Clik here to view.
“You Will Never Amount to Anything!”
I am currently reading “When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin” by Mick Wall. I won’t go into much of the detail of the book but the message presented around the four members of the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Core Values of Education and Why We Have To Oppose “Pranking”
I’ve had a lot of time to think about education this year (roughly 400 hours at current reckoning) so it’s not surprising that I have some opinions on what constitutes the key values of education. Of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Taught for a Result or Developing a Passion
According to a story in the Australian national broadcaster, the ABC, website, Australian school children are now ranked 27th out of 48 countries in reading, according to the Progress in International...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Leading the Innovation Charge: Research and Teachers (NESTA Report on Digital...
I’m currently reading the NESTA report “Decoding Learning: The Proof, Promise and Potential of Digital Education” and the report talks about ways of learning with technology and sources of innovation....
View ArticleClik here to view.
When Does Failing Turn You Into a Failure?
The threat of failure is very different from the threat of being a failure. At the Creative Innovations conference I was just at, one of the strongest messages there was that we learn more from failure...
View ArticleClik here to view.
John Henry Died
Every culture has its myths and legends, especially surrounding those incredible individuals who stand out or tower over the rest of the society. The Ancient Greeks and Romans had their gods, demigods,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Pressganging Story into Service: The Dickens, you say?
“Marley was dead” and so begins Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” which has been reprinted and remade so many times it is near impossible to avoid the cultural impact of this work in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Emperor’s New Clothes Redux: The Sokal Hoax
Making way in a new area of scholarship can be challenging for many reasons, no matter how welcoming the community. One of the reasons for this is that there are points in our life where we are allowed...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Adelaide Computing Education Conventicle 2012: “It’s all about the people”
acec 2012 was designed to be a cross-University event (that’s the whole point of the conventicles, they bring together people from a region) and we had a paper from the University of South Australia:...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Thinking about teaching spaces: if you’re a lecturer, shouldn’t you be...
I was reading a comment on a philosophical post the other day and someone wrote this rather snarky line: He’s is a philosopher in the same way that (celebrity historian) is a historian – he’s somehow...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Thanks for the exam – now I can’t help you.
I have just finished marking a pile of examinations from a course that I co-taught recently. I haven’t finalised the marks but, overall, I’m not unhappy with the majority of the results. Interestingly,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Expressiveness and Ambiguity: Learning to Program Can Be Unnecessarily Hard
One of the most important things to be able to do in any profession is to think as a professional. This is certainly true of Computer Science, because we have to spend so much time thinking as a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
SIGCSE 2013: Special Session on Designing and Supporting Collaborative...
Katrina and I delivered a special session on collaborative learning activities, focused on undergraduates because that’s our area of expertise. You can read the outline document here. We worked...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Kids are Alright (within statistical error)
You may have seen this quote, often (apparently inaccurately) attributed to Socrates: “The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Time to Work and Time to Play
I do a lot of grounded theory research into student behaviour patterns. It’s a bit Indiana Jones in a rather dry way: hear a rumour of a giant cache of data, hack your way through impenetrable...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Continuum of Ethical Challenge: Why the Devil Isn’t Waiting in the...
This must be a record for a post title but I hope to keep the post itself shortish. Years ago, when I was still at school, a life counsellor (who was also a pastor) came to talk to us about life...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Another semester, more lessons learned (mostly by me).
I’ve just finished the lecturing component for my first year course on programming, algorithms and data structures. As always, the learning has been mutual. I’ve got some longer posts to write on this...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Let’s not turn “Chalk and Talk” into “Watch and Scratch”
We are now starting to get some real data on what happens when people “take” a MOOC (via Mark’s blog). You’ll note the scare quotes around the word “take”, because I’m not sure that we have really...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The defining question.
There has been a lot going on for me recently. A lot of thinking, a lot of work and an amount of getting involved in things because my students trust me and will come to me to ask questions, which...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Skill Games versus Money Games: Disguising One Game As Another
I recently ran across a very interesting article on Gamasutra on the top tips for turning a Free To Play (F2P) game into a Paying game by taking advantage of the way that humans think and act. F2P...
View Article
