Sub Ubi

This past autumn I taught Software Design at Olin College. It was an excellent experience, and I enjoyed myself a great deal. As I was experimenting with a number of things (a transition from material found in HtDP to an OO introduction to GUI programming, pair programming, the use of version control with novice programmers, extended projects in a first programming course, etc.), I was very interested in getting good feedback regarding how the course went. Translated, I mean “better feedback than a bog-standard feedback form would yield.”

I often close my courses with a discussion as to how the course went. This year, I took the results of the 45 minute discussion that the students and I had, and reflected on how I might evolve the course the next time I teach it. I then pushed those reflections (4 pages of summary and 10 pages of reflection) back to the students, asking for them to verify whether they felt my proposed changes captured the spirit of their comments and criticisms. Of the 20 in the class, 6 came back to me with their thoughts.

I have now consolidated my proposed changes and the student comments into one document. I’ve titled it Feedback as a conversation (PDF, 5MB), and have made it available online (if you are interested… mostly, this is so I can point students and colleagues at it). Based on a quick poke around the literature, I’m curious whether the notion of “feedback as conversations” (in the spirit of the Cluetrain Manifesto) has made its way into the academic discourse. I may try and dig through this literature, as I have never actually seen anyone go through this kind of iterative, reflective process with their students before. Certainly, it is outside my experience at Kenyon, Indiana, and Kent.

Carrie was ordering some ink for her pen, so I decided to be silly and order a fountain pen of my own.

I ordered the Lamy Safari Vista, a clear fountain pen, and a bottle of Noodler’s Black. This is a permanent/archival fountain pen ink, which is awesome; I don’t have to worry about a glass of water taking out my notebook, for example. (Ever since the basement floodings of 1998, I’ve been a little leery of what I use to take notes in my research notebooks.)

Now, I’m going to learn how to use this pen, and probably get ink all over the place. My next post will probably be titled Don’t fill your fountain pen near your laptop, or something similar.

Update: I found this page to be handy, since I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t actually know where to start with the piston adapter. The device is so simple, yet it wasn’t obvious to me what to do. This page has cleaning tips, which look important.

I previously wrote about Amazon S3 and its use for people who just need a way to cheaply/safely backup and archive content off-site. This came up at a CE-L dinner I was attending with my wife some time ago; people were discussing the relative costs of backup solutions for their work. I’ll be updating this, as JungleDisk has recently been updated with some new features that I think make it a complete no-brainer for use as a backup solution for Normal People Like Us.

In putting up a note about tools for collaborative scientific writing, I tweaked the interest of Tom Colvin over at Becoming A Writer Seriously. I’ve offered to handle more questions in this vein, as I think there is an important space here—how can you set up a writing environment that allows you to:

1. Sleep at night knowing that your working copy isn’t only on your computer,
2. Wake up in the morning and be able to revert back to a previous version,
3. Collaborate with others, anywhere, without having to worry about keeping track of which version is attached to which email, and
4. Sleep even better knowing that it is all backed up somewhere

Tom (or others) might actually have additional questions, and those will evolve through discussion on this post and others. When we’re done, hopefully Tom will have answers to his questions about using version control and straight-forward backup solutions to keep his work safer, and others will perhaps benefit from the dialogue as well.

I’ll be categorizing these posts under ‘writing’ as well as any other categories that seem relevant. That, and I’ll make a point to see that the posts are Creative Commons licensed so that others can do with them as they please.

This post is licensed under a

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 License.