The 2022 academic year came to an end. From a professional point of view, it was great to graduate so many students and it felt good when I realized how well all those little scripts I made years ago worked well. Yes, you read it right: scripts. The thing about management is that usually there is no such thing as one system doing it all. Information is often managed in one system but the reports and data analysis have to Read More …
Author: Anderson Passos
ICT in Education: Final Test
The first time we prepare a course is always difficult. Is this text appropriate? Are students going to engage in the discussion? If they don’t understand, what other examples can I give them? The preparation is always plagued with doubts. Luckily for me, I got an amazing group this time and things went much better than one could expect. We had only eight lessons in the semester (1 credit course), but every lesson was full of discussion and questions. It Read More …
Poster Presentations
Today we had our poster presentations. All students submitting a Senior Thesis (or graduation thesis) have to do it. I was very happy to see massive attendance from faculty and from junior students. To be honest, we were not expecting so many visitors, and the rooms felt crowded at times. Well, with only 25 minutes for presentations and all windows open, I believe we did a good job keeping it safe in times of corona. To all students who participated Read More …
Research Ethics from 1st year?
Every year in my ICT class we have a mini research project where students create a questionnaire and interview their colleagues. This year I had a big surprise when I found out that some students were using Google forms to create the questionnaire and posting it on social media in order to get more answers. So far, so good. The problem with this approach was that, due to the educational nature of the task, we are skipping many steps there Read More …
Taking the day off
We had classes canceled in the morning today, and I decided to take the whole day off in order to catch up with test corrections. I was sure this would be a relaxing day… but oh boy… It is really sad to see that some students could not do anything asked in the test. My partners and I are really working hard explaining, going around the classroom to check students’ doubts… and still … looking at the tests, it is Read More …
Working on the Senior Thesis
I am not sure how common this is in the other universities but here, our students have to write a final senior thesis before they can graduate. Of course, in English. This year I got some students who, for different reasons, could not take their first class on how to write their thesis. As usual most of them were assigned to me, so teaching this class what good for two reasons: first, students have to learn the basics before writing Read More …
Old vs New
I have always been a person who favors new things over used ones. There are mainly two reasons for that. The first reason is that usually the price difference is not that big so, why buy something that someone else was using? The second reason is that you cannot check how the previous person “treated” the thing. Specially in IT, it is often the case that you will find out something does not work only when you need to use Read More …
Online Security Presentation
It was a rainy Sunday yesterday and there I was, in downtown Miyazaki, to do a presentation about online security. This is not my usual type of talk, and to be honest, it was quite challenging. The audience was small (less than 20 people) with ages ranging from 20 to 60 (as far as I can tell). I was not really sure about how much the attendees knew about technology so creating the presentation made me a little bit nervous. Read More …
About students and horses
Oh my… it looks like a joke, but the last time I posted something here was… an year ago!!! I (and everyone else around me) have been very busy preparing for the new academic year. A new curriculum, graduate school prep, and of course all the normal work that we do at the college everyday running in parallel. It is really interesting how life happens and, suddenly, posting on my personal page looses its priority. In 2021 I worked really Read More …
Time to catch up
The weekend is over and this is the result of not checking the emails for three days. It might be time to reply some emails.