View the story “Tony Hirst on Data Wrangling” on Storify

Why can’t the developers of educational platforms create a decent forum? You’d think that there’d be several decades of experience of what works and what doesn’t to call on. However, like most of the (Managed/Virtual) Learning Environments I’ve had to use, and MOOCs that I’ve tried, the edX forum which being used for the Data, Analatics and Learning MOOC (#DALMOOC) is broken. The particular issues that I have are 1) that there’s no mark all items as read button and 2) no way to edit your own posts.

Cloud9 is a cloud-based interactive development environment (IDE) with some killer features. Amongst these is the possibility of creating and hosting a WordPress blog completely free. The blog runs in a Ubuntu instance on Docker and you have complete access to the WordPress’s PHP files using the very capable browser-based IDE. No need for virtual hosting, FTP, or any of that arcane stuff. The IDE provides terminal access to the Docker instance over ssh through the browser and there’s a MySQL database, Git support and built-in support for Bitbucket and GitHub.

So, yesterday I was browsing my twitter feed and favourited a post from Helen Keegan tagged #whyIteach accompanied by the #ccourses hashtag. Today I noticed a tweet from DML Research Hub “Channelling Engelbart: Augmenting Human Education” in which Howard Rheingold interviews Gardner Campbell — also tagged #ccourses. Digging a little deeper I find that #ccourses refers to the Connected Courses course and realised that it’s another connected MOOC-like thing facilitated by some of the usual suspects.

I am very excited by Smallest Federated Wiki (SFW) – the latest project from Ward Cunningham, the inventor of the wiki. I’ve been watching the videos and playing with the software most of yesterday and today. I’ve also been inspired by Mike Caulfeild‘s explorations of the teaching and learning applications of SFW on his blog and on YouTube. Follow up After a bit of a struggle, I have managed to install my own copy of SFW as a node app, backed by a MongoHQ database on Heroku.

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.

Having dealt with the reading list, my next consideration was the course description. This has been published in the course catalogue so I have to stick to the sense if not the letter of the published description. Here’s what the catalogue entry currently says. EG-247 Signals and Systems Module Aims To develop further methods of representing and analysing dynamic systems, to extend these concepts to sampled-data systems, to introduce concepts in signal processing and to use computer-aided methods for modelling and analysis.

The course reading list in iFind Reading My second step in setting up my new module was to update the reading list. There are a large number of books on Signals and Systems and some, like the ones recommended by my colleagues last year, are considered seminal. However, they are also very expensive and available in the library in small numbers and only on short-term loan. They also take a somewhat mathematical approach to the subject.