I'd probably lose some math geek cred if I didn't celebrate Google's way of celebrating the 410th birthday of Pierre de Fermat, the namesake of 'Fermat's Last Theorem.'  The guts of the theorem are depicted in the doodle itself; that there are no integer solutions to the Pythagorean-Theorem-like equations for integer exponents greater than 2.

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The other day, I wrote about how I used Google Docs and Applescript to lubricate the peer review workflow in a class I’m teaching. My set-up is certainly imperfect, and here I want to comment on a couple improvements that I could make, when I can find the time.

At present, a student submits peer review comments to a Google Form that gets written to a Google spreadsheet that I need to download by hand to a Numbers spreadsheet and process with an Applescript. The script produces a PDF that I need to email to students by hand.

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So, I’ve just had a chance to bend Google tools and Applescript to the service of teaching. In the event that someone else might find this interesting, I thought I’d share the story. Details are available to those who request them in the comments.

This semester, I get to teach an interdisciplinary seminar for juniors that’s writing enhanced. This means that the students need to write a lot and I need to read and comment on their writing. When I began teaching this course, I took advantage of peer reviewing. This is where each student has two other students read their writing and share comments. It gets the students to think about ‘good writing’ more (theirs and that of others). To keep them focused on the issues of interest to us in the course, I made a two-page ‘Writing Checklist’ for each peer reader to fill out as they read another’s writing.

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Google has given me permission to use their Google Storage service. It's also given me permission to use the Google Predication API. I'm thinking of using this in service of some research projects I've conducted with colleagues and undergraduate collaborators. The dataset aren't huge, but sharing them between institutions has been a PITA. I wonder if anybody else has use Google Storage to collaborate on small-scale academic research projects in the life sciences.