Sorry for dropping off the planet just as things were getting started. I had a good reason, let me tell you the story.

As I was prepping for running my new Christology course I ended up having a conversation with my friend Michael at church. I had been chatting with him about doing some teaching for a lay school of theology that he works with and I was completely unaware that he taught at Algonquin’s School of Advanced Technology  up the street from my home. My teaching background and former career are both in IT, which he did not know. So when that came out in a conversation he strongly urged me to apply for a couple permanent positions there as well as for sessional teaching. So I did.

Now I have a developer background, although I’ve worked in everything from traditional coding to security policy development and implementation, my training was really in software development. The course they offered me was for the BITNet programme with Carleton university. That’s awesome. But the course was NET1001 Computer Technology Basics. This is an introduction to computers for network specialist students that dealt with everything from the physical components of computers to the repair of those components. Cool, but not my specialty. So suddenly I found myself teaching two new courses and running new labs (so essentially three new courses in one semester). Yikes.

That’s when I dropped off a lot of things, hunkered down and prepped.

When I started prepping my course for Algonquin I was chatting with my good friend Doug, he’s a hard core developer, about teaching a hardware course. His comment was quite helpful: “I’m a developer, I don’t care if it is squirrels in the machine that make it work.” Really, as a developer there is a level of abstraction that you live in unless you are coding at a really low level, which many of us learned but is only relevant to a subset of development. I did mostly multimedia and web-based development in my career. And while I did have to know a fair bit about networking for the security work I did, I always learned it as I went along. This was uncharted waters for me, but I do love a challenge.

The other hurdle I ran into was that these courses at Algonquin are taught quite differently than university courses. In the university you have a set of course objectives to cover (fairly high level), maybe a paragraph description of how the last professor taught the course, and other than submitting a syllabus you are on your own. I’ve never had a syllabus rejected, in fact I think they just publish it right away. And the syllabus just has the basics – a short description, required and recommended texts, outline of assignments, and a breakdown of how the course will be marked. That’s pretty much it, although we’ve been adding specific learning objectives more recently in order to adhere to certain accreditation rules. Easy.

At Algonquin they gave me the slide deck for the last running (just the slides although by the look of them they were probably the notes as well) and a fairly detailed syllabus that I am not allowed to modify more than 10% in any given semester. I know that syllabus went through an approval process because it was kicked back to me to fix the marking schema because the rules had changed since it was last run. This syllabus even had a list of lectures, so things are pretty standard which makes sense, it is just not what I am used to.

My first step was going through the lectures and labs to make sure I could use what was there. Yeah, I didn’t think that would fly either. The slides were horrible actually. Text crammed onto a stock PowerPoint slide template and endless math??? Worse, the labs were written for different machines than I had for my students. I spent a day setting up a dozen identical lab machines for my students and learning the hardware. Then another day re-writing the first lab and then turned my focus to the lectures.

Now I am grateful that I had something for the course, even unusable slides, because it gave me a sense of the range of material to be covered as well as where the course got bogged down. There were four lessons on math and circuit logic, the syllabus had space for one. I knew from this that that previous students were having trouble grasping the concepts, and some merciful (possibly frustrated) professor had lingered there until the class was ready to move on. So I talked to Michael, he is the guy for BITNet at Algonquin, and asked what math was really needed. Then distilled it into a few things: Converting between base 10 math to base 2, base 16, and a wee bit of base 8; basic binary math; one’s and two’s compliment math; and circuit logic. I could leave aside things like the math behind floating point numbers, I could just teach that conceptually instead of mathematically. The second thing I did was figure out where they needed this math so that I could always ground the technical in the practical, because if you know you will need certain types of math you will put a bit more effort into understanding it.

I ended up reducing the math to two lessons: circuits and number systems in one lesson and the rest in the second. I gave them one lab that was online just doing the math (instantly evaluated with feedback) and then tested them right away on the material. It worked well. But I’m probably now boring you with the details. All in all I worked my ass off this semester but it was hugely rewarding.

bitsy the squirrel in Christmas tree

So now I am back in the IT world, teaching. I’m running Java (Android development) labs as well as Web development labs this coming semester and lecturing about God’s self-communication to humanity at the university. It should be a bit less insane, but still a full semester. (The last time I worked in Java it was 1.1 so I’ve been updating those skills big time!)

Oh, and I used the squirrel comment from Doug as a kind of running joke in my class. At the end of the semester a number of appreciative students gifted me a stuffed squirrel that I named BITsy. Here she is in our Christmas tree.

I’m hoping to post a bit more this semester, if I do not you will know what happened.