Tomorrow I will be presenting for the first time at a HMC faculty meeting. "Scaweee" as my two year old started saying at Halloween.
Here it is:
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Teaching and Learning
Today at lunch time we had the first TLC/CIS cosponsored panel on teaching and learning. Sarah Harris, Melissa O'Neill and Vatche Sahakian presented. Sarah spoke about her experiences using Tablet PCs in class, Melissa about using wikis in teaching and Vatche about screencasting.
Great stuff I learned about:
Sarah showed Classroom Presenter-- software out of the University of Washington that does some very nice things for presentations using Powerpoint. Like letting the instructor see handwritten notes on the slide (on the slide, not off to one side) that the students don't see.
Melissa described how she asks students to collaborate to create class lecture notes on a wiki. Melissa "seeds" the wiki with the text from the slides used in the lecture. She uses Twiki, but also mentioned other social collaboration tools likeHiveminder, Trac and Jottit
I had to step out and missed part of Vatche's presentation, unfortunately. He talked about the setup he put together to create screen casts of homework problem solutions. Later, I came back and he showed me his Livescribe pen, which is about the coolest thing I've seen in quite a while. It's going on my wish list.
In short, a great discussion. The turn out was small, which meant there was lots of time for questions. And there were lots of questions!
I hope that CIS (Computing and Information Services) and TLC (Teaching and Learning Committee) can sponsor more events like this in the future.
Great stuff I learned about:
Sarah showed Classroom Presenter-- software out of the University of Washington that does some very nice things for presentations using Powerpoint. Like letting the instructor see handwritten notes on the slide (on the slide, not off to one side) that the students don't see.
Melissa described how she asks students to collaborate to create class lecture notes on a wiki. Melissa "seeds" the wiki with the text from the slides used in the lecture. She uses Twiki, but also mentioned other social collaboration tools likeHiveminder, Trac and Jottit
I had to step out and missed part of Vatche's presentation, unfortunately. He talked about the setup he put together to create screen casts of homework problem solutions. Later, I came back and he showed me his Livescribe pen, which is about the coolest thing I've seen in quite a while. It's going on my wish list.
In short, a great discussion. The turn out was small, which meant there was lots of time for questions. And there were lots of questions!
I hope that CIS (Computing and Information Services) and TLC (Teaching and Learning Committee) can sponsor more events like this in the future.
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Academic Orientation
Classes at HMC started today, Sep 2, so I had to work on Labor Day, but it was for a good cause. Apologies to organized labor everywhere. Apparently, this is not unusual at schools that are on a semester system. Since I lived with the quarter system at UCLA, I had no clue!
One thing I did was a brief presentation for Academic Orientation. The freshman class was introduced to topics like plagiarism, cooperation on homework, time management etc. My bit was on some Computing Services and, of course, on file sharing. In talking about file sharing, I focused on the RIAA's tactic of sending early settlement letters for the College to deliver to users whom the RIAA claims are infringing copyright.
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
IT Planning Overview
This is a presentation I did last Spring for the Board of Trustees Educationl Planning Committee.
Monday, August 18, 2008
At Harvey Mudd we're getting into an IT planning phase. The College has not had a comprehensive IT plan for some time, so creating one was high on my agenda when I came here. We have a very good start in an IT Review that Joel Smith and Ted Dodds wrote in 2007.
In my first few months, I met with a lot of people to try to get a sense of what they saw as important for IT @ HMC, how CIS (the central computing entity) could improve services, and what they hoped to have in the future. I learned a lot.
We've now launched a website to help support the IT planning process. CIS staff helped me get this up. I'm trying an experiment with Comment Press from the Institute for the Future of the Book. It is a WordPress theme that allows people to comment on a text paragraph by paragraph, so I'm hoping that it will be useful tool for the HMC community to discuss the IT Review. I hope to do the same thing with drafts of the IT Plan, once we've got some written.
I also found this very nice idea for creating a timeline, written by Bryan Croxall while he was a Woodruff Library Graduate Fellow in Emory's Center for Interactive Teaching (ECIT). It combines Google spreadsheets and MIT's Simile Timeline tool very nicely. I used it to create a timeline for the IT planning process, but it would be great for lots of different purposes. Once built, I can change the Google Docs spreadsheet and the timeline page reflects the changes within five minutes.
In my first few months, I met with a lot of people to try to get a sense of what they saw as important for IT @ HMC, how CIS (the central computing entity) could improve services, and what they hoped to have in the future. I learned a lot.
We've now launched a website to help support the IT planning process. CIS staff helped me get this up. I'm trying an experiment with Comment Press from the Institute for the Future of the Book. It is a WordPress theme that allows people to comment on a text paragraph by paragraph, so I'm hoping that it will be useful tool for the HMC community to discuss the IT Review. I hope to do the same thing with drafts of the IT Plan, once we've got some written.
I also found this very nice idea for creating a timeline, written by Bryan Croxall while he was a Woodruff Library Graduate Fellow in Emory's Center for Interactive Teaching (ECIT). It combines Google spreadsheets and MIT's Simile Timeline tool very nicely. I used it to create a timeline for the IT planning process, but it would be great for lots of different purposes. Once built, I can change the Google Docs spreadsheet and the timeline page reflects the changes within five minutes.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
