Backgrounder
Dr. Norm P. Friesen - Canada Research Chair in E-Learning Practices at Thompson Rivers University
Dr. Norm Friesen possesses a PhD in Education (U of Alberta 2003) as
well as a master’s degree in Library and Information Studies (U of
Alberta 1996), a Master of Arts degree in German (Johns Hopkins
University 1991) and a Bachelor of Arts degree (U of Winnipeg 1989).
He has written two editions of two books on the instructional use of
WebCT and two editions of two books on the implementation of the IEEE
Learning Object Metadata standard, and co-edited two others. He has
also written or co-written 32 scholarly articles and/or book chapters,
has had presentations published in nine conference proceedings, has
written 45 reports and/or standardization documents, three reviews, and
five websites and/or multimedia packages, and has presented at 82
scholarly conferences and seven workshops.
He has won a number of honours and awards. His post-graduate and
graduate education has been supported by the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) in the form of a 2005 Postdoctoral
Fellowship and a Doctoral Fellowship (2003), as well as a number of
graduate prizes at the University of Alberta, Johns Hopkins University,
and the University of Winnipeg.
In addition to the CRC funding, Dr. Friesen has received as total of
$1,468,500 over the past five years in research funding for nine
projects related to collaborative learning, learning object
implementation and international e-learning standardization.
He has taught face-to-face graduate and/or undergraduate courses at the
U of Bergen, U of Alberta, Institut fur Erziehungswissenschaft
(Innsbruck), and Johns Hopkins University and has been involved with
course development and teaching graduate and/or undergraduate courses
at Athabaska U and Learning Spaces. He has been a visiting scholar at
the Leopold-Franzens-Universität in Innsbruck, Austria, a SSHRC
Postdoctoral Fellow at the Applied Communication and Technology
Research Centre at Simon Fraser University, and a director of the
CanCore Initiative and has undertaken research and development
associated with a Web-based collection of reusable teaching resources
for post-secondary education for the province of Alberta. His teaching
experience also includes teaching developmentally delayed and/or
emotionally disturbed adolescents in the K-12 program.
Dr. Friesen is a current member of a number of organizations,
including: Board of Directors, e-Learning Standards Advisory Council of
Canada; British Standards Institute Committee for the standardization
of IST/43/-/6 BS8419 (UKLOMCore); Dublin Core Metadata Initiative
Education Working Group; Review Board, Educational Technology and
Society Journal; PROLEARN INITIATIVE and IEEE (Institute of Electrical
and Electronics Engineers, Inc.) Learning Technology Standards
Committee. He is also a project editor for both "Collaborative Learning
Communication" and "Metadata for Learning Resources" Standard: Part 1 -
Data elements, and is a delegate to the Canadian Standards Council
representation to the International Standards Organization Special
Committee on Information Technology for Learning, Education and
Training (ISO/IEC JTC1 SC36).
Born in 1966 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, where his parents both taught in
the public school system, Dr. Friesen graduated from the Mennonite
Brethren Collegiate Institute in 1984 before enrolling in Arts studies
at the University of Winnipeg.