A Transdisciplinary Team
The need for data literate personnel ranges from open data to research data to business-critical data, and spans sectors, organizations, and fields. Addressing the need for data literacy, and the challenge of teaching it effectively, thus requires a transdisciplinary approach. Our team includes members from the Faculties of Arts and Social Sciences, Science, Management, and Computer Science at Dalhousie University. Each has expertise and experience in various areas of data literacy in both teaching and research. The role of the team is to guide, inform, and supervise the knowledge synthesis; ensure the breadth and coverage of the review of literature; and connect research assistants to relevant literature and help assess the quality of informal documents.
Of course the backgrounds present on the team are not intended limit the scope; these fields are a starting point. We aim for a broad inquiry that draws on expertise from across the academic community, the private sector, and the public sector.
Research Assistants
The project RAs take a strong leadership role, defining the scope and processing an incredible amount of material on which to based our synthesis.
Chantel Risdale
Bio to come.
James Rothwell
Bio to come.
Principal and Co-Investigators
Mike Smit
Dr. Mike Smit is an Assistant Professor in the School of Information Management, Faculty of Management. He holds a PhD in Computing Science from the University of Alberta. His relevant research includes cloud computing and the management of Big Data, and the use of open data and information. An emerging scholar, he has published dozens of peer-reviewed articles and has two patents pending in the area of data management. He developed a required course that uses open data sets to teach data literacy to non-technical students, and advocates publicly for data literacy. As PI, he provides day-to-day supervision of the project.
Hossam Ali-Hassan
Dr. Hossam Ali-Hassan is an Assistant Professor of Management Information Systems in the Rowe School of Business, Faculty of Management. His research interests include business intelligence and analytics, social media, social capital, job performance, crowd-sourcing and open innovation. Prior to his academic career, he worked for many years as a technologist and consultant. He is currently teaching a new course on Business Intelligence and Data Visualization.
Michael Bliemel
Dr. Michael Bliemel is an Associate Professor of Management Information Systems in the Rowe School of Business. He has recently received several awards for academic leadership and for teaching from both academia and industry. He currently teaches several undergraduate and graduate courses using data analytics for business decision making. His research includes game-based experiential learning, business intelligence, human-computer interaction, and student engagement. He conducts workshops on teaching data analytics, and speaks on student engagement using experiential learning.
Dean Irvine
Dr. Dean Irvine is an Associate Professor in the Department of English, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. He is the director of Editing Modernism in Canada, a SSHRC-funded strategic knowledge cluster dedicated to training, networking, and producing open-source editing, publication platforms, and analytic and visualization tools for digital humanists (modernistcommons.ca). He is a collaborator on multiple SSHRC- and CFI-funded open-data initiatives in the humanities, including Implementing New Knowledge Environments, the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory, and Open Modernisms.
Daniel Kelley
Dr. Daniel Kelley is a Professor and the Graduate Coordinator in the Department of Oceanography, Faculty of Science. He has authored several open-source data-analysis tools, including the R oce package, the only tool providing oceanographic analysts with statistical and data-exploratory tools, which led to his textbook Oceanographic Analysis with R. He teaches two data-intensive physical oceanography courses that emphasize quantitative problem solving, was a partner in the creation of a class on how to sample the marine environment, and is proposing a new class in oceanographic data analysis.
Stan Matwin
Dr. Stan Matwin is a Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) and Professor in the Faculty of Computer Science, and the Director of the Institute for Big Data Analytics at Dalhousie. His research is in machine learning, data mining, text mining, and their applications. Author and co-author of 250 research papers, Stan has worked at universities in Canada, the U.S, Europe, and Latin America. Among his many funded research projects, Stan is the principal investigator on a six-year NSERC CREATE grant “Training in Big Text Data”, providing research experience and training in Big Data technology for computer science students.
Brad Wuetherick
Brad Wuetherick is the Executive Director for the Centre for Learning and Teaching (CLT) at Dalhousie University. Brad has responsibility for supporting teaching and learning, and championing the adoption of evidence-based practices in teaching and learning across the institution. His research includes the development of research skills at the undergraduate level, inquiry based learning, the scholarship of teaching and learning, faculty attitudes and practices in teaching and learning, and curriculum development and course design in higher education.