I had never heard the term “flipped” teaching, so I wanted to make a note of it, via Mel Chua, who says:

my classmate Nikitha’s project for pedagogy class: redesign Purdue’s MATLAB-heavy intro-to-engineering first-year class to use a “flipped” model – view lectures at home, work on homework in class where there’s help available. (Mind you, this doesn’t mean they’ll implement it; she’s a TA, not the prof. Still, it’s cool.)

Flipped teaching is one of the ideas that could help sustain and justify small-group teaching as highly scaleable online learning becomes feasible and productive; MSNBC notes that, “Apparently even the Stanford students preferred watching the classroom lectures as online videos on their own time.” They report that 85-90% of Thrun’s in-person AI class at Stanford AI had stopped attending by the end of the class. Imagine Thrun’s shock: “These are students who pay $30,000 a year to Stanford to see the best and brightest of our professors, and they prefer to see us on video?”

In-class homework is not a new idea: the success of Berkeley’s Math/Science Workshop and UT’s Emerging Scholars Program (which I TA’d back in the days when I taught calculus) was based on providing challenging problems and group study support in class.

Nor is avoiding lecture: It would be interesting to compare the underlying philosophy of flip teaching to St. John’s, where, rather than listening lectures, students discuss the source materials in small groups. It was a wonderful way to learn!

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Sarah Seastone circa 2003

I never met her, but she was part of my life for almost a decade.

Sarah Seastone was the editor, archivist, and Web designer for the Math Forum. She helped numerous teachers create early webpages about topics like tessellations and fractals, and taught many of them about the Web. Here’s a definition she gave of the Web.

Sarah was a great encouragement to me when I started answering questions for Dr. Math, as an undergraduate in the mid 90′s. She always knew lots of resources, and was always happy to share them. A thread about women in math is typical. While I pressed “send”, Sarah contributed ideas. She knew and kept track of resources throughout the world.

Sarah was one of the first people I knew who really knew how to search the Web. Just about everything in the Dr. Math archives of that era was culled by Sarah as worth saving. As Dr. Math’s archivist, she must have read through a lot of the email sent by the project.

She also wrote many, many archived Dr. Math answers herself.

I knew her through email, sarah@forum.swarthmore.edu, and am sad to say I never met her in person.

Sarah Seastone circa 1965

Images from http://mathforum.org/~sarah/ and http://www.hemlockgorge.org/hgs65/HGSTeachers.htm

Part of Ada Lovelace Day 2009. Read about more women in technology.