A Week of Learning and Teaching
May. 27th, 2022 10:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tcpipThe past several days have been almost entirely dominated by scholarly pursuits, the most important (at least personally) was handing in my MHEd thesis on Monday; I've already mentioned this on Facebook with some rather lovely comments and recognition from friends. Assuming I pass that will be the end of two and half years of studying this subject, with numerous essays on the nature of advanced technical education, public economics and systems engineering, and university leadership. I am very thankful for those who engaged in the qualitative interviews for the thesis and also to Kayo who really provided superb insight and experience on the subject matter and recruiting of subjects. I honestly could not have ended up with the thesis that I did without their support and participation. Not one to let something like a thesis stop me, I have also been working on my next essay for my GradDip in Applied Psychology which, with no sense of temporal irony, is an experiment in qualitative interview techniques. That degree should be finished in the middle of next year.
Apropos, coming up tomorrow I am giving a talk at the Sea of Faith in Australia on Saturday at 2pm on "Is Moral Reasoning Innate or Learned?"; contact me for a Zoom link. The following day is also the Annual General Meeting of the Victorian Secular Lobby, an organisation I helped found in 2010, and that I have been president for most of this time. I will be standing down from this role at the meeting and there is the possibility that the organisation will disband; that will be up to the members and whether someone else takes up the role of the convenor. Despite this possibility, I think the organisation did pretty well over the years; we had stated objectives and we pretty much saw most of them actually come to pass. The biggest issues remain the School Chaplaincy project and the automatic status of religious bodies as charities.
Work has also been a site of some teaching and learning this week as well. For the past two days I have been conducting workshops on Linux, HPC job submission, and shell scripting as is typical every month or so. Further, however, the Cultural Working Group hosted one of our regular researcher presentations, this time with Associate Professor Adrian Bickerstaffe from the Centre for Epidemiology and Biostatistics discussing how Research Computing Services has provided assistance in the study participant engagement, application hosting, management of very large datasets, and genomic analyses. It is this sort of thing that gets me up in the morning; working with supercomputers is great and all with plenty of interesting technical challenges, but knowing that they are used to improve and save lives is my primary motivator.
Apropos, coming up tomorrow I am giving a talk at the Sea of Faith in Australia on Saturday at 2pm on "Is Moral Reasoning Innate or Learned?"; contact me for a Zoom link. The following day is also the Annual General Meeting of the Victorian Secular Lobby, an organisation I helped found in 2010, and that I have been president for most of this time. I will be standing down from this role at the meeting and there is the possibility that the organisation will disband; that will be up to the members and whether someone else takes up the role of the convenor. Despite this possibility, I think the organisation did pretty well over the years; we had stated objectives and we pretty much saw most of them actually come to pass. The biggest issues remain the School Chaplaincy project and the automatic status of religious bodies as charities.
Work has also been a site of some teaching and learning this week as well. For the past two days I have been conducting workshops on Linux, HPC job submission, and shell scripting as is typical every month or so. Further, however, the Cultural Working Group hosted one of our regular researcher presentations, this time with Associate Professor Adrian Bickerstaffe from the Centre for Epidemiology and Biostatistics discussing how Research Computing Services has provided assistance in the study participant engagement, application hosting, management of very large datasets, and genomic analyses. It is this sort of thing that gets me up in the morning; working with supercomputers is great and all with plenty of interesting technical challenges, but knowing that they are used to improve and save lives is my primary motivator.
