1/classroom

I had the good fortune to be required to take a computer science course as part of my undergraduate major at Brown University way back in 1992-1996. I would say that most students I meet today are no more proficient in programming that I was over 20 years ago, and many are much worse, which is insane. Could you imagine saying the same thing in 1992 (students with 1972-level computer skills)? No, you couldn’t. At Brown, I had an awesome class (CS4), it was hard and we worked a lot, and I know I can’t demand the same now, but at least I had a course in how to learn the thinking of programming and algorithms.

I realized something today: although Livescribe's software works well on both the Mac OS and on Windows, both installers require admin privileges. That means a student cannot install the software on a university cluster computer. I've run into this problem in the past, where I could not have students install free, open source software due to the requirement for admin access. Of course, there is no problem if the student has his or her own laptop or other computer, but I suppose it is not possible to assume this. Hopefully this problem is something I can discuss with the college instructional technology consultant when I meet with him this week or next. It is interesting, when I went to college way back in the old days, I didn't know anyone without a computer (I graduated in 1996). Some schools, notably Dartmouth, provided financial aid for the purchase of a computer, which was actually a requirement. I wonder what fraction of UM students owns his or her own computer. I will bring a spare laptop to class so that if anyone doesn't have access to a computer, we can do the syncing there. They can probably store their library file on a thumb drive, so that should work, but it will not be quite as cool as if they had their own laptop. Still, the recordings can be played directly from the pens, so, actually, a computer is not entirely necessary.

I have just over a week until classes start, and I'm not exactly sure what to do. If this were a normal class, I'd just prepare my lecture notes (I don't use powerpoint for upper-level courses), and I'd re-write them during the hour or so before class. Writing out the notes usually means I barely have to look at them during lecture, which I think makes me look like a lecture rockstar, and I make far fewer mistakes. This time, I'm going to introduce the course, and try to help everyone deal with their pens and notebooks. I will try to motivate the study of quantum mechanics by illustrating several examples of how quantum mechanics is front-and-center in modern chemistry. This will be TedTalks style, and I won't expect anyone to really remember anything, other than my enthusiasm. After all, I am lobbying them for their time, knowing full well that they have many other courses and obligations that are similarly vying for a slice of their attention pies.

Apparently, peer assessment can be highly accurate--with peer-assigned grades strongly correlating with "instructor" assigned grades. I will definitely try this. Teams will assess other teams, annotating the in-class work, which I can then review to assess the degree of correlation with my own assessment. 

Excellent Ted Talk by Daphne Koller. She is one of the founders of Coursera, and though most of her talk is about the online megacourse, she does stress many issues central to inverted classrooms.

Also, a sort of anti-worry. I wonder if any of the students will actually buy their own pens as they see how valuable they are?

There will also be an open-ended quiz question about their impressions of the topic and the way it was presented. These quizzes cannot be anonymous, but I am hoping that students will let their guard down a little since it is a web interface (we all know what kind of ridiculousness is on people's Facebook pages...). 

A couple years ago, my colleague, Eitan Geva, and his graduate student, Porscha McRobbie, put together a set of interactive demonstrations of key concepts in quantum mechanics. Since it's possible to link to the results of a search on the Wolfram site, I've put that link above. We will use these and other demos in the course. 

LiveScribe Echo smart pen—to help students document and then review their active breakout sessions, I was awarded some funding from the Instructional Technology Committee of the college of LS&A at UM to purchase 16 pens for my class of roughly 30 students. Smart pens will be a major component of the flipped class, and I will comment on how things are going on this tumblr. This picture also shows the text for the course Physical Chemistry: A Molecular Approach, by McQuarrie and Simon (ISBN 0-935702-99-7).

This tumblr will document some of my experiences. Hopefully others at UM and elsewhere will find them useful.