I.
Knowing that this year would be crazy busy for me, I chose my service wisely. I tried to select things that were staggered throughout the year, so that I could give my time and attention to them without stressing out too much. I tried to avoid January and February since that’s when hiring season will kick into high gear around here. I said no to some opportunities because I knew I wouldn’t have the bandwidth for them.
Even with all this careful planning, several of my service activities are now ramping up all at the same time, and all of them seem to require attention at precisely the same times.
So much for careful planning, huh.
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II.
This term, I’m experimenting with all-electronic grading. I’ve always felt a bit squicky about all the paper involved in take-home exams and essays. But I’ve felt more comfortable grading on paper, so even when students turn in take-home exams or essays on Moodle, I tend to print them out to grade them. Moodle introduced a blind grading feature recently, and with this feature I decided to try and go all-electronic.
My system goes like this: Students turn in exams or essays in either Word or PDF format. If they turn in a Word file, I use track changes to make comments and/or indicate how many points they received on a question. If they turn in a PDF file, I use the annotation features in Preview to make comments, mark up the text, highlight passages, etc. Usually I also have an associated rubric on Moodle, but since I comment on their papers/exams directly I just refer them to the document for comments rather than repeating them in the rubric.
I was worried about the clunkiness of this, particularly with annotating PDFs. But I’ve been annotating PDFs I read for research for quite some time now (also to save paper), so I’ve gotten used to how to annotate in Preview and I have a pretty good workflow. And I’m actually enjoying it quite a bit. I can copy and paste comments between papers/exams (good when many students miss the same question or make the same mistake for the same reasons). I had all of my Networks exams open on my computer earlier, and I found it easy to switch back and forth between them, allowing me to grade like I normally do (one part of a question at a time for each student in the class). I find I make longer and more constructive comments and it takes me less time.
Interestingly, my Networks class appears to favor PDFs while my freshman seminar definitely favors Word docs. I’m not sure why this is.
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III.
Tomorrow I embark on a new-to-me adventure. I’m serving as an external reviewer for a CS department review at another liberal arts institution.
I’m pretty excited about the opportunity. We went through our own department review a few years back (right after we brought our son home), but since I was on leave I had a pretty fractured view of the process. I am looking forward to meeting new people, talking about trends in the field, and seeing how another institution does things.
That said, the schedule for this thing looks pretty daunting! I am an extrovert and usually thrive on interacting with people, but I’m thinking I will need to sit and stare at a wall for a few hours after I get back to my hotel, especially at the end of the first full day. I know that the schedule has to be this way due to the short time frame, but ay caramba, this will test my extrovertedness for sure.
This is what a computer scientist looks like 