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Hello POSE participants,

It is incredible how quickly the winter term is flying by. We are just over half-way through the open research unit. In this announcement we wanted to share with you about what has been happening in the last couple weeks and what is coming up.

Looking Back

On Feb 1st we opened the Open Research unit. This unit focuses on open workflows, open software and open data. So far it looks like most of you have been working on completing the activities for the unit. The Open Research unit activities include a number of really interesting visual and tool focused activities. If you haven’t had a chance to take a look at the activities for this unit yet, we have pointed you to some highlights below.

Analyze text using Voyant

Quite a few of you have been using the open-source Voyant tool to analyze text. The variety of texts that you chose to analyze included the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, a lecture by George Bernard Shaw, Recommendations On Open Educational Resources by UNESCO, the info page from a PhD program.

Test Out Latex

A number of you tested out using Latex. Latex is a system for high quality textual typesetting that is also used for writing equations online.

February Open Chat

The open chat this month took place on February 10th. During this session Aled Edwards Chief Executive of the Structural Genomics Consortium, Professor of Medical Genetics and Medical Biophysics at the University of Toronto, Visiting Professor of Chemical Biology at the University of Oxford, and Adjunct Professor at McGill University discussed how the practice of open in drug development can both expedite discovery and reduce the social and economic costs of these research endeavours. The conversation had particular resonance in the context of COVID

If you missed this session and are interested you can view the recording in the Canvas course media gallery.

Looking Ahead

We have two more weeks to go in the Open Research unit. It looks like many of you have completed the unit activities. We have ensured that the POSE program is flexible. With this said, you may want to start contributing to the unit discussion in the next little while. We have tried to create discussions that synthesize some of your understandings of the unit.

We also wanted to highlight an optional open education set of events coming up. The Honouring Indigenous Writers on Wikipedia events will be starting on February 24th. Read more about how you can learn about and contribute to Wikipedia. 

We are excited to learn with you for the remainder of the Open Research unit. The POSE program is flying by and the final course topic Open Education is just around the corner.

Sincerely,

The POSE Facilitation Team