An unofficial AU advocate at large, Jason never misses a chance to recount the merits of an Athabasca education. Jason’s studies began alone in front of a rustic rural fireplace in December of 2003 and carried on through various brick and mortar college classrooms yet always with Athabasca as part of his journey. In 2014 he completed his BA in Sociology and in 2022 graduated with an MA in Cultural Studies. To this end, his columns seek to explore edifying moments of learning how to learn within the challenging ideological terrain of that great bugaboo facing students everywhere: the real world!
265 000 students have graced the proverbial halls of Athabasca University since it opened in 1970. Despite differences of age or geography, we all share an intellectual bond as members of the academic diaspora that is AU. Turns out, we are not alone in sharing a unique bond with those who are surrounded by a… Read more »
The mere mention of Charles Darwin brings to mind fishy bumper stickers (imploring us all to evolve), bespectacled chimpanzees on t-shirts (proclaiming our 98% DNA match with monkeys) and flustered debates about human nature (where everyone goes home a little bit hurt and disgruntled). Happily, there’s more to the man’s work than a series of… Read more »
Elementary school class photos are as ubiquitous as report cards and leave a lot to be desired when answering that timeless question: how is school going? From kindergarten on through graduation, these wallet-sized mementos tell only a fragment of the story of our schooling. For instance, many hijinks are left out of the picture. Nowhere… Read more »
In his award-winning book, Big Lonely Doug, Rustad gives eloquent descriptions of the nature of untrammelled forests, never staying far from his central message that the majestic giants of the Pacific coast deserve preserving. Likewise, to explain our studies to others is usually about justifying them in the big picture of our life narrative and… Read more »
What if someone threw a party and nobody came? Convocation is our party and we can cry if we want to, but not it won’t be from loneliness. I skipped my high school grad to pick up an extra shift of work but I’ve always been grateful that I had the foresight to attend my… Read more »
The meaning of life: what can that mean? Possible answers run the gamut of human thought and experience. Meaning is both personal and general; each of us has our own private mission statement whether we think of it that way or not and invariably there will be affinities between ours and others. As AU students,… Read more »
What’s the meaning of life? It’s a timeless question apt to induce eye rolls. Ever since cave people digested a dinner of mastodon under moonlight, humans have pondered purpose and mulled meaning. As denizens of the universal cave of AU, the question of life’s meaning is eminently answerable for us at some level simply because… Read more »
What would happen if not only the logical but also the poetic aspects of our human nature were linked electronically? The human brain, with its heavily developed prefrontal cortex, allows reasoning and planning far exceeding even a lab rat’s such as seen in Pinky and the Brain (the Brain, online). There’s a lot of brain… Read more »
Group activities can be wondrous and, in theory, so can groupthink. There’s little more inspiring than when individuals come together to present unique and multiple perspectives on an issue or topic. The problem is when groupthink lives up to its name and morphs into an oppressive consensus beyond the bounds of which neither words nor… Read more »
In some sense, all that goes into making us who we are at the academic level cay be summed up in the immortal lyrics of the REM song “Losing My Religion”: “that was just a dream” they sang (REM, online). And what a wonderful dream it is; AU sets us off on a previously unimaginable… Read more »