Greg Wilson

A couple of days ago, I wrote about the excellent book What Works for Women at Work and said that it would be required reading if I ever taught another undergraduate software engineering class. I later tweeted:

I am putting together a short guide to creating effective lessons, and would be grateful for feedback. If you are comfortable with LaTeX and GitHub, you can read the source at https://github.com/gvwilson/10-lesson and submit issues or pull requests. If you prefer PDFs and email, you can download the current rough draft and send me comments.

I never got more than a couple of dozen pages into Sandberg’s Lean In, but I’ve just finished Williams and Dempsey’s What Works for Women at Work and loved it. Drawing on a ton of research and interviews, they put forward four concrete patterns, quoted below:

We are conducting a study to find out what questions people who teach computing would most like researchers to answer. If you teach programming, web design, or anything else that involves writing code of any kind, in classrooms or otherwise, at any level, we would like to invite you to take part.

Toby Hodges and I are pleased to announce the release of Version 0.2 (ish) of JavaScript versus Data Science. It’s still point-form notes, and there are still a lot of gaps and FIXMEs, but we hope it’s enough to give an idea of what we think researchers who already know a bit of Python or R ought to know about JavaScript. We would be very grateful for your feedback.

Today is my daughter’s first day at her new school—she’s very excited. Coincidentally, today is also my first day as a full-time member of staff at RStudio, where I will be a data scientist and professional educator, and I’m very excited too :-)

Thinking some more about my last post, I’ve realized why I am so often frustrated with academia: it’s high church and I’m low church. The terms were first used in the 1600s and 1700s as the Anglican Church was trying to figure itself out; both take scipture and salvation seriously, but adherents of the former emphasize formality and tradition while those in the latter camp are much less concerned with ritual and the authority of clergy. Research universities are one of the few high church institutions left in Western society; while I am not religious, I am definitely low church.

I recently read and enjoyed this paper:

I’m preparing a couple of talks based on Teaching Tech Together, and this seems like a useful topic to cover. Updated notes are below; I’d be grateful for feedback by email. (I’ve disabled comments on this site until the trolls find someone else to pester.)