It was a tough week with several heartbreaking stories from our students and instructors. I love trying to help and have felt frustration in not knowing how! I do appreciate the active listening and reaching out that has been happening. All is not lost or in the gutter (I’ll return to this later!), we received an email from a student today stating that they would like to take an incomplete to improve their project as they knew they didn’t put in enough effort. I am humbled and proud of their honesty and self motivation to learn and improve! We didn’t mention grades; we focused on creating projects and synthesizing what they learned in ways they felt comfortable and proud! What a nice email to end the course with… and cool case studies to review!
Another highlight of my day was talking to the wonderful people from the OFD, Libraries, DELTA, JMBE live, KBase, and Hypothes.is! Erin McKenney and I were in Liquid Margins to talk about social annotation in science. OFD/Libraries/DELTA taught me several new things including TopHat Community channels! JMBE Live is always unpredictable and fun… this week included Amada’s meltdown over a hamburger, discussion about applying for teaching jobs, and possibly a Microbrew and workshop. KBase group is always a delight: as one member said, I feel like we should be paying you for all the support, computing, and confidence you offer.
As I was feeling a little in the gutters about the struggles with courses and student difficulties, Taylor Quimby shared a podcast session we recorded earlier this year about microbial life in gutters and… Delftia! In combination with fantastic student-produced yeast cases that look beautiful on Gala, Delftia Team interviews and research, and a possible way to annotate in Spanish, there were nuggets of hope and a ton of appreciation for fun collaboration.
