By-Law S-800 (A Note to Societies)

The Halifax Regional Municipality’s by-law S-800 is focused around the requirements for licensing temporary signs. This by-law, along with all other by-laws, must be followed by Dalhousie societies. This specific by-law is of importance for you and your society due to the advertising that has occurred in the past. Under the by-law all forms of signage (including but not limited to posters, sandwhich boards, banners, mobile signs, and planter box signs) that are placed without a license on city property has the potential to result in a fine. The fines range from $250 - $10,000 and your society will be responsible for paying the fine if charged. Also any affiliated groups/individuals on your advertisement can also be charged (example – a member from the Spanish Society places a poster on a lamp post advertising that the event is being held at the Grawood. The individual who placed the poster, the society, and the Grawood could all receive fines). Please make yourself and your society members informed on this by-law and the reprecusions that can come from it.

Dalhousie Business Ethics Case Competition

This year the Dalhousie Student Union sponsored the Dalhousie Business Ethics Case Competition. The event took place this past weekend and as a representative from the DSU I was able to attend the closing banquet.

The banquet was wonderful and was full of students from Dalhousie all the way to Florida! Everyone that I spoke with at the dinner continually mentioned how great of an experience the event was and how they are excited to be apart of the event next year.

The one thing that I would like to see more of next year is maritime university participation! This year it was only Dalhousie and Memorial (NFLD) from the eastern region of Canada. I will be meeting with several maritime university executives this coming Friday and will pass along the information on this competition to this in the hopes that they will send students in the coming years.

All around this was a wonderful event to be at and to have the DSU sponsor. A huge congratulations goes out to all of the students that took part in the event and the Dalhousie planning team for hosting.

Dalhousie Faculty Association

Today was my first meeting with the executive of the Dalhousie Faculty Association. The meeting was basically to introduce myself and themselves and to talk about any areas we may be able to pursue together.

The topics that we discussed were:

- partnering on events (ex - winter skate for students/faculty with chili)

- partnering on fundraising initiatives (ex - Shinerama)

- course evaluations (issue is currently at Senate, I wanted to provide them with a student perspective on the topic)

- co-curricular transcripts (including extracurricular involvement on students' transcripts once they finish university)

- having a member of the DFA attend the next Canadian Roundtable on Academic Materials conference in December (currently the DSU VP Education and the manager of the Dalhousie Bookstore attend)

We had a great conversation on all of the above topics and it was great to be able to meet with their executive. I do plan on working with them when possible during this year to build a better university experience for our students.

Senate Forum

On Monday November 10, 2008 Senate held a forum in which Seantors could come together and discuss selected topics. There were 3 brief presentation at the beginning of the forum on topics that could be related to the selected discussion topics for the event. I was a presenter at the event and spoke to the group about student evaluations.

Currently at Dalhousie there is a wide range of evaluations that are being used by students to evaluate their professors at the end of the semester. The Dalhousie Student Union would like to see a standardized section of the evaluation be created and used for all classes. We also want information from the evaluations to be available to students. Many other universities in Canada have standardized sections of their evaluations and have the information available (some just to students, some to just the university community, and some have the information available to anyone on their website).

The three selected topics for Senators to dicuss at the meeting were (1) learning and teaching, (2) research initiatives, (3) community engagement.

There was lots of great conversations that took place in each of the groups. The group that I sat in on was learning and teaching and here are a few of the conversation points we had:

- create first year interest groups (around academics)

- move towards service learning

- have more students participating in exchange programs

- have the opportunity for more Dalhousie students to participate in communities (within Nova Scotia, Canada, and globally)

- have faculty/student mentorship programs through student societies

- course capture (online lectures for students to access)

I was very happy that Senate put the effort into creating a forum where Senators could come together and openly discuss topics on how to make Dalhousie better for our current and future students.