We just lost a colleague in my department (http://piotrrudnicki.blogspot.ca/). He fought intensely, but for far too short a time, the disease that, in Greek, we do not name; we just say the “cursed disease” (η επαρατος αθενεια) afraid to invoke its name because just to say the name means to touch the [...]
This afternoon I attended Maria Klawe’s keynote for the UoA’s Festival of Teaching 2011 (https://provost.sitecore.ualberta.ca/en/FestivalofTeaching2011.aspx), on “Teaching Trials and Triumphs”. How interesting an accident to have this inspiring female role model here on the eve of the International Women’s Day!
The message of her keynote was simple: there are four important ingredients in becoming [...]
I have failed… no question about it; two weeks gone by and no update; yet another resolution who did not stand up the test of time; but never mind, such is life; one simply has to recognize failure, concede the battle and keep trying, imagining a future victorious conclusion to the current war waged… (I [...]
I was interviewed as a “Senior Technical Woman” by the Anita Borg Institute and the content of this profile can be found at http://anitaborg.org/news/archive/senior-technical-woman-profile-eleni-stroulia-professor-and-nsercicore-industrial-research-chair-university-of-alberta/.
This past weekend I hosted the UCOSP code sprint at the University of Alberta. About 40 students and 7 project mentors came here for an intensive weekend-long session of software development.
UCOSP – the Undergraduate Capstone Open-Source Project – is a distributed software-engineering course that brings together undergraduate students across Canada (and sometimes North [...]
I, and, I know, many of my colleagues too, fret over designing our project-based courses. Courses in the computing-science sub-disciplines within the generally construed “systems/applications” area, like databases, software engineering, operating systems and architecture, frequently use projects.
I am a strong believer in learning-by-doing (the fundamental principle of constructivist pedagogical theories) and learning in teams [...]
I have had two interesting (and rather intense) professional experiences recently, which made me say to myself a few times “the Devil is in the Details”. And I wanted to reflect (i.e., think aloud) upon these experiences and so I went and looked at Wikipedia where the expression comes from. And there, I found that [...]
This term I decided to do something risky: namely I decided to give a “practically” real project to my undergraduate software-engineering class, CMPUT 301, based on the City of Edmonton’s (CoE) open data.
The CoE is at the forefront of open-data initiative among Canadian cities, with Nanaimo, Vancouver and Toronto. It has launched a broad [...]
It is the end of the Fall term. My final exam is tomorrow at 9 and after I have gone through the mad rush of marking them before Christmas and assigning grades, vacations will be here, which means one thing: I need to make up my graduate course next term!
I have taught this course [...]
Lately, I have been thinking a lot about mentors and mentoring. Several unrelated events have conspired to keep the subject relatively prominent in my thinking stack for some time, and I started drafting this just around Thanksgiving time but I did not make it on time. But it has simmered enough, and I have now [...]
