Let's talk about something other than distance learning and COVID-19. You know you've been doing something a long time when you've got legends. Over on my alumni mailing list JonAlf shared a web site showing off what his current students were doing in their computer graphics class. Somewhere in the thread, Con replied: Someone should put up a video of the fabulous and fantastically famous hand animation called FINGER.MDL. It dates from a little before my time, but stories elevated it to legendary status.

I didn't expect to read a Fred Wilson post on teaching online but that's what I found when I visited his blog this morning. Don't get me wrong - I suspect that Fred has the makings of a great teacher, it's just not what I expected to find. There have been many posts about education but I don't recall any about teaching or more specifically the art of teaching. I did find this post though which actually speaks to some of the thoughts today's post got churning.

Preamble I've never accepted a guest post before but when my friend and long time colleague JonAlf Dyrland-Weaver said he had something to say I was all for it. JonAlf's one of the best teachers I know - he started at Brandeis HS and has been at Stuy forever. Really sharp guy, great teacher, and really perceptive. When he has something to say it's 100% worth listening to. To JonAlf - since I know this is one of my blog posts you'll actually read - you should set up a blog of your own.

Hunter, like most other schools has gone remote. I taught my first two online classes on Thursday. Currently, I'm using Zoom for synchronous stuff and a mailing list and slack for async. There are still some missing pieces. When we're all together, it's easy to look at a student's work and talk them through issues. It's also easy to get students to work together, at least to a point. With everyone locked up in their own homes, real time collaboration is harder.

<figure class="z_image_center"><img src="/img/carrot-cake.jpg"/> </figure> Not my normal post but these are not normal times. Besides, this isn't the first recipe I've posted. I'm one of those that will, as long as supplies allow, bake and cook my way through our shelter in. Today I made Brazilian carrot cake. It's not quite the same as an American carrot cake as you'll see from the recipe below. First, carrot cake rules:

I taught my first two online classes this morning. The first one from 8:10 - 9:25 and the second from 9:45 - 11:00. Toolset: Zoom meetings Emacs (yes, not just an editor) First up Zoom. I think I want a video camera on policy. All my students should have laptops with working cameras. Some students might have issues with showing even a small bit of what's behind them so I don't want to make it required but I really wish they'd also have cameras on.

Hunter's classes are still on hiatus while we figure out how we're going to deliver instruction remotely. I have it easier than most. First, my students all get laptops as being part of the Daedalus program. This doesn't mean they have great internet access or access at all but it does mean they have a device that can run everything we need them to run. I don't yet know if they all have adequate internet access but I'm hoping it's either not an issue or one that we can easily figure out.

I maintain a couple of small simple web sites. One provides information about my undergraduate honors CS program and another that isn't live yet is a FAQ for my CS teacher certification program. Traditionally I would use ssh to connect to the host machine, fire up Emacs and edit the html files to update the sites. I always forget that with Emacs we can do better. One way is with Tramp Mode.

Austin Cory Bart tweeted this a little while ago. I don't always consider how much power I have as a faculty. Right now, I'd really like to expend that power to make my students understand that I don't want them focused on my course during a global pandemic. Not right now. Later, but not right now. — Austin Cory Bart (@AustinCorgiBart) March 13, 2020 While Cory's right about this it's also good to remember that as we're all going remote, focusing on our courses can be important for our students not merely due to content but in this time of uncertainty to have something to focus on to remind us of community and remind us of normal.

I've been seeing some tweets over the past couple of days about the wonders of online teaching. How it's at least as good or better than in person or how we should have been doing it all along. Rubbish. If you say that online is better than in person that says more about the (low) quality of your teaching than it does about the quality of online tech teaching resources.