Teaching and Learning

A good portion of the past week has been taken up by running my usual set of day-courses, Introduction to Linux and High Performance Computing, Advanced Linux and Shell Scripting, and Parallel Programming. The classes were quite full, indeed the first two almost down to standing room only, and I discovered that the booking organisers had oversubscribed, which is always playing with fire. Sure there's usually a few that can't make it, but it's a worse situation if someone turns up and there's no room for them. From the other side of the table engaged in a tutorial and one-on-one session with the senior lectuerer for my two courses for my MHEd at University of Otago today. Due to the wonders of international time-zones had to start the tutorial (via video-conferencing) at 7am. As the courses do what they say on the box, with the Critical Reflections course (the Kiwis call it a "Paper") asking for reflections. The first week has been What Makes A Good Teacher?, next week's is Evaluate Your Past Performance - plus there is peer review among the group. For the other course, Learning Theory and Practise, I essentially gave an outline and explanation of the International HPC Certification project and provided a write-up of why this is an important change to implement.

In a couple of weeks my end of semester assignment will be submitted for the MSc in Information Systems at Salford, which will mark my half-way point in that degree. The last group project on collaborative learning in a cloud environment was a little irksome to me as someone with a modicum of knowledge in education theory and cloud technologies, reading a number of posts which were basically regurgitating the spruiking of cloud-provider marking. A limit of my temper was reached when one individual tried to insist that you can't SSH into a system on the cloud; at that point I just gave some examples and left the conversation. Finally, there is a small mountain (and I mean mountain) of economics textbooks next to me which I will get through over the next two months for the GradDip in Economics. I have finished the extensive studies for all four course and from now I'll engage in intensive studies. "All work and no play" (well, a little bit of play, to be honest), will lead me to posting a lot about economics over the next eight weeks or so. Who the hell assesses a course on a single exam these days anyway? Favourite error I've picked up on so far - referring to Population variance of a discreet random variable. Whilst econometrics can be subtle, I am pretty sure it is more bounded as "discrete" rather that quiet as "discreet".