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My Favorite Course
I find it really strange that my favorite course to teach just happens to be the course that I hated the most when I had to take it - computational theory. I thought that I would love to teach my favorite subject during my undergraduate and graduate studies. I am not sure why I have had such a change of heart. All I can do is be grateful that I have a job that has allowed me to teach such a variety of areas. I have basically taught every course in the undergraduate degree except computer organization and the very beginning programming course in a year and a half. (Which, by the way, is a very good method for studying for a qualification exam.) It also excludes courses that are covered by the Information Systems and Technology degrees like networking and databases, and senior level electives.
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Course Message Boards
When I was a student I never really used the course message boards. I never found any help or answers there. Right now I am taking a course/seminar at the University of Hawaii. As part of the course, we are required to participate on the message boards. It has been difficult for me to get really involved, mostly because no one else is really posting anything for me to comment on. I also hate commenting just to earn credit, which I have done a few times. Forcing people to comment on a message board seems to cheapen the conversation.
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Aaron Curtis - From Monologue to Dialog
Aaron Curtis from Indiana University came to BYU-Hawaii and did a presentation on his dissertation research. He is studying how much adding a whiteboard (Microsoft One Note) to a typical chatroom (Microsoft Meeting) can improve group understanding. Although his results are not complete, he says it does look promising.
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Researching Local Races
So I really wanted to know more about the local races here in Hawaii. I have been getting a lot of fliers in the mail and heard a lot on the radio/TV, but I wanted to research the facts for myself. Luckily, I found a web site at the Honolulu Advertiser that lets you see all of races, and view the candidates' responses to the issues. It also had links to their website if you wanted to find out more.
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Teaching Object-Oriented Programming
Since a lot of our students come here with very little computer experience, we had our beginning programming course split into two courses. The first half focused on variables and control structures, and the second half focused on object-oriented programming with C++. Some time last year we decided to teach a scripting language (Perl) in the first course due to it's simplicity -- hello world is only one line. We then created a two course series in object-oriented programming in Java. This would allow us to make sure our students had a solid object-oriented background and three classes to develop their programming and problem solving skills, something that takes a lot of practice.