A very good week this week, in that I was only in work for 3 days, but still accomplished a lot. Through some convenient meetings I’ve managed to get a whole mess of projects lined up for the next year or so, and I came out of the week on Friday very eager to get cracking on things.

Monday 8.5.17

This week started with our Assessment and Feedback focused teaching ‘away day’, which wasn’t really an away day because we didn’t go anywhere, but which was incredibly useful nonetheless. Put together by myself, Andrew (DoT) and Helen (A&F lead), the event was attended by a good number of teaching staff within the school and allowed us to spend the day thinking about our teaching practice and the way that we do things within COMSC.

We took a look at the upcoming Cardiff University commitments and principles around assessment and feedback, and considered how well our assessment lines up with some of the ideas within this draft of the document. A surprising amount of assessment within the school is some variation of ‘build this project in language X using paradigm Y and assess how well it performs in terms of property Z, then write a report on it’, and it turns out that trying to work out how well that corresponds with a 4,000 word essay is quite a challenge. Discussion around this topic also highlighted how the National Software Academy have done a good job of using larger projects as assessment for a number of different modules, something that we could do more in the BSc Computer Science, as currently there are a lot of (too many?) larger assessments within each module. Combining these makes a lot of sense - for instance why not have a software project in the first year that gets assessed for both the ‘OO Development in Java’ and the ‘Developing Quality Software’ modules, rather than a separate project in each module?

In a session that I chaired we looked at Learning Outcomes of our modules - with a particular focus on how well they match with assessment or are assessable. We also looked at trying to get a handle on the year level learning outcomes for BSc Computer Science to make sure they are up to date and relevant.

The final session of the morning saw us covering exam feedback, and how we can provide this to students in a useful fashion. The afternoon saw some discussion around a few different projects that aim to help give visibility to the workload that assessment gives to both staff and students. One project from a team in the University seemed almost useful, but focused too much on deadlines, with little regard to start dates, duration and effort. So, as a tool to help prevent deadline bunching it was great, but to actually monitor workload it was less than great. George is working on a project as part of the Cardiff Futures project that promises to deliver what I think is needed (essentially automating the creation of the coursework timetables that we delivered at the beginning of this year), and hopefully that will be taken up by central University, as effective communication of this information is a key part of helping students and staff manage their workload.

Tuesday 9.5.17

After a fairly involved and in-depth Monday, Tuesday was a day of playing catch up with admin and sorting things out before my week off next week. First things first was my PDR. This was my first PDR, having come off probation last September a few months early because I was fed up of not getting paid enough. I thought it had been a pretty decent year, and Andrew seemed to agree. I agreed some interesting objectives for the next year that were basically things I’ve been wanting to do for the last few months, and are all things I’m looking forward to getting stuck in to over the next 12 months.

In the afternoon I met with a few students who are interested in our summer CUROP project doing some analysis and visualisation of the Creative Cardiff data, which was fun as it’s always good to meet with interested and engaged students who are keen to get involved with research projects. Still got a couple more students to meet with, but hopefully we’ll have someone for this project relatively soon.

I also met up with m’colleague on Tuesday afternoon and we did some more planning for the next few months. The textbook we’re writing is coming along, and we’ve identified an opportunity to get some excellent input to the book from the attendees of the Data and Computational Journalism Conference we’re organising in Dublin. We discussed the upcoming intake of students for the next academic year, and the progress our current students are making on their dissertation project pitches. We also solidified our publication plans for the next six months - with a couple of decent journal papers in the pipeline alongside a couple of decent conference presentations it’s looking like a strong finish to the year.

Wednesday 10.5.17

I took a day off today to have a sneaky date with my wife for her birthday (which isn’t really until later this month). We went off to the theatre to watch OmiDaze doing Romeo and Juliet, which was very enjoyable, then to a bar in the bay for lunch which was very tasty (food) and very average (beer).

Thursday 11.5.17

Worked from home today ploughing through the CMT212 marking. The quality this year is incredibly high, and I’m very pleased with how the students have analysed and visualised their data. I’ve had a few students submitting data analysis in R, a lot of Python, and then the majority of the visualisation so far has been some very good D3 code. If the standard keeps up across the whole cohort when I get round to marking the rest I’ll be very happy indeed.

Friday 12.5.17

Nada. Day off again (2 in 1 week!) packing and preparing for the week off. Mad day rushing around with Arthur collecting parcels, packing bags, and trying to optimise the fitting of bags into the car boot so that we could get both ourselves and the luggage in the car at the same time.