June 26, 2013

School year 2012-13 reflections

I had my annual review with my dean yesterday.  It went well, and although I don't have much to say about the review specifically, it was a time to reflect on things that went well and not so well in class this past year.

What I've come up with are things that I'm going to try in order to build on what has been going well and correct things that are not going so well:

  1. I'm going to completely change how I assign what I call "Reading Reviews". This is probably going to be my biggest change next year, and I plan to have a separate post on this topic soon.
  2. Lab report first drafts are going to be due the next class period we meet after the lab has been completed. Part of the point of a science course should be to model good scientific processes. I am terrible at quickly writing up scientific work that I do. But, if I want my students to start forming good habits, then we need them to write up what they do in lab as quickly as possible. That way there is less time for the memory of what was done in lab to fade. I will continue to use the policy of allowing as many rewrites as needed to get full credit on the lab.

    I saw that Joss posted about his concerns about lab report revisions on twitter today:
    That's a concern I have, too, but ultimately the responsibility is on the student to meet the expectations put forth in the syllabus.
  3. I give a lot of short quizzes the first part of the semester, hopefully to encourage preparation for exams. I am planning to grade the quizzes in class as soon as they are done. We use a studio physics classroom, which makes for long class periods (at least 2 hours), and since I see my role as a facilitator of the learning environment rather than a lecturer, I will need to have mostly self-directed tasks for the class to work on for the 20ish minutes it will take to score all the quizzes.  My goal is to have the immediate feedback encourage the students to come to class better prepared for quizzes and exams. Even though I'm not using standards-based grading specifically, I am striving towards keeping the spirit of SBG. (Excellent post by Frank Noschese.)
  4. Based on what I learned at the New Faculty Experience, I will be trying to make more frequent reflections.  I started doing this late in the year using Evernote.  Part of my problem with doing it regularly was that I had a tight schedule last semester. In the Fall I won't have that issue.
If I could identify a few things that went really well this year, I would say that in the Spring term especially, I used a lot of the TIPERs activities with whiteboards fairly effectively.  I do think I need to better introduce how the class needs to share their whiteboard work with each other.  Also, although we were able to do more labs (and more effectively, I think) I have some plans to better introduce some of the skills I expect them to use throughout the term.

I'm really happy with how the last year turned out.  I am looking forward to the Fall, but really happy to have the Summer to prepare for it.

June 24, 2013

Musical Acoustics Research Library online!

If you're interested in the field of musical acoustics you'll definitely want to check out this resource from Stanford: the Musical Acoustics Research Library.

I found out about MARL when I received an email with this press release. The collection is broken up into four parts: a collection of material from the Catgut Acoustical Society, and collections of materials from three well-known acousticians.

Much of the material has been digitized, allowing anyone to peruse the correspondence between colleagues, drafts of articles and the ephemera contained in the collection.

According to this post, the collection is completely digitized, but there seems to be some parts which are not available online.  I'm not sure if that's due to copyright, or if there are plans to post the rest of the collection online in the future. In any case, what is online right now is a great resource for musical acoustics and also a neat look into how scientists collaborated with each other from the 1960s through the late 1980s and 1990s.
the John W. Coltman Collection, the Arthur H. Benade Collection, and the John Backus Collection. - See more at: http://library.stanford.edu/blogs/special-collections-unbound/2013/04/musical-acoustics-research-library-records-digitized#sthash.bQVLskwV.dpuf
the John W. Coltman Collection, the Arthur H. Benade Collection, and the John Backus Collection. - See more at: http://library.stanford.edu/blogs/special-collections-unbound/2013/04/musical-acoustics-research-library-records-digitized#sthash.bQVLskwV.dpuf
the John W. Coltman Collection, the Arthur H. Benade Collection, and the John Backus Collection. - See more at: http://library.stanford.edu/blogs/special-collections-unbound/2013/04/musical-acoustics-research-library-records-digitized#sthash.bQVLskwV.dpuf
the John W. Coltman Collection, the Arthur H. Benade Collection, and the John Backus Collection. - See more at: http://library.stanford.edu/blogs/special-collections-unbound/2013/04/musical-acoustics-research-library-records-digitized#sthash.bQVLskwV.dpuf
the John W. Coltman Collection, the Arthur H. Benade Collection, and the John Backus Collection. - See more at: http://library.stanford.edu/blogs/special-collections-unbound/2013/04/musical-acoustics-research-library-records-digitized#sthash.bQVLskwV.dpuf
the John W. Coltman Collection, the Arthur H. Benade Collection, and the John Backus Collection. - See more at: http://library.stanford.edu/blogs/special-collections-unbound/2013/04/musical-acoustics-research-library-records-digitized#sthash.bQVLskwV.dpuf
the John W. Coltman Collection, the Arthur H. Benade Collection, and the John Backus Collection. - See more at: http://library.stanford.edu/blogs/special-collections-unbound/2013/04/musical-acoustics-research-library-records-digitized#sthash.bQVLskwV.dpuf
the John W. Coltman Collection, the Arthur H. Benade Collection, and the John Backus Collection. - See more at: http://library.stanford.edu/blogs/special-collections-unbound/2013/04/musical-acoustics-research-library-records-digitized#sthash.bQVLskwV.dpuf
the John W. Coltman Collection, the Arthur H. Benade Collection, and the John Backus Collection. - See more at: http://library.stanford.edu/blogs/special-collections-unbound/2013/04/musical-acoustics-research-library-records-digitized#sthash.bQVLskwV.dpuf
the John W. Coltman Collection, the Arthur H. Benade Collection, and the John Backus Collection. - See more at: http://library.stanford.edu/blogs/special-collections-unbound/2013/04/musical-acoustics-research-library-records-digitized#sthash.bQVLskwV.dpuf

June 14, 2013

Github for science: anyone played with these yet?

If you've written any amount of code beyond "Hello, world" you are probably familiar with the idea of version control systems. The idea is simple: you use a piece of software to keep track of changes that you've made to your code. If you are working on a complex project involving multiple people, using a VCS is likely the only way to efficiently manage the project.

If you're working on a project with a collaborator, there is no need to be in the same location as each other if you are both able to access the shared space where your files can be indexed by the VCS.  Most VCS make it trivial to work with others via cloud-based services.

One VCS that is popular is called git.  There is a web service called GitHub where coders who use git can check-in their code and collaborate with others. And, although there are people and organizations starting to use GitHub for non-software projects, there are GitHub-like clones popping up for specialized fields.

Two in particular have caught my eye for scientific research projects: SciGit and Banyan. Both of these sites are pretty new, and they both seem to have roughly the same idea: a service for scientists to collaborate on projects with version control without having to learn a lot about git itself.

I'm interested to know if anyone out there has looked at these sites or tried them out.

June 12, 2013

Science Hall, Goshen College - 1947-53

This photo was taken sometime between 1947 and 1953, according to the information on flickr.

How many physics (and/or science) classrooms look the same 60 years later?

At least we don't use the giant built-in power supplies anymore.

Via Flickr:
Caption: April, 1948. Goshen, Indiana. Interior scene in Physics Lab in Science Hall, Goshen College.

Citation: Mennonite Community Photograph Collection, 1947-1953. Goshen College. HM4-134 Box 2 Photo 301-9. Mennonite Church USA Archives - Goshen. Goshen, Indiana.