Nice Blog from a Norwegian lecturer: jill/txt -- her educational category makes for interesting reading!

Chaos today! A resit CBT was scheduled to run in a lab with 56 seats -- no worries, I thought, only ~40 students will be taking it. Booking the room through official channels seemed like a good way to ensure the room is available (natch?) but , oh no, that would be too easy! The room is being refurbished (no-one was told) and the largest available room seats 36, with 2 broken PCs (34 working seats). 38 students turn up so one starts off doing the test on paper whilst standing up! And another wants to come back 30 minutes later for a free PC ... meaning I'll be there for longer than anticipated just because there is no "joined-up thinking" in the University admin. :-(

Further admin-derived chaos: The letters telling 13 students they had to do a CBT and a coursework didn't go out complete ... they tell me the day before the test that the coursework was OK, the test notices never went out! So I have to waste time phoning these poor souls, some of whom had heard through various channels that there was a test, to cancel the test so as not to disadvantage any of them! Not to mention the hours I spent designing the damn CBT in the first place!

Irony: The Faculty Admin Manager earns £50k+ (a bit less then double a lecturer's salary) and was "promoted from within" ... which is the usual fate for management-types who can't seem to cope in lesser positions in this University! Moral: Don't have standards, be crap at your job, rubber-stamp the students through as the University will do its damnedest to make assessing them correctly bloody difficult!

Email from a student this morning (NHBCTPTG):

Title: hey sir
Body Hey i think you have forgotten to give the password for the resit material. I was wondering it email me the password. You email me on <hotmail address>

My reply was measured and politely suggested that the student was a rude, thoughtless idiot for committing this offence against the primary tongue of this country ;-)

Moral: Email is a very convenient communication tool but it's easy to come across as a thoughtless idiot who couldn't be bothered to put any effort into the message! Put some effort in and you're much more likely to get some effort out.

In case you don't understand how to write a decent email or even can't see what the problem is, here are some links to pages discussing "netiquette": our-kids.org, From Kass Johns -- scroll down a bit!, George Dillon and a Google search.

Argh!

Student

I don't like programming. Can I change from my COBM degree to the BIT course?

Lecturer

Check the course description -- BIT contains more formal programming than COBM and you don't like programming! (D'oh!)

Moral

Look up relevant information before wasting lecturer's time asking stupid questions!

(This student phoned me after failing to pass his level 1 modules!)

Gotta get me one of these <grin> Mangonel LART!

It's not an urban legend ... someone really did blow up a whale!