(A proper post is coming soon, with problems, discussion, and more!)
I personally learned a lot during the first pseudolecture. As expected, a number of technical things went unexpectedly wrong, but thanks to the shepherds, everything important went smoothly.
Notability: I couldn’t use my prepared notes because they weren’t syncing to dropbox, so I had to just write from scratch. (Anecdote: Twice, Christopher Hacon has come to speak at a seminar I was co-organizing, with a carefully prepared talk on his computer, and the computer wouldn’t connect. So both times he just immediately moved to a spontaneous board talk, without breaking a sweat. The talk was somehow meticulously structured.)
Youtube live: Youtube wouldn’t let me use the new channel yet (hopefully by tomorrow!), so the livestream didn’t appear where it was supposed to. The in the busy-ness of dealing with these, I didn’t have a chance to invite one person to zoom who didn’t have youtube access.
Still, most of the important things happened — people watched, and the unrecorded discussion afterwards was also interesting.
For next week, I am going to try to make better friends with notability (I use goodnotes for my own notes), and see if everything can be better set up in advance, so links are available beforehand. I am curious how the zulip groupoid “discussions” were, because that was the most experimental part of what we were doing. (Experiments do not have to be completely successful, but ideally we should learn something from them!)
Please let’s now discuss (in zulip? discord? comments here?) what we should try differently next week — what things need tweaking, etc. Next week will also be more “typical” in that there won’t need to be any philosophical set-up.
I expect to have the video of the pseudolecture posted before long. (It is trimmed and sitting on my computer.)
Math 216: Foundations of Algebraic Geometry 
June 27, 2020 at 5:01 pm
Hi there! I think we all did pretty well for the first day of class in a new school! Thank you so much. If I may, I’d like to suggest that you choose one location for feedback (zulip, discord, here, it doesn’t matter which one) as one of the challenges I found was that we have so many locations going at the same time that it is a bit dizzying. Even if we don’t address this for the present feedback session, I would like to suggest we streamline information dissemination on the day of the class – and let us all know exactly where to go for that administrative information (probably zulip as that is where we will all be). I found myself jumping from one groupoid to another, and then to the AGITTOC lobby site on zulip to get information on, for example, where the zoom link was for the q and a session, the youtube link, etc.
June 27, 2020 at 5:18 pm
Definitely I want to (and even intended to) streamline where information is — hopefully for next week (if I can figure it all out), in advance I can have (i) the youtube channel where the pseudolecture will appear, and (ii) the link to the slides that will refresh in nearly real-time. If discussion worked well in the zulip groupoids (I don’t know whether it did yet), then that seems the best place for it. WordPress is useful for getting announcements out, and I’ll look at the comments, but it shouldn’t need to be something you all should feel the need to monitor. Ditto for the agittoc channel on discord — people can feel free to post there, and enough do that people will answer them, but you shouldn’t have to monitor it. But if you are wandering through there and answer someone’s question please feel free to do so. (By the way, thanks very much for guiding people there!)
One thing to refine beyond this — currently if there are things to tell everyone, the shepherds are posting them in groupoids, which means they happen at separate times. Maybe all groupoids can be contacted at once, eg. by an email — I’ll think about this.
More in a bit — I’m taking care of a few things now, and come back to this later.