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I’ve watched and found two videos the week by Greg Wilson to have been very instructive. The first, presented and recorded (slides) at PyCon 2014, introduces lessons learned in developing the Software Carpentry (teaching lab skills for scientific computing) movement. This was slightly revised and presented again at SciPy 2014 (the videos have just gone up on YouTube). I’ve embedded the recording of the latter talk here. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1e26rp6qPbA?rel=0]Greg’s talks are not really about programming or software carpentry but rather are about teaching and the fact that very little of the large body of research about teaching actually informs what goes on in the class or training room....

There is a Google Apps for Education User Group running today at the University of York. There are live hangouts to be found on YouTube (search for GEUG14) and here is the Twitter feed for: #GEUG14 Tweets!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?‘http’:‘https’;if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+"://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,“script”,“twitter-wjs”);

I’ve just joined the 2014 (second) run of the Open Course on Technology Enhanced Learning that is being supported by the Association for Learning Technology (ALT). You should expect to see the hashtag #ocTEL in my posts on this site until mid June, but hopefully that will be compensated for by an increase in activity and reflection. Amongst the Week 0 (induction) activities we are asked to reflect on your work experience and ambitions for developing your teaching...

In Blackboard, the title of an assignment submission is black and it looks like an ordinary heading. When you mouse over it, the underline appears and it looks like a link. But if you just look at it, it’s not obvious that it is a link! In response to feedback, I’ve now changed the colour of my assignments to dark blue. (See example). Colour assignment title so It Looks More Like a Link...

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yb4XDzjPS_4]I attended a Blackboard Innovative Teaching Series webinar on Monday which discussed how Blackboard Learn can be used to support Chickering and Gamson’s Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education [1]. This was a very nice presentation from Ronald Scott Wennerdahl and Crystal Sheu of the Faculty of Fine and Applied Arts at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. And there are some good ideas that I will need to think about in relation to my own teaching coming up next semester....