Each semester I teach biol597f, I'm challenged to strike a balance among several competing themes: Devote time to exploring more technologies or delve more deeply into a few? Learn how to use environments or how to install and configure them? A big part of becoming facile with technology is having a broad enough base of experience that when you see something new, you can think of a variety of potential ways that it might work to try. The final project gives students an opportunity to take a small set of technology systems and learn them in detail. But learning to install and configure technologies (in the open source world) requires a different level of expertise. I've thought about having a "build a server" exercise where students could install a free OS on a machine. When I look at where my students are, however, I worry that they would become discouraged by having to navigate a command line environment at the beginning.


StevenBrewer