The Informer Page 9

February 28, 1989

Saturday, March 4, 1989, 9:00 a.m.- 4:00 p.m.
Ballroom, Holiday Inn, 711 West Broadway,
Vancouver.

“This one day seminar is designed primarily

for faculty who are active or who wish to become
active in fostering programs to enhance teaching
effectiveness at their own institutions. However, it
will certainly be of interest to anyone concerned
about the future directions of post-secondary
education and their implications for educators.”

Fee: $25 (Waived for CIEA Professional
Development Committee representatives)

For further information call 872-8478. A
registration form is available from Reid Gilbert (local
2414).

2. Preliminary announcement is made of a conference
on Advanced Computing for the Social Sciences
in mid to late 1989. For more information, or to
submit a paper proposal, contact Lloyd F. Arrowood
at LFA@ORNLSTC.BITNET, or
LFA@STC10.CTD.ORNL.GOV, or by mail to Oak
Ridge National Laboratory, P.O Box 2008, Oak Ridge,
Tennessee, 37831-6207. Phone (615) 574-8700.

CALLS FOR PAPERS:

1, The Twentieth Annual Conference of the
Mythopoeic Society (Mythcon XX): Mythic
Elements in Fantasy.

July 28-31, 1989.

University of British Columbia.

Writer Guest of Honour: Guy Gavriel Kay (author of
The Fionavar Trilogy .) Papers and panels on various
aspects of mythopoeic fantasy, including the work of
J.R.R. Tolkein, C. S. Lewis, and Charles Williams.
Membership: $25 U.S.

Papers should be addressed to Mason Harris, Papers
Co-ordinator, Mythopoeic Conference, Dept. of
English, Simon Fraser University. Deadline for
abstracts is May 1, 1989.

2. Joint NetNorth/CDNet Annual Conference
June 8-9, 1989.

Concordia University, Montréal.

“The aim of the conference is to bring together people
who provide network services to the Canadian
University and research community via NetNorth,
CDNet and other networks.”

Theme: Networking 89: Toward an integrated
network solution—International, National, Regional,
Institutional.

Papers should be submitted to and information had of
steveb@maxwell.concordia.ca

or by mail to NetNorth/CDNet Program Committee,
c/o Steve Bush, Concordia University, 1455
DeMaisonneuve Blvd., Montréal, Québec, H3G 1M8.
(NOTE: the deadline was Feb. 3, but immediate
contact can still be made with an idea. Abstracts
should be fewer than 100 lines.)

RESEARCH AND CONFERENCE GRANTS

On February 9, the Faculty Development
Committee met for more than three hours to
deliberate the large number of requests for funding
under the Research Grants and Conference
Programmes for spring 1989. It was not easy to
determine how to fund the various requests,
especially as there was a total of $14, 650.00 worth
of requests for only $8,200.00 of available money.

Each request was valued on each of three
criteria.

1. Personal PD growth. We asked ourselves
whether the applicant would, by undertaking
this work, or attending this conference, expand
her professional abilities, expose himself to new
ideas and grow as a professional. We think this
personal growth is the most important use of
Faculty Development funds. Here, we looked
“inward.” This criterion was worth 60%

2. Value to the Profession, to colleagues.
We asked ourselves whether the discipline area/
business community/vocational community
would be enriched by this activity. If an
applicant was speaking at a conference, or
publishing a product from her research, or if his
expertise would be shared by the activity, we
rated the category high. Here we looked
“outward.” This criterion was worth 30%.

3. Curriculum value. We asked ourselves
what value this activity would have for the
students of the applicant or for the college
directly. We believe that all PD activities in a
college must have some curriculum application,
but we don’t believe the principal purpose of
faculty PD funds is to maintain ongoing college
programmes; rather, it is to promote personal
faculty professional growth. This criterion was
worth 10%.

These “points” were then totaled, weighted
against the monies available, and then weighted
again against the magnitude of the request (so that
large requests representing a number of colleagues
were not treated unfairly with regard to a smaller
request representing only one faculty member). A
“share factor” was, in this way, assigned to each
request. Realizing that this distribution resulted in
some grants which were too small to be useful—
although fair in terms of the distribution—I sought
additional funds and was able to secure some
additional financial flexibility from the Dean of
Student and Instructional Services and the
President. The “share factors” were then applied
to this larger pool of money so that the grants
became useful.

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