Blog (page 35)

Guest Post by: Catherine Wachter, Guidance Counselor at University of Toronto Schools

The Innovation Hub envisions a seamless student experience, one where students feel well prepared for their future academically and personally. Unfortunately, poor mental health is an overwhelming barrier to student success. Students report feeling stressed and anxious about school work, and often struggle to find a healthy balance between academics and their personal life. 

Warrior Within (www.warriorwithin.ca) is a project that centres around the creation of a fictional short film (shot in July, 2016) that uses metaphor and imagery to help engage students in their understanding of stress, anxiety and resilience. This film has inspired a student-created curriculum that will be an open source resource for educators. 

By: Margaryta Ignatenko, Student Co-Leader, Communications and Events Team

Working at the Innovation Hub has been one of the highlights of my academic school year! I am pleased to share that the opportunity to be part of the Innovation Hub’s next phase is here. There are 7 new work study positions for the summer term. These positions fill 4 roles that will be essential for supporting the work of the Hub moving forward. The jobs are briefly described here and full descriptions can be found in the Career Learning Network by searching for the following job numbers:

Guest Post by: Scott McAuley, Communications Coordinator at UofT’s Impact Centre 

The desire to enable innovation is all around us. From university campuses to corporate headquarters to government chambers, new programs are springing up that are designed to help bring ideas into reality, and reality into practice. The University of Toronto is no different. The University has always been an innovator, from the isolation of insulin to creating the pacemaker, but today’s technologies and markets provide new opportunities that require a new way of thinking.

The Impact Centre is a research institute at the University of Toronto that is dedicated to bringing science to society. We create and deliver events, programs and courses that are all designed to introduce students to innovation and entrepreneurship as well as give them the support they need to make those dreams a reality.

Some recent and upcoming programs:

 Guest Post by: Jonathan Kates, Master of Public Policy Student

As a graduate student at UofT’s School of Public Policy & Governance and an executive member of the student-led Policy and Innovation Initiative, the Innovation Hub’s human-centered design focus overlaps with my own interest in innovative policy design. The way policy is designed at the federal, provincial and municipal levels of government offers opportunities for or constraints to innovation. This is largely due to the fact that unlike businesses in the private sector who dream up a brilliant new product, governments rarely enjoy a first-mover advantage. That is, one of the main ways of selling policies to the public is by talking about a successful application of this policy somewhere else. “It worked well in the U.K.!”; “If Montreal can do it, so can Toronto!” The thing about policy is that it can be context-specific, so sometimes what worked in the United Kingdom or Quebec may not be what’s right for Canada or Ontario.  But does that mean we shouldn’t at least try and find out?

By: Margaryta Ignatenko, Student Co-Leader, Communications and Events Team

On March 7^th, Ali Rodney, Julia Smeed and Tamsyn Riddle presented the Hub’s key insights and design process to a room full of energetic, inspired and innovative folks who are part of Civic Tech Toronto.  Civic Tech Toronto hosts weekly “hacknights” which allow anyone with a project to collaborate and create with fellow community members. Participants worked on projects ranging from creating a WebCrawler to identify hate speech in Canada to creating a multimedia campaign that raises awareness of racial profiling and carding to a take down of fake news project (among others!)

By Denise Bentum, Kate Bowers and Alexandra Rodney

As mentioned in our last post, the Innovation Hub’s Organizational Learning team has been interviewing faculty and Student Life staff at the University of Toronto to learn about their experiences working with students and with each other. We have been exploring the topics of collaboration and student support, in line with a design-thinking approach, by trying to understand these things from the perspective of staff and faculty. Our goal has been to elicit stories of successful and challenging experiences supporting students and collaborating across the university’s many divisions and departments. We have analysed these stories in order to understand how to meet the needs of both students and frontline workers at the university, and to learn about what they value during intra-institutional collaborations and interactions.