I had the privilege of speaking at the Santa Rosa March for Science in April. Here is some coverage by the local media. I have included my prepared notes although my spoken remarks deviate somewhat from them.

It is encouraging to see so many folks here to support and defend …

I used the nltk ngram functions to pull the common phrases from a group of student essays. I also filtered out the commonly used words (stopwords) from the text body. This ended up being a fairly quick exercise thanks to the popularity of nltk and some stack overflow posts. I'm …

Quantitative argument is fundamental to the construction of a healthy democracy. Quantitative argument is the presentation of an argument and claims that are supported by quantitative evidence and analysis and are important in science, policy, and engineering. As an educator, I work to cultivate these skills in students and demonstrate …

The higher education system teaches students to reason and consider evidence since these skills are fundamental to constructing a thriving democracy. While I am convinced of the need for this approach, the effectiveness of fake news stories and public skepticism of valid scientific findings such as climate change suggest that …

Teachers are expected to incorporate technology in their classrooms and teaching but have good reason for skepticism. Many teachers are providing excellent learning environments without using the latest digital tools. The benefits of technology are sometimes presented as self-evident, reinforcing our skepticism. Teachers resistant to using technology are likely to …

This post describes a teaching technique I am revising that illustrates the use of hybrid distributed and automated feedback to focus instructor time on high-value feedback. When I began teaching at Sonoma State University in 2013, I used the techniques I experienced in the classroom: lecture, individual homework, and individual …

High-quality feedback delivered promptly is an important part of undergraduate learning but providing this feedback is difficult in larger classes. Instructors respond to larger class sizes by either increasing their workload or by reducing the frequency or the quality of their assessment. The strategy of instructors increasing their workload reaches …

For large classes with many assignments, entering grades can be time-consuming and error-prone. I started prototyping a very simple app that would allow a grader to quickly select the student and assignment in a text box interface and then write the grade to a spreadsheet. One time savings comes from …

I'm frequently discouraged by the level of debate on climate from some corners of our democracy. Snowballs on the senate floor come to mind. It is even more disturbing when some of our most thoughtful scientists and policy makers treat some decisions as black and white. I see this in …

I suspect that most of us assume that there is a linear relationship between the time we spend working and the amount we get done. I propose that this actually breaks down and at some point we damage our productivity by working beyond our optimum. Here is my oversimplified model …

Here is a problem that I was unprepared for as I began my teaching career. Students don't always use their calculators correctly, and absent videotaping their keystrokes, they have no way of getting feedback. This means that the reproducibility of their result is in question. I'm moving toward using scripting …

The first blog I created was in raw HTML in the late 1990's. After a long hiatus, I started blogging again on Tumblr. After a while, the interface to Tumblr started to feel inefficient and limiting. I discovered static blogging tools and decided to try them out. Since I write …

Our demand prediction research project in Indonesia uses a 1200-household survey as part of the data collection. The data is collected by UNCEN students using electronic tablet computers and the OpenDataKit platform. The data is stored on the Ona platform for analysis and retrieval.

In any survey, there are entries …

What should an undergraduate energy curriculum focus on? This blog post asks questions about what energy education should look like and outlines my thinking as I consider the curriculum I am teaching at Sonoma State University. The Department of Energy has started to develop an Energy 101 curriculum for a …

I'm looking forward to teaching our department's class Computer Applications in Energy Management and Design. My plan is to teach students the most general concepts that will allow them to learn any software package. This class needs to prepare folks with an interest in modeling buildings, performing renewable energy financial …

Part of my growth as a new professor is broadening my focus outward from the classes I teach to the degree curriculum and the department curriculum. The trick to this is the many constraints that a professor or a department faces. One of the most important constraints is the financial …

The Provost's office at Sonoma State University makes funds available for research equipment purchases. I used this opportunity to propose the purchase of a unit to measuring temperature, humidity, carbon dioxide, and sound level. Netatmo makes a very convenient to use device that posts the information over the internet and …

I've been thinking about the link between research reproducibility and the way students perform the work in their problem sets. The emphasis in problem sets and grading is the presentation of the correct answer. Many instructors demand some clarity in the methods used to provide the result but my suspicion …

This semester I have funding for two students help with a beyond the grid research project I started this summer. This funding is provided by Sonoma State University through the Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activities Program and I'm grateful for the support. The goal is to create an affordable and …

This semester, I'm teaching three classes: ENSP 200 Global Environmental Issues, ENSP 202 Quantitative Methods, and ENSP 438 Small-scale Energy Sources. ENSP 200 is new to me, but I taught ENSP 202 and ENSP 438 last year.

ENSP 200

For the Global Environmental Issues class, I'm going to take an …

A few months ago, I wrote about the way I use Markdown, a simple syntax for content generation in my writing and teaching. In this post, I document how I use Moodle, Github, and Dexy to easily update and publish materials for my class.

Since I am still early in …

After many years of observing the conference from a distance, I was able to travel to the SciPy conference. This year the conference hosted a track on computation tools and education that inspired many ideas for me.

Teaching

All the keynotes and several of the talks focused on the use …

I'm attending the SciPy conference this year with two main objectives

• Look for best practices to integrate into my research on energy access
• Look for best practices to integrate into my teaching

Energy software

I'm interested in the development of open-source solutions in the small-scale energy analysis space. There are …

I've been using Markdown, a plain text lightweight markup language in combination with Pandoc, a versatile document converter to do the bulk of my writing.

The benefits

• I can use the same text editing tools for my computing work as well as my writing work.
• With a generic makefile, I …

I have a workflow that I'm happy with for creating, rendering, and archiving, slide content for my classes.

I have a single file that contains stubs for the entire semester's lectures. This allows me to quickly capture ideas for future lectures without leaving the file.

At the beginning of the …

I am trying out pelican as an authoring tool.

Themes

I cloned the octopress pelican theme and added to the pelicanconf file

Plugins

I cloned jakevdp's plugins and checked out the liquid_tags_import branch and linked using pelicanconf. This is to support ipython notebooks in the blog.

dsoto.github.io

I …

Having just finished my first week teaching at Sonoma State University, I wanted to return to my blog after some time away. This week is a very exciting milestone for me since being able to educate the next generation about energy issues has been a goal of mine for years …