Time

For the first time in more than a decade, I'm not teaching this semester. At the moment, I'm still at 110% getting ready for the semester but, once things get started, I'm anticipating having some real time to work on interesting projects. I've been frustrated over the past few years that I've become so saturated at work that I don't have time to support people doing interesting things in the department. I've already gotten a few things started and more are on the way.

For Bioimaging, I installed the 5-star rating module and a view to show the highest rated images. The instructor wants to encourage students to look at one another's images and think about what contributes to quality -- this is a small way to get started. For Histology, I'm looking at supporting their adoption and use of CC licenses. I've been talking about CC for years, but this year people are starting to see the need.

When I was hired, my position did not actually include any teaching. I've volunteered for teaching in the department for several reasons. Partly, its been to contribute in particular places where I thought I thought I had something useful to offer: when we redesigned the intro labs, I thought it was important to actually teach the new activities and to model the style of teaching we were proposing. And when there were early faculty retirements that left a gap in the writing course, I saw an opportunity to make-over the class and use it as a vehicle for demonstrating to the other faculty ways to engage undergraduates in meaningful activity and to support the activity with technology. I also teach partly to demonstrate teaching on my CV, although that was never my primary motivation.

During the coming year, I'm hoping to propose teaching a new class on Biological Computing. I've been surprised that our students mostly are consumers of technology and rarely learn how to get under the hood and use the things that make technology really powerful for scientists. One faculty member pointed out that, if you can't program or use technology effectively, it limits the kinds of questions you can ask. Students need a better preparation in using technology at a basic level: to build scripts, use regular expressions, reformat data, and link analyses together. We do a disservice when our students have never even been exposed to this.