Technology For Teaching - Matthew Brett
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Matthew Brett
I (Matthew) am an aged sort-of post-doc working at the UCB Brain Imaging Center.
How to use (how not to use) the IPython notebook for teaching
I am teaching a course called practical neuroimaging at UCB.
The course is half-flipped, in that the students do 30 minutes of reading before class, and spend about half of the 2 hour class time doing exercises.
Of course we make heavy use of the IPython notebook for the exercises, and this has worked very well.
But - using IPython for tutorials and reading for the class has been much more difficult because it does not yet fit well with static website builders like Sphinx.
It is still hard to write a lot of complicated text or explanation in the notebook because the web interface and cell structure make the environment cumbersome compared to a good text editor.
Others seem to have had the same experience working with the IPython notebook as an interactive code editor - see the very new rodeo project.
Maybe, by sharing our experiences, we can help to work out some solution that uses the IPython machinery, that is yet closer to perfection.
Lightning Talks
Jess Hamrick : nbgrader
Jess shared a cool tool written for creating
Stfan van der Walt : Elegant Scipy, Markdown for Books, etc.
Stefan and Juan Nunez-Iglesias are writing a book called “Elegant Scipy” to collect and discuss elegant uses of and implementation within scientific python. He shared some details about the book and showed how he is using markdown as the native format to edit in, exportable to ipython notebooks and html.
Sean ONullian : What Computers can’t do (even now) and why
Sean gave some context for an upcoming conference.
Matthias Bussonnier : Jupyter Sidecar
A tool for viewing/rendering rich Jupyter kernel output in HTML.
https://github.com/rgbkrk/jupyter-sidecar
Also, thebe: