I met Buzz for lunch today. Buzz and I collaborated on the first year's development and teaching of the Information Technology in Biology Education course. This year I'm teaching it on my own. It's going very well and I'm having a great time, but I really miss the collaboration -- and I miss Buzz -- so it was great to see him for lunch.
Supposedly, Buzz and I, plus another colleague, are to co-teach a new version of the course Information Technology in Science Education through the "eLearning Network". We got a grant during the summer for the course development. But we haven't heard anything about this "network" since we got the grant. It wasn't clear, even at the time, that it really existed -- or ever would exist.
Over the course of the last week, I spent a huge amount of time grading papers. Well -- more than that -- trying to provide meaningful feedback on the writing of the papers. That is, when I wasn't trying to hide from doing it -- it was fairly painful because there aren't any magic answers. Although I'm still not convinced that the students are reading their team's papers after writing them. I think the papers could be improved a lot if they just edited them carefully themselves before turning them in. I had hoped that by putting the writing in the wiki, students would be more likely to edit each other's writing. And it probably is better. It is certainly interesting to go back and look at the development of some of the papers. I'm definitely going to encourage the further use of wikis in the department. I think we need to have a mechanism to have a wiki for each class, though. The name space is simply too small otherwise.
I'm really looking forward to the long weekend with nothing hanging over my head.