3 Feb 2023

Let’s get back to it. There’s catching up to do but in the meantime, I invite you to join me in the middle. Here are some thoughts from the past week. Reproducibility As part of my Interfaces seminar this term, I am having students do their projects around a process I called “hermeneutic reverse-engineering” (this …

Zoom Teaching: Omicron Edition (or, the ballad of Mr. Twinkles)

We are in what feels like semester 1 trillion of Zoom teaching. I don’t know about you, but I’m still talking with people about engaging students online. Here are a few things that have come up. It’ll be elementary for some readers but useful for others. This post is adapted from a conversation I was …

A Simple Guide to Hybrid Classes for Teachers

This is a guide to setting up audio and video for hybrid courses, especially seminars. This based on some research I did this summer: I asked friends who have genuine expertise in the area, and with my partner Carrie Rentschler and our friend and colleague Darin Barney, we ran some audio experiments with Darin on …

Iatrogenesis and Gratitude for Online Teaching

It’s been about 10 days since I spoke with my oncologist (yay, telemedicine, boo: overwork). My tumour marker is trending back down after a month back on The Drugs: just above 10. Everything else looks good. The visit to the cancer floor was par for the course. The place was more organized thanks to the …

Recording Your Lectures #4: techniques

This is the fourth in my series of posts on how to record your lectures. Tl;dr: a little focused practice up front will help a lot: spend some time experimenting with positioning the microphone, and how you address it. Record a bunch of short takes saying the same 1-2 sentences and then listen and see …