It’s been a while since I blogged. Since I was in Seattle for SIGCSE 2017 and it’s the start of Spring Break, I decided to hang out here for a few extra days. It seems like a good time for a reflection on both SIGCSE and the first half of the spring semester. Continue reading
With the busy-ness of the semester over and the turning of another year, it is a time for looking back and looking forward.
Last week my Grinnell colleague Sam Rebelsky shared some end-of-semester reflections. I’m going to try this exercise too. Continue reading
In what has become a tradition, I report on pre-registration for next semester. The highlights:
Academic labor is typically framed as falling into three categories: teaching, scholarship, and service. There is also a common saying about tradeoffs in computer systems research: “X,Y,Z, choose two out of three.” Lately, I’m finding that in any given week I can be caught up on work for the CS program, or I can be caught up on grading, but not both. It’s a little harder to define being caught up on scholarship—meeting deadlines perhaps? In any case, if I meet a deadline for scholarship, I’m surely not caught up on everything else. Continue reading
Last week I traveled to Austin, Texas with seven students for the Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing. My job was to moderate a panel on teaching-oriented faculty careers—my fifth such panel, but the first at Tapia. CS program funding allowed me to bring along several students. To maximize impact, I recruited from amongst this fall’s class mentors and the leadership of the CS@W student club. Students are expected to share or apply what they learn on campus.
Whitman students and faculty at the Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing. You can tell we are in Texas by the steer made of license plates on the wall behind us.
I’ll start out with a diary of my experience, and conclude with my students’ reflections on their experiences. Continue reading
Students often have difficulty understanding how principles of academic honesty applies to problems in computer science, and especially programming problems. In my nine years at Grinnell, I had all too many discussions with my colleagues about interpreting evidence of academic dishonesty.
While core values and principles are held in common, institutional policies and procedures differ. This is one of the things that made last year a lonely year for me professionally. I sorely missed having colleagues to consult with about potential academic honesty cases, colleagues familiar with institutional policies and the special problems of academic honesty in computer science.
In which I report briefly on my first LACS meeting, discuss the hiring crisis in computer science, and plea for CS Ph.D.s to return to academia.
Continue reading
When Grinnell College announced that its relationship with the Posse Foundation would end, many folks at Whitman asked me what I thought or if I had any inside information. This post is not about that Posse.
Rather, it’s about my experiences with the Professor’s Open Source Software Experience (POSSE), an NSF-funded project that engages faculty from across the US in developing and deploying learning activities that engage computing students with humanitarian free and open source software (HFOSS).
Almost three weeks after Commencement, it finally feels like summer.
The first meeting of the Whitman CS faculty was today!
I wrote about our first hire, John Stratton, in an earlier post. We have now filled our second position.