How I use a weekly grid in my courses

Anne recently commented on my checklist for the start of the term post, asking if I could share more about what my weekly grid looks like. This is when I learned that I can't include my own images in blog comments. 🙂 So, I decided to write a longer post about what my grid looks …

Initial thoughts on the Tuesday/Thursday schedule

I am a whopping one class in to Spring Term, my first foray into teaching a non-capstone class on the Tuesday/Thursday schedule. My first class went pretty well, I think. I am definitely rusty on the content -- which makes sense, given that the last and only time I taught this class was Spring 2015. …

Yes, and

Given the quirks of Carleton's calendar, the end of February is a time of divided loyalties. We're barreling towards the end of Winter Term, with all that the end of a term entails. And with a short break between Winter and Spring Terms -- shorter still this year, given that this term started on a …

Class activity recap: API usability testing

Our Software Design course, a required course for the computer science major, contains a term-long team project in which students design and implement a website around the dataset of their choice. The project moves students from requirements documentation to backend and frontend design to web frameworks to integration. The students learn and refine technical skills …

Winter term snapshot

After the long winter break between Thanksgiving and New Year's, it was back to reality last week. Winter Term classes started January 3, and we were off and running, as we usually are. It's now Week 2, and if I squint I can kind of see a rhythm emerging for this term. I'm teaching Software …

Reprising a first year seminar, part 3: Confronting my discussion-leading demons

Earlier this month, I started a three-part "blog mini-series" on reprising my Ethics of Technology first-year seminar. In Part 1, I talked about the changes I made to the course and how it's been going. Part 2 presented a collaborative writing experiment I tried in Week 2 of the term. In this, the final installment, …

Reprising a first year seminar, part 2: A collaborative writing experiment

Last week, I started a three-part "blog mini-series" on reprising my Ethics of Technology first-year seminar. In that post, I talked about the changes I made to the course and how it's been going. This week, I'll talk about a collaborative writing experiment I tried in Week 2 of the term. In the final installment …

Reprising a first year seminar, part 1: Changes and how it’s going

This fall, I am teaching my Ethics of Technology first-year seminar for the second time (the first time was in Fall 2021). I was thrilled to have the opportunity to teach it again (never a guarantee). Unlike the first time, all of my students are in a learning cohort together, which means they have support …

What I’m working on this term

Winter Term started exactly one week ago, so we are now officially in the swing of things. I'm teaching 5 days a week this term, which is great in terms of spreading out the workload but also means I don't really have a "down" day where I can work from home and crank things out …

Lessons learned from a multiyear community collaboration

On rare occasions, I'll get inspired to write up some aspect of my pedagogy for publication. The last time I did so, apparently, was way back in 2008, when I wrote about an experimental first-year seminar on digital storytelling ("Digital Storytelling as a Gateway to Computer Science"). Granted, I think about doing so way more …