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More Adventures in Teaching and Learning
Feb. 23rd, 2021 11:02 pmThe past few days have been almost entirely buried in either teaching or learning. On Monday and Tuesday, I ran courses on Parallel Programming and Mathematical Programming, respectively with the usual format. The latter is only the second time I've run the course at UniMelb and I'm afraid that it still needs more work. There's too much content, but how else is one supposed to pack the scope and capacity of extensive programming languages like R and Octave/MATLAB into one-hour sets and then book-end either side with a variety of shell tools and alternative languages such as Maxima, Gretl, and Julia. It's a smorgasbord that is as deep as it is long, and the only real option I have is to provide plenty of examples for people to explore in their own time in detail expressed as HPC job submission scripts to give it a particular context (in particular I have introduced several new job arrays which are very useful). Julia, in particular, is a tricky one because of its sudden increase in popularity over the past eighteen months or so, as it begins to fulfill its promise of being an easy, high-level, programming language that is flexible, but with the performance of lower-level languages such as C. Perhaps I am going to have to develop a workshop entirely dedicated to Julia.
In another teaching forum, I have started teaching the intermediate English course at the University of Rojava. I find myself encountering what is a common issue for me among many of the other teachers where, by virtue of some network engineering knowledge, I am slightly horrified by the lack of consideration of whether various tools are appropriate for learners who are trying to take their classes by mobile 'phones with poor Internet connectivity. Some are using Google Docs (I suggested Etherpad), others are talking about extensive video-conferencing, and so forth. Now some audio is necessary for pronunciation experience and learning, but I'm trying to do as much as possible in plain-text. One hundred thousand words of plain-text are roughly a megabyte. Put it in a binary format and watch it grow. Save it as an audio file and it'll be ten times the size, at least. Give it video and, well, you get the picture (literally); "A picture is worth ten thousand words". But this is rarely experienced by the sender, it is the recipient that suffers. I always find it curious that there are so many who are advocates to access to technology and information are often those who do not practice what they preach, because it's a technical detail that they don't understand, but also don't try to understand.
When I haven't been teaching, I've been learning (and there's certainly plenty of learning involved in the act of teaching). In particular, in an act of linguistic solidarity, I've decided to give Arabic another crack this year. The difficulty involved is substantial, I wonder which would be harder to learn as a non-native speaker, Arabic or English? Arabic has a fairly complex alphabet, in which a letter having up to four different shapes depending on where it is in a sentence. Further, I have also been hitting the books pretty hard for macroeconomics in particular, and also econometrics as well, as the pile of some twenty or so textbooks in front of me should indicate. I've been working on a regular paragraph or three on my MHEd dissertation, but that has fallen on the wayside a little bit for the first half of this week. Still, it hasn't been hard work, one way or another; Sunday was pretty much entirely dedicated to RPGs, with a compilation of more material to be sold, plus sessions of RuneQuest and Cyberpunk 2020 in succession. But apart from that it really has been much work and little play.
In another teaching forum, I have started teaching the intermediate English course at the University of Rojava. I find myself encountering what is a common issue for me among many of the other teachers where, by virtue of some network engineering knowledge, I am slightly horrified by the lack of consideration of whether various tools are appropriate for learners who are trying to take their classes by mobile 'phones with poor Internet connectivity. Some are using Google Docs (I suggested Etherpad), others are talking about extensive video-conferencing, and so forth. Now some audio is necessary for pronunciation experience and learning, but I'm trying to do as much as possible in plain-text. One hundred thousand words of plain-text are roughly a megabyte. Put it in a binary format and watch it grow. Save it as an audio file and it'll be ten times the size, at least. Give it video and, well, you get the picture (literally); "A picture is worth ten thousand words". But this is rarely experienced by the sender, it is the recipient that suffers. I always find it curious that there are so many who are advocates to access to technology and information are often those who do not practice what they preach, because it's a technical detail that they don't understand, but also don't try to understand.
When I haven't been teaching, I've been learning (and there's certainly plenty of learning involved in the act of teaching). In particular, in an act of linguistic solidarity, I've decided to give Arabic another crack this year. The difficulty involved is substantial, I wonder which would be harder to learn as a non-native speaker, Arabic or English? Arabic has a fairly complex alphabet, in which a letter having up to four different shapes depending on where it is in a sentence. Further, I have also been hitting the books pretty hard for macroeconomics in particular, and also econometrics as well, as the pile of some twenty or so textbooks in front of me should indicate. I've been working on a regular paragraph or three on my MHEd dissertation, but that has fallen on the wayside a little bit for the first half of this week. Still, it hasn't been hard work, one way or another; Sunday was pretty much entirely dedicated to RPGs, with a compilation of more material to be sold, plus sessions of RuneQuest and Cyberpunk 2020 in succession. But apart from that it really has been much work and little play.
