Welcome to my instructor blog! I love teaching EDCI 336 and have been doing so for several years. I am a professor in educational technology at the University of Victoria in the Faculty of Education‘s Department of Curriculum and Instruction, where I am also the undergraduate and graduate educational technology area advisor. I am also co-director of the Technology Integration and Evaluation (TIE) Research Lab, which was funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the University of Victoria, TELUS, and many other sponsors. You can explore the UVic calendar to learn more about the other courses we offer in our area (EDCI 335, 337, 338, 339) and about our graduate programs in educational technology at the MEd (project-based), MA (thesis-based), and Ph.D. level. I am also president of the Open/Technology in Education, Society, and Scholarship Association (OTESSA).

To give you more about my academic background, I have a BA (English) and a BEd from UBC. I began a Master’s in Educational Psychology (specialization in Educational Technology) at the University of Alberta, and was fast-tracked to the Ph.D. program in Educational Psychology (specialization in Educational Technology), where I was a Government of Canada SSHRC doctoral fellow.

Personally, I am a full-time single mother to two amazing girls, now 13 and 15. This journey of praxis, where theory is put into practice, was life-changing for me. I was able to learn indepth about educational psychology, educational technology, and what is learning vs. schooling, as I traversed parenting children who went to traditional public school, traditional private school, homeschool, and an inquiry-framework school.

My current interests span teacher education, digital, networked, and open literacies, technology adoption and integration, how technology scaffolds inquiry-based learning, educational reform, and multi-access learning (where modality and access is at the choice of the learner), and open education. One project I have currently is on cyberproxy, where telepresence robots are used to provide accessibility for the 50% of learners with disabilities, for whom the cement ramp doesn’t help. I have been teaching open and online since 1998 and supervise/d MA and PhD graduate learners on topics such as open pedagogy in higher education, open scholarship, inquiry in K12 education, flipped learning in post-secondary, technology adoption in teacher education, and educational change theory. My MEd learners from #tiegrad have focused on more diverse topics related to educational technology. All graduate work can be accessed from the UVic repository.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact me anytime. My full contact information is on the syllabus, but these can get you started:

Twitter: @_valeriei

Email: edci336 at uvic dot ca

Office tel: 250-721-7778 (cell will be provided directly)