The LU campus is beginning to show signs of life as the Spring semester rapidly approaches. This is your last weekend to prepare for your classes. I hope you have done your "spring cleaning" on your syllabi and infused them with some learning experiences that employ teaching methods that encourage active learning. As we move from the teacher-centered methods of the past to more effective student-centered approaches, we will start to reap the benefits of higher retention and graduation rates. If you are interested in using collaborative technologies to enhance your learning experiences, Jason Kalin has a terrific article you will want to access. He raves that we should encourage the use of the available collaborative technologies because it mimics what will occur in the real world when our students report to work. Kalin warns that although our students may be technology communicators, "many students consider these socially-centered online applications as neutral communication tools without learning, or even realizing, how to use these applications in rhetorically aware ways." Just wanted to remind you that our Blackboard support allows you to access SafeAssign, designed to eliminate plagiarism in student assignments. The service detects plagiarized works in student papers and delivers reports on such incidents through the Blackboard Learning System. SafeAssign checks assignments against databases of published articles and also scans the Internet for materials that might have been plagiarized. The interesting thing is that the more we use the service, it creates a database of LU material that is used to check your student's assignments. In this way, we are capturing the "viral sharing" that can sometimes occur in classes. The University of British Columbia Okanagan has issued a call for proposals for the annual learning conference Scholarly Approaches: Evidence-Informed Teaching and Learning to be held May 2 and 3 in British Columbia. Proposals will be accepted through February 29. Educators are invited to share their expertise and experience with the connection between research and learning. The conference intends to explore questions such as how can research inform my teaching and hence enhance the student learning experience; how do students learn best; and, what does the research say about approaches to teaching and learning that are most effective? Michael Theall urges us to help our students stay on track throughout the semester. He says "research on the dimensions of college teaching provides powerful evidence of the importance of helping students to organize their time. With respect to student achievement, the most strongly correlated teaching dimensions are organization and clarity. When teachers make clear how topics fit and how the assigned work can be efficiently carried out, they help students to construct accurate schemas and clarify the structure of the discipline. The result is better student learning and increased student satisfaction because that learning becomes more apparent."