Queen’s National Scholar and Associate Professor of Media and Film Sidneyeve Matrix teaches courses – both in class and online – on digital communications, creativity, and culture. She is often quoted in the media talking about all things digital – everything from people’s inability to cope when the Internet goes down to new programs people are using to create online content.
Her educational technology initiatives and research have been featured in University Affairs Magazine, Maclean’s Magazine, Toronto Star, and the Globe and Mail.
Dr. Matrix will be joining Queen’s Provost Benoit–Antoine Bacon and Dunin-Deshpande Queen’s Innovation Centre Executive Director Greg Bavington at two alumni Branch events in Los Angeles (April 19) and San Francisco (April 20) to talk about technology and innovation in the creative arts classroom.
Dr. Matrix answered a few questions about her upcoming talk.
Question: What can alumni in San Francisco and Los Angeles expect to hear about in your talk?
Answer: The team will be speaking about the culture of innovation and entrepreneurship at Queen's, from startup incubators and makerspaces, from courses to co-curricular activities. We'll be discussing new undergraduate research and learning spaces, on campus and online, and how they enable students to collaborate across disciplinary boundaries to arrive at new solutions to persistent problems – social, technical, business, and creative ones. I'll be addressing the place of entrepreneurship in the creative and cultural disciplines specifically, and how new educational technologies are changing the student learning experience in the humanities and social sciences.
Question: How has technology changed the way you teach over the past ten years?
Answer: Using mobile, social, connected and cloud-based tools for teaching has made it much easier to engage learners and to reach distance students. The convenience factor of having conversations and course materials accessible online has increased the productivity of students and instructors alike. Extending classroom activities to the web opens up new opportunities for creativity and collaboration, and the learning experience is enhanced for everyone – professors included. In my everyday life as an educator this means office hour consultations can become mobile-optimized video chats, lectures can become interactive webinars, research essays can become multimedia compositions – and the connected class community becomes distributed and richly diverse.
Question: What's next for innovation in teaching and learning at Queen's?
Answer: I'm seeing a lot of pan-university ‘intraprenuerial’ innovation, with faculties and professional schools collaborating to create cross-disciplinary opportunities for students and faculty to work together, on campus and online. Increasingly, Queen's educators are using digital creativity and communication tools and technologies for research, teaching, and learning -- and the result is new pathways for students to connect with each other, with employers (including in the creative and culture industries), and with alumni networks around the world. It's a very exciting time to be working at Queen's.
Visit the Queen’s Alumni events calendar to register for the receptions in Los Angeles (April 19) and San Francisco (April 20). Registration is free but please register in advance online.
