This past year, I’ve been serving on a task force at my institution. Our charge is to investigate the intersection of technology and learning on campus, make recommendations regarding where we might focus our energy in the next five years, and (perhaps most importantly) recommend political structures that might then provide guidance and insight on [...]
Posts under ‘teaching’
allegheny students and open source
This semester, we’ve introduced 40 students to the Fedora project . By “introduced,” I mean they have been introduced as contributors. I want to point out that for me as a member of the faculty this is 1. hard, 2. a massive leap of faith, and 3. very, very exciting. And, it is all of [...]
ipad and ebooks
I gave an introduction in Technology and Activism the other day to the Creative Commons. In that introduction, we (briefly) explored two thought problems:
[ music ] How long until you can own every song ever written? My first question had to do with music. If $60 buys a 500GB hard drive, you can put one year . . . → Read More: ipad and ebooks
knuth’s charge
In the preface to The Art of Computer Programming (1969), Knuth wrote the following:
I would posit that the vast majority of students who complete an introduction to Computer Science (often heavily focused on introducing the practice of programming) would not say that they felt they had been exposed to “an aesthetic experience much like composing . . . → Read More: knuth’s charge
programming less visually
Operation: Stick Figure Army is a project that will provide tools for converting 2D imagery (as typically found in many introductory computing texts) into 2.5D representations: physical tiles with raised and textured surfaces that represent one or more diagrams from a text. This lets us explore, as a group, image processing, 3D printing, and the [...]