CS/CIS December Department Meeting

We'll be having our December CS/CIS Department meeting on Friday (December 10) at 8:00 AM in the John Clark Computing Center. I'll get a room when I get to school. I'll also try to pick up some coffee and muffins, but that depends on when I get up.

Here are the agenda items that I have so far:

• Office 2010, Windows 7 plans for curriculum and in Computing Center
• Scheduling and enrollment issues for our department
• Curriculum and Organization Issues
• The PSLO Assessment Debacle
• Oracle Classroom Presentations: any experiences or ideas?
• Facilities Committee and requesting space.

See you all there

The First Day of Summer

Summer is wonderful; we should have summer all year long. We shouldn't have to work either, although I did a little of that this morning.

OCC Meetings

Pam B. and I are officially retired as OCC's online faculty coordinators, but our replacement hasn't yet been picked. This morning I biked over for a 10 AM meeting with Glen, Pam and Ann, to work on a few interview questions to ask next week.

A Little Reading

On the way back from school, I stopped by the library, dropped off some movies, and picked up a half-dozen new books. When I got home, I fixed a little bit of guacamole, and finished off a family-sized package of restaurant-style Tostitos, while reading Fangland, a story about vampires attacking a 60-minutes style television show. It was pretty obscure, and I had a hard time following the plot. Even after a few re-readings, I'm not really sure how it all came out. The guacamole was great, though.

After Kathy got home, I took Richard Clarke's latest novel, Breakpoint, which is a story about a terrorist attack on the Internet, down to the Newport Pier, and sat and read along with an apple fritter and a large coffee. It was perfect; sunny, not too hot, a nice south swell starting up. On the way home, I stopped off at Chronic Tacos for dinner. I almost don't want to go on vacation. I need to get back on a diet, though.

Planning for CS 111

Later in the afternoon, I laid out the schedule for my summer CS 111 class, and started modifying the JavaScript from the videos for my online class. I'm going to put them on CSJAVA and use them as supplemental lecture material for my class, even though, technically, it's not an online class. Here's how I'm going to use them.

In my traditional CS 111 classes, the students listen to me for an hour, and then I assign two hours of homework based on that hour of lecture. This summer, I'm going to try inverting that, and assigning the lecture as homework, (using the videos from my online class), and spending my class time giving demonstrations and having the students work on projects and exercises.