Thursday, October 11, 2007

Busy, busy, busy...

<Lame!>The usual excuses about being too busy etc</Lame!> here's a quickie for what I've been doing recently:

  • Spent the summer supervising a visiting French student, helping him to learn PHP and MySQL programming (I over-estimated what he knew before he arrived, so the project he was to work on proved very challenging ... still, it's 75% complete & working)
  • Been to an excellent conference in Southampton from the HEA ICS subject centre
  • Joined a project at work to use technology in the classroom for rapid feedback -- used "ppvote" technology once (writing questions is hard!)
  • Done some "cat-herding" work with also-too-busy colleagues with widely-varying opinions on the age-old question: Why do some students find introductory programming modules so hard? Arriving at some consensus actions is hard!
  • Written two brief articles for our University newsletters: one on computer-assisted assessment and how to tell if it's working, the other on a speech recognition project that I and two colleagues have a PhD student working on (dictating Maths!)
  • Did some L&T/feedback work with some guys from an Indian University with which we have a collaborative agreement
  • Presented L&T technologies to some visitors from Chile
  • Started to teach JavaScript again -- this year the group assignment is to do Minesweeper in JavaScript -- fun!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Sure, minesweeper is fun for us (damn it!!!) ;) But not as fun as reading your blog! Just as a quick suggestion, i suppose you should add this somewhere on your future module pages for your students to read, so that you are spared of the 12 Year Old AOL type messages. I find it a nice read as well :) http://faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1855.html