Sometimes professional practices don't work well in the classroom and sometimes they do. One professional practice that does work well is code review - reading and reflecting on other peoples code. I've had my students do code reviews in the past but this time I did things differently. Here's what I did and here's how it went Two weeks ago my students completed a lab. The lab involved reading in a poorly indented C++ program and spit out a properly indented one.

Mark Guzdial's post the other day about direct isntruction struck a chord with me. Right up front, Mark said: The research evidence is growing that students learn better through direct instruction rather than through a discovery-based method, where we expect students to figure things out for themselves. Quite a surprise to the teachers who have been beaten over the head with "everything must be discovery" in recent years. At the end of the post, Mark writes:

A couple of weeks ago I took twenty four of my first year students up to Catskills Conf. As usual it was a great weekend. I particularly enjoyed this years talks. I found one talk particularly engaging. Jordan Koschei gave at talk titled Digital Terroir. Terroir refers to the natural envorinment in which a wine is produced - the ground, the climate, everything. It's why wine (and foods) produced in one location taste differently than the same things mamde elsewhere.

I use both org-mode and Google Calendar for scheduling. I like Google Calendar because: It's pretty universal so I can issue and accept calendar invites. It works well with my phone and other mobile devices. The rest of my family doesn't live in Emacs :-(. I prefer using org-mode beacuse: Emacs I prefer, for the most part, to control my data. I partially sync the two platforms. I've already talked about syncing Google Calendar and org-mode.

I was originally going to do a video on how I set things up so that I get an email every morning with my org-mode agenda but that's going to be something of an ordeal. I have to create a droploet on Digital Ocean, set up SyncThing and a mail server and lots of other things. I'll get to that video at some point but in the meantime I saw this thread on the Emacs subreddit.

Two weekends ago I took a group of my first year students up to Catskills Conf, an annual event that I describe as "light tech conference with a focus on diversity and inclusion meets summer camp." I've written about the event before if anyone's interested in more details. As in past years, Devorah ran her knitting for good project. In each of the first two years of the project, attendees of Catskills Conf learned how to know and collectively knit, crocheted and assembled a blanket for Project Linux which provides hand made blankets to children in crisis.

I just read this post by Bethany Crystal - Going off script. Bethany writes that while she normally essentially scripts important presentations, this time she went more off the cuff. It made me think about how I teach and a disturbing trend I've seen in CS education and education in general. I've never strictly used a script for teaching. When I started I did use very detailed lesson plans. Back then I was teaching math.

I can't believe that I haven't made a video since the beginning of summer!!! Part of the reason is that I haven't had any video ideas that have motivated me and the other reason is that the Fall is my busiest season. In any event, here's the latest installment. Take a look at how I use Emacs and more specifically org-mode for my day to day work. Sometimes I use the fancy power tools but to be honest, most of the time, I stick to the basics.

Parts 1 and 2 Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 In the first two parts of this set of posts I wrote about the motivation and design a question answering system that can answer "who" queries like "who played Spiderman" or "who shot John Lennon?" It's not perfect. When doing the Spiderman query, chances are the desired answer will be at or near the top of the list of most frequently appearing names but so will "Peter Parker.

Parts 1 and 3 Part 1 Part 3 Part 2 When we left off last time we used a search engine API to gather a whole bunch of documents with the term "played Spiderman" or "who played Spiderman." Now we have to process these documents to answer the question. Fortunately, the documents are basically just big strings of text. Since we're doing a "who" query we want to find all the names in all the documents.