CfAO PDP Conference

The CfAO's PDP was a very long but intensely productive conference. We had 23 returning and 27 new people, mostly 2nd to senior grad-students and a few post-docs. I was a design-team leader this time. Basically, I'm redesigning one day's worth of activity in a week-long short-course (AMSC). There's 15 UH-Manoa and Maui CC engineering soph & juniors that will be getting summer internships with local high-tech companies or universities. Several of us will be teaching the week-long course. The last day needed re-designing. This conference is basically like "lesson-planning" but for lab-type hands-on *inquiry* activities. Inquiry is actually a buzzword for a new type of teaching (Wikipedia: 1, 2). I was way behind on sleep most of the time and managed to meet a number of good people. Anne's nickname of meta-Dave was very useful - we spend a lot of time discussing social and community aspects of learning as well as metacognition (learning how you yourself learn) and other related things (training to be a better leader by watching yourself and being watched by shadowers in various leading roles). It's really neat....

Anyways, the fun stuff was that I got to be MC again with Jerome at the closing ceremony and we had a really fun time.