A call for submissions to SciPy 2014
The deadline for SciPy 2014 appproaches! It’s a great, growing conference, with an emphasis on the following topics (espeically the first two this year):
- Education
- Geospatial data
- Astronomy and astrophysics
- Bioinformatics
- Geophysics
- Vision, Visualization, and Imaging
- Computational Social Science and Digital Humanities
- Engineering
There is also a Diversity Goal. Anyone up for organizing something for women, people of color, or other under-represented groups?
Abstract submissions are due this Friday, but if that’s a deal-breaker, we will probably be able to accomodate later submissions (feel free to contact me or Katy Huff about it).
MOOCs this week
And now, a selfish topic request this week: the D-Lab is looking at becoming a resource for MOOC (1) data on campus. I’d invite folks who are engaged with online courseware to talk about what they’ve been doing. This could include things that Raymond is doing with the new bCourses system (our campus course management portal). Or particularly folks who’ve been working with EdX systems!
(1) MOOC = “Massive Open Online Course” You’ve probably heard of some of them, like Kahn Academy, EdX (& our local BerkeleyX), Codecademy, Coursera, etc.
A place for beginners
Lastly, please invite folks who are beginners. The idea is for the Python Workers’ Party to support the development of our community! People can treat it like a “study hall” to follow a MOOC or book and ask for help if they get stuck, or ask for help with their projects.
What happened
Raymond talked about his experiences with bCourses (which runs on Canvas, which is produced by Instructure). He was initialy motivated to do automated grading, but it’s been harder to do than to just have his TA do it.
So, he’s been working on being able to do something like clickers during his class, although some of the response features of Canvas are still in beta. I.e., students can provide answers to questions during class, and then you can programmatically access what they respond.
There’s a REST API, and Raymonds working on a library to work with it. Let him know if you want to join the effort!