I’m a big fan of courses overall. And this was a particularly good one. It’s easy to get into a mode of “this works well enough” with teaching. I think being forced to confront the evidence of how to teach is very, very useful. I’m an academic; I’ll probably never not teach.
Round 4.1
I found this a lot more useful than I thought. I think the hardest part of teaching is often where to start and what to include. I’ll definitely use these and either provide them to students or encourage them to make their own.
Round 4.2
This is something I’m still struggling with. I’d like to develop this more for the next time I teach my class so I can include it in my end of semester assessments.
Round 4.3
I actually really liked this. The book is jammed with good stuff. A little dry, but good stuff. And I’m a firm believer that you never know something as well as when you explain it to someone else. I often make presentations to organize my thoughts, and I find them very helpful. Glad we did this.
Round 4.4
This is just a tough one, overall. I did the screencast, and found that helpful. I might make a little series of those for my phylogenetics class and put them online so that I don’t have to explain 70 times how to change directories or scp a file.
For my in-class, I did a short intro to using qrsh and screen for persistant instances of processes on a cluster. My video for the in-class teaching turned out super garbage (you can find it on my youtube if you really want … it’s bad). BUT … I can now see the people who were in the room connecting to nodes on our cluster via qrsh when I qstat -u ‘*’ to see which nodes are in use. So mission accomplished.
Misc
I’m not sure I loved the blog format, but I can’t really think of anything better. I do like the idea of these posts being publicly readable.
I think it might be a good idea to have a shared calendar or front page for the blog with a timeline of what is due when. I had a higher-than-usual travel volume this year, and it’s just easy to lose things when you’re all over the place.