MozCam

I am well but generally pretty knackered. This is a result of taking on an "extra, extra" job of teaching a one-semester course in Internet Applications and Services to a final-year class at one of the Universities in Maputo. It has two especially knackering aspects:

• the huge amount of preparation involved. I have 2 x 2-hour classes a week, for 15 weeks. In total, somewhat under 60 hours of contact time when you subtract breaks and delays etc. Not really much time to teach something I started learning in 1995 and only felt solid in by 1999.
• the classes start at 08.10 which means getting up at 06.50 two days a week. This was the only slot I could do which would not cause too much disruption to my main job at UTRAFE. It seems strange that in 1994, when I was signing up for my second-year classes at Edinburgh Uni, I wanted to to Economics, but decided against it because the lectures started at 9am and I knew I would just miss almost all of them by sleeping in.

As an aside, Neill pointed out an interesting first (apparently) for Scotland, being the first place to teach "Rails", the latest must-have technology of the web programming world, on an undergraduate course. See here for the original post. The blogger, one of the key boosters of Ruby (the programming language which underlies Rails), asks "Is anyone else out there teaching Rails?". By coincidence, only yesterday I mentioned it in a lecture, as a popular alternative to the technology I will be teaching on the course, which is JSP (based on Java as the underlying programming language, which fits with the other courses in my University).

JSP does have certain deficiencies as a beginner's tool for web-programming. Perhaps next year, if I have enough time to learn it properly myself, I could consider integrating Rails in the course.