Our mission at FOCUSED is to capture real life stories of Wilfred Laurier University Brantford students through the use of simple photography and very little editing. We want to create a web space for students currently enrolled to display their photography work while also showcasing the campus and campus life. Most importantly, students who are not enrolled and who are viewing our campus for their future education can access our photography website to see current students, read about campus stories periodically, and get a real grasp of what student life here is like without the glamour that may distract someone from the real things a students needs to know coming here.
Nothing should be masked with a filter, gloomy days happen and we don’t want to hide them. We want people to see what our campus can look like all year round without adjustments of extreme photoshop enhancement. This is why diversity is a huge part of this club; to show different photography styles taken by a range of students (different programs, backgrounds, ages). This creates a tasteful composite that we can display in meaningful ways. My final goal for the creation of this club was to create a photo archive of each school year that will encompass two semester themes. The themes was supposed to reflect a general pattern of a picture taking style that members try to capture and recreate using their own skills through the semester. We are trying to create a story through the use of simple artistic images that will transcend any particular viewer whiling remaining on our website for years to come. We want to make students feel closer to Laurier, and to students viewing us, possibly their future home. As the founder and President of Focused, I must say starting this club was difficult. Finding members and getting the word out about Focused was a challenging. As days go on, new ideas come into my head that push me forward to continue this project, while sometimes I feel as if the club will crash and burn. I have even contemplated not running the club entirely. If you ask me, this is normal. Contemplating with yourself is normal, and will eventually lead you to a better decision then when you started. Wheather I decided to run the club this year, I know the decision I make will be thought out and will be made with the solid 5 members (friends) I have helping me with this. No decision is ever a wrong decision, as long as you trust yourself and stand by your self. Anitra Nickel
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As more and more of our daily lives take place online, a growing proportion of social, political and economic activity shifts to cyberspace. Social and technological change are inextricably intertwined and so the questions raised require crossing traditional technical and social science disciplinary boundaries. Yet universities have been slow to adapt. Although ‘interdisciplinary’ has become a buzzword, there are still comparatively few truly interdisciplinary programmes or forums on campuses.
The purpose of the Internet Research Network is to provide such a forum for students and scholars from different disciplines to collaborate and share feedback on research projects concerned with the Internet and its relationship to society. Our members include scholars from computer science, psychology, political science, sociology and information studies and, since I founded the group in 2015, we have been holding regular seminar-style meetings where members present projects and ideas to get feedback. This has worked quite well, especially since we kept the focus of the group intentionally broad to make it as inclusive as possible. Every discipline has its own perspective on the world that we need to step back from to make room for others. What has become clear over the last two years is that this not only applies to how different disciplines solve problems but what they see as important problems to be solved. Computer scientists deal with technical problems, and so therefore naturally reason that because technology solves problems, the better the technology is, the fewer problems there will be. Social scientists on the other hand look at a technology ask how could this be used for political purposes, what might it change about society and why could this be a problem? The world as a social scientist sees it involves social and political problems foremost, technology then comes not automatically as a solution but as a new variable. How to bring these divergent worldviews together? Seminars for project presentations are a great way to get opinions from people outside one’s field, but since everyone is immersed in their own fields they are not always accessible for scholars from other disciplines. A sociologist’s project on institutions in Internet regulation will have little overlap with a computer scientists project on improving encryption mechanisms. Therefore, we are planning to complement seminar meetings with problem-driven workshops on specific topics such as digital rights and privacy, surveillance and encryption, malware and proliferation, etc. By focusing on specific problem sets with a technical and social component, we hope to foster even closer collaboration among our members and make sure everyone gets as much as they can from the meetings. Lennart Maschmeyer Approximately 465 people suffer from brain injuries daily in Canada, resulting in a brain injury every 3 minutes. The extent of brain injury outnumbers breast cancer, spinal cord injury, multiple sclerosis and HIV/AIDS-combined. Traumatic brain injury is a major public health concern yet it does not receive a lot of attention. Brain Awareness Movement (BAM) club is a group at the University of Alberta comprised of students who are determined to reduce the prevalence of brain injury. BAM club was started in 2009 with a mission to educate the public about the preventive measures of brain injuries, support brain injury survivors and their families, and to advocate for brain awareness throughout our community. Acquired brain injury is the leading cause of death and disability for Canadians under the age of 35. It is clearly the number one killer of young adults. The fact that brain injuries can be prevented made the Education Program the main focus of our group’s mission. As the BAM club, we want to inspire our community to be safe and aware of the risks associated with brain injuries. We do this by delivering presentations to schools and explaining the importance of protecting the skull by exposing our audience to varying degrees of brain injuries. Brain injuries can happen to absolutely anybody. They can happen to people of any gender, any age, any ethnicity, your neighbour, or even your child. We focus on supporting brain injury survivors and their families. We work directly with support centres for brain injury survivors like the Brain Care Centre (BCC), and Networks Activity Centre (NAC), by providing volunteers to both these centres. Our volunteering experience is unique because our volunteers gain knowledge of what it is like to be impacted by brain injury as they work one on one with brain injury survivors. They take that experience with them and educate others about how brain injuries can have a huge impact on one’s life. Our volunteers also get to raise funds to donate to the BCC and NAC. We also hold fundraising events, and our main annual fundraising event is the Big BAM Fundraising Gala, which provides an opportunity for the brain injury survivors to share their experiences in order to educate our volunteers and others. Because our focus is to reduce the occurrence of preventable brain injuries, one of our values is to advocate for brain safety by campaigning on campus and throughout our community. We do this through advertising campaigns for example we participate at STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Math) oriented events in Edmonton, such as the TELUS World of Science and the School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Even though our members have always sustained the group’s core values, which are to educate, support, and advocate, we have faced challenges. And that is because when we talk about brain injury we lack that deep understanding of its severity. We continue to face a main challenge of getting a lot of members who share the same vision as us. Initially the members were mostly from the Science background, but we have increased our scope of members by participating in the campus clubs fair as we continue to reach out to people who are moved by our cause. Our desire is to have more organisations that are raising awareness on brain injuries. TOGETHER WE CAN SAVE LIVES: JOIN THE BAMILY!!!!! Ruvimbo Maranga Director of Education Brain Awareness Movement University of Alberta |
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