After the game is before the game

So the semester is almost over. I end with a much bigger base of new slides from recent lectures that will probably make the future lecturing task much easier. I had never the chance to use a former presentation 1:1 for a new one: there is always a need for update and improvement – but at least as long as there is improvement I think lights are green!

So the I’ll embrace a motto from a german soccer coach: »After the game is before the game!« – So what’s next in teaching?

First of all I am looking back over five years of teaching with more than one new seminar concept per semester. Almost any seminar could be repeated with new participants without loosing actuality. On the contrary, being able to build upon prior work seems to be an invitation on its own to do so. I think it will strengthen the research focus and also provide another level of certainty to me and to the students.

Secondly I still have a number of topics “in store” that could be adressed or haven’t yet been extended beyond the initial sketch for a seminar.

Weblogging and teaching – status

I have written about my experiences with weblogs as a tool for teaching. Still most of what I said still remains valid thinking – even though I didn’t invest enough energy to move onward from that stage. I am still empowered by the positive feedback. I always opposed forcing students to blog. Now I see weblogs gaining popularity here and so I hope the overall trend may eventually become stronger and maybe students are going to pick it up even without me introducing them to weblogging. I don’t know – but I think this way around it’s much better. Until then I use the seminar weblogs as publishing channels. Even without much student activity it seems to be the weblogs are a simple way to filter the web and provide essential resources to students. But with around 25 active weblogs I am reaching a limit somehow. So there needs to be some thinking on my behalf how to re-use all those news items published. We need some sort of aggregator similar to what kCollector of eVectors ist doing.