed to Kyle Scholz.

Wednesday's notes

The latest module in the Public Safety Canada Safeguarding Science series takes place today. Safeguarding Science: Raising awareness of security risks and mitigation tools in the research ecosystem is a 90-minute online that runs from 1:00 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. The primary objective of this workshop is to explain the potential for misuse of dual-use research, technology and materials, along with possible risk indicators and mitigation tools to protect Canadian research assets.

The next Safeguarding Science workshop, open to faculty, staff (Research staff, Safety Office staff, Research Ethics staff, and Information Systems & Technology staff involved in research using biological, chemical, radiological, or nuclear materials or technology), and students is set for Tuesday, September 17.

Here are next week's electrical shutdowns as part of the ongoing Primary North Electrical Distribution Replacement project:

• Mathematics 3, Monday, August 12, 5:00 a.m. to 7:00 a.m., please note there will be a generator for the data centre;
• North Loop 1 (C2, DC, MC, GSC, COM, M3), Monday, August 12, 5-minute shutdown at 5:00 a.m.