The day start off with what turned out to be one of my favorite presentations of the conference – a talk by Steven Greenlaw of University of Mary Washington. He walked us through a course he taught last year on the 2008 financial crisis. The crux of the presentation was challenging us to think about (1) what learning environments should look/be like today, and (2) the possibility that we should be teaching the way we practice our disciplines. He spent this course (a seminar in international finance) teaching only a little bit, and mostly having students read on their own, then come into class to teach, interact, and discuss. Grades were based on engagement and insight, and some of the students agreed to continue the class project through the summer – after they had graduated! – so that they could produce the final outcome of the project (availiable at www.financialcrisis2008.umwblogs.org). Awesome stuff.

So my initial response (other than very much enjoying the presentation) was, as usual, something to the effect of “that’s great, but would it work in the sciences?” I think that it could, if not in the exact same format it was carried out in the economics class. There were several features of this class that I think we’d do well to apply to more of our courses regardless of the content:

1. Working on a current issue in the field (for economics, the recession was great; for neuroscience, maybe we could spend time working on a class project looking into the legitimacy (or lack thereof) of using fMRI “lie detection” as evidence in court cases)

2. Running class more like training for practitioners.

3. Creating a genuine product as the driving force for the class

There are some potential issues as well, including:

1. Assessment

2. Covering course content

3. Varying student motivation (especially in a community college setting)

But overall, this presentation actually gave me something I could consider implementing in my own courses! Yay!

Next up was the session I thought I’d like the best, entitled Computational Thinking, by Jeannette Wing, the asst. director of CISE and NSF, as well as faculty at Carnegie Mellon University. First of all, for a person as smart as she is, she was remarkably personable and clear, and, even better, she spoke with a lot of enthusiasm about a topic that could certainly have turned out to be dull as toast. Anyway, her “grand vision” is that by the end of the 21st century, essentially everyone will be engaged in what she refers to as “computational thinking.” She went on to (thankfully) give us some definitions; she defined “computing” as the automation of abstractions, and “computational thinking” as “the process of abstraction.” This all sounded, well, very abstract to me, but after lots of examples about computational thinking in other disciplines, I felt like I was getting it. Unfortunately, when I was asked about it later that evening, I found I had sort of lost it. Oh well.

So overall – favorite session of Wednesday: the Card Sort task (which I’ll most likely try to use/write about again in more detail at some point); favorite session of Thursday: Steven Greenlaw’s presentation I talked about above. I really enjoyed the time I was able to spend down there and all the lovely people I met!