Category Archives: Stories

Scholarship guidelines

In academia, at least, it’s a rare privilege to write the criteria by which your work will be evaluated. That was, in fact, one of my major tasks for the 2015-16 academic year, and part of my backlog of blog topics. Why is it on my mind right now? While I am being reviewed for tenure at Whitman, I also just submitted my first letter as an external reviewer for a tenure case at another institution. That other institution’s departmental evaluation guidelines look quite different from the ones I wrote for Whitman, and that got me thinking back on the process of developing guidelines.

I tell the story of Whitman’s CS Scholarship Guidelines below. Continue reading

Report: Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing

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.

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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

I’ve got a POSSE

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).

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Prospective students and pre-registration

I’ve heard colleagues describe April as “the month of a thousand nights” because of all the senior recitals, shows, celebrations, and so on. April is also the month of admitted student visits and fall pre-registration. Next year I need to account for all the time in April I’ll spend just  talking with current and prospective students.

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How I spent my time at SIGCSE 2016

Each year in March, the Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) hosts the Annual Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, SIGCSE for short. SIGCSE is a medium-sized conference; the final registration count for SIGCSE 2016 was 1243. It’s usually in a medium sized city big enough to have a convention center, but not too expensive for the high school and community college teachers who often don’t have institutional support to attend. This year it was in Memphis. Don’t ask me about Memphis: As usual, I didn’t see much beyond the convention center.

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