Today was a great day. Fridays seem wonderful now as a constrast with the stress and frenetic activity required on Thursdays when I teach until 9pm at night. In the afternoon I teach Writing in Biology, one of the junior level writing-across-the-curriculum courses. The writing program at UMass was just placed among the top 25 "programs that work" by US News and World Report. This is my first year in the writing program, so I can't claim any responsibility for the reported success, but its nice to be involved in something that is recognized as valuable. My students have been initially skeptical about the extent to which I was asking them to maintain their writing electronically (I'm asking them to maintain all of their writing in a wiki!) but it seems like this has started to wear off as they become comfortable with the wiki and start to have confidence in the technology.
When I first came to UMass, I was really a technology skeptic. My experiences up to that point had convinced me that, although technology had promise, it needed to be a lot more reliable before most people would be willing to invest significant effort in building resources that used. Then I arrived at UMass and met George. George almost single-handedly built in the network in Morrill. He undoubtedly made some mistakes as he went along, but he learned and by the time I arrived, the network was absolutely solid and reliable. I was astonished at the extent to which faculty were willing to use the network and realized it was because they had come to unquestioningly accept that the network and servers would always be there. Our building network has been significantly more reliable than the phone service in the building, for instance.
In any case, today one of my writing students came to the BCRC to take a picture. Currently, the students are working on a project where they need to take a picture with a digital camera and then write a Methods that describes how someone could reproduce the same picture. Then each student has to follow someone else's methods and try to take the same picture. The student today was following someone else's methods. After we got the picture off the camera, he wanted to see how close he'd come. We looked at the pictures side by side and critiqued them a bit. "Cool!" he said. Then he seemed to think better of getting excited about a writing exercise. But I'm pleased to think that the students are starting to relax and have fun with the assignments.
As I taught my evening class, Information Technology in Biology Education, I reflected a bit on the different approaches I bring to the two classes. For the Writing course, I want the technology to be absolutely stable and work reliably and unquestionably. For the Technology course, I tend to not set up the resources ahead of time and so stuff more-or-less on the fly, so as to demystify the process and to let the students see that, whenever you set up something, you usually need to tweak stuff a few times. I developed this attitude from the WeMaLU meetings, where I had long observed that the presentations where you really learn something, are the presentations where stuff doesn't work smoothly. It's when stuff breaks and acts weird, that you really have a chance to see how stuff works. When it just installs and works, it tells you almost nothing about the system.
After the evening class was over, two students chatted with me a bit about the course. One remarked that she had been worried about taking a three-hour-long evening class, fearing that the time would drag. "On the contrary," she reported. "The time seems to fly by." The other student added that she found the course to be "the most pleasantly challenging course" she had taken in years. I was highly gratified to hear these comments and they in no small measure contributed to my well-being today.
Today was also a great day because I finally got a bigger hard disk and some more RAM for my tibook. When I was getting ready for my trip to Chicago, I found that I had to throw away a bunch of my files in order to clear enough space to burn a CD (the Apple disk burner software insists on having enough free disk space to build a full disk image for a CD). Now I have 4 times as much hard-drive space, which will make life much easier. I also have more than twice as much RAM, which will save me a lot of time. Still, I'm spending hours this evening trying to rebuild my work environment: reinstalling the OS, resetting my preferences, copying my user files back into place. In the long run, it will be a great thing.
I had to remove one of the RAM modules from my tibook in order to add the new module. I've reused it by installing it into an older iBook that was donated to the BCRC when a faculty member left the department. Conveniently, the machine was named 'Nei' -- a good Esperanto name, so I won't even have to rechristen it. We did add a wireless networking card and on Monday I will make it available to the student consultants in the BCRC to use. They will enjoy it and find good use for it, I'm sure. All in all, a Good Day.