Education

Some lessons learned today in the project of taking my classes online: If you’re going to be screen capturing in a video lecture, do a very short test lecture first, flipping through all the windows you may show, to make sure you have your font sizes big enough to be legible. If you don’t you’ll end up re-recording a 20-minute live coding session. Don’t get too update if you have to re-record something. It will probably be better the second time through. In general try not to have 20 minute videos. Also, trust your students to forgive you if your … Continue reading T-minus seven days to online teaching

Like many (most?) faculty who started the spring term teaching in a face to face context, I’m finding myself suddenly figuring out how to move my classes mid-stream to a new format. Based on what my college provides, the major platforms I have available to me are Microsoft Teams and Sakai as my CMS. I’m discovering there are a lot of features in these tools I didn’t know about. I’m also discovering that they’re a bit complicated to learn how to use and I’m concerned about how well students will pick them up – particularly without someone able to help … Continue reading Making the Jump to Online Teaching

The start of the spring semester is looming all too close (about 60 hours left to go), and the pressure is exacerbated by having spent the past two weeks in intensive committee service (it is, apparently, possible for five people to sit in the same room for six hours multiple days in a row and churn out productive work, but it is exhausting and your evenings are not productive) and having a new course launching this spring. I’m trying desperately to get my ducks in a row (note to self: perhaps duck sorting would be a good programming exercise…) but also … Continue reading Teaching Goals for Spring 2020

The timing of SIGCSE (the technical symposium for ACM’s special interest group on computer science education) as midway through the Spring semester is a nice lead-in for course revisions that might happen over the summer for the next year, but the trick is to actually remember those intended revisions. There’s also so much one can take away from SIGCSE that I’ve committed to, each time I attend, identifying three manageable things I can do to follow up from the conference in the coming year. Top of the list is a revision to my OO programming course inspired by Prather et … Continue reading To-do list from SIGCSE 2019

I always enjoy the updates to Math with Bad Drawings that reflect on the process of teaching math. The recent entry The Serious Truth About Silly Mistakes rang particularly true for me, especially when I think about teaching programming. Orlin writes about how students do sometimes make careless mistakes – what I might think of as “typos” or “silliness” as he calls it – but that students (or, in his case, their parents) can struggle to distinguish an actual careless slip and an instance of “silliness” that reveals a lack of underlying understanding. He suggests the following for why mathematics … Continue reading Just silliness

Over the past few months I’ve been spending more time than usual in discussions about the value and mission of liberal arts education, coming at it from a few different directions. This seems to align with an increased number of articles in various sources (mainstream and higher-ed focused) about the value of the liberal arts. There are a lot of pieces to the challenging problem of explaining liberal arts education. One piece I keep coming back to, though, is my frustration with the phrase “liberal arts majors”, generally intended to mean arts and humanities majors. If it were up to me, we would insist on being clear … Continue reading Defining a Liberal Arts Major

There are a series of good quotes in this article about how librarians can get students to start understanding the scholarly frame for exploring information that highlight the general shape of the argument being made: That exploration is important in learning: “When small children observe and imitate, they are testing the physical world around them and coming up with their own understanding of how things work. Explicit instruction short-circuits that process.” That various pressures prevent students from seeing library research as exploration: “They are intensely curious about what the teacher wants, if not about the topic they’re researching, and often focus … Continue reading Exploring for information