Deadline extensions

A problem with assessment deadlines for complex pieces of work is that you can never tell in advance exactly how long the students will need to digest the material necessary to do the work. My case: A group work assignment (to build a Breakout game in JavaScript!) is taking the majority of my 200-student class longer than I estimated (I broke the game down into 6 stages for 8 teaching weeks + they had a mid-term "study week"). My original deadline is looming and I feel they would benefit from an extension over Christmas. However I said on Monday "Come to the Tuesday lecture and we'll talk about it." 22% of the class showed-up -- reasons for poor attendance were either Eid (a major Moslem festival) or (perhaps more likely!) a tough Java assignment deadline at 9PM that night. So I point-blank refused to give an extension (pique, mainly!) and postponed the decision until the following Tuesday's lecture ... It's aggravating! I don't like giving extensions as it feels like weakness (& a lot of large-group teaching is "front") and encourages students to expect an extension so they need not start working until the last minute. I also worry that giving an extension covering a holiday period will encourage plagiarism: "No lecturer support, so who else do I turn to? My buds!" We'll see what happens next week...

Is Powerpoint evil?

I'm a "professional Powerpoint user" <shudder> in that I use it everyday for presenting slides during lectures. I don't think Powerpoint is evil per se (although it can obviously be put to "evil" [stupid, pointless, inappropriate, misleading] purposes!) I can sympathise with the tone of Jeremy Zawodny's recent post about Powerpoint and agree with many of the comments but I disagree with 2 of his points: Zawodny says it's among mankind's worst inventions, which seems to leave out a lot of truly heinous things (religion? other ways of abrogating personal responsibility? UK fast food?) and as for the largest single source of useless crap within companies admittedly I've worked for just one "real" company (hearsay suggests it's similar in many other corporations) but there I felt that the useless crap tended to come from management, totally divorced from the everyday running of the company (oh so true Dilbert!)

Charles Eicher's old post on the subject is nearer my view -- Powerpoint is too limited to present complex ideas on its own (it is the speaker's comments that provide the detail.) Fortunately my students are also (in the main) too limited to understand complex ideas without the repetition that Powerpoint makes easy (OK, some of 'em are like that -- the majority don't turn up for class [duh] & a majority of the minority who do turn up are more switched-on than that sentence gives 'em credit for.) Links to other entertaining Powerpoint commentaries include the very interesting Avoiding Powerpoint suckage, Are we wasting $250M/day? (Humour: The Gettysburg Powerpoint Address).

As for Powerpoint online NO! I really loathe Powerpoint's exported slideshows! I do publish PDF versions of my slides online. My PDF slides are in two forms: One for students to print out and use in the lecture (6 slides to a page) and the other (1 slide to a page) for me & they to use for reference. We have a "Learning Management System" (Blackboard) on which the majority of material safely resides away from the wider web but it's painful to link to slides on Bb; having slides at a more static URL on a public web server is much more useful.

MathWorld News: Perfect Magic Cube of Order 5 Discovered

Perfect Magic Cube of Order 5 Discovered -- I thinks it's excellent to use math expertise to direct this kind of search for existence proof.

Group work

Since it's uppermost in my mind these days (my Web Technologies module is approaching fever-pitch as students begin to seriously work and worry about their Group Project assignment) I've added a few words on the subject to my Stupid Questions blog and also started a fictitous but (maybe) educational blog from a student's perspective...

PhD viva success

Congratulations and serious kudos to my colleague Gordon (now Dr Gordon!) who passed his PhD viva yesterday . Well done!

Whoopeee?! After 5 years of happily struggling with Microsoft Office 97 we're having Office 2003 imposed upon us -- no consultation, AFAIK no user-testing beyond the IT people but we will (apparently) be given a chance to try it out before all our lecture notes etc... stop working in January 2004! Sounds like a typical top-level imposed decision... (I'm sure there's an appropriate Dilbert somewhere <grin>) According to vnunet.com IT Managers feel railroaded into deploying untested applications -- dunno who's pressurising our lot but it's not the lecturing staff! It seems such a short time ago that we were forced to upgrade from Windows 3 to Windows 95 (summer 1998 -- a good upgrade with many advantages), Windows NT (mostly during 2002/3) and finally to Windows XP this year (summer 2003 -- a goodie from my POV but roundly criticised for the rushed rollout, lack of consultation etc ... sound familiar?)

Alien and poor website design

Went to see Alien: The director's cut last night -- excellent movie, stands the test of time very well (I was just 9 years old when it first came out <grin>). Going to our local Odeon always reminds me that their website is an annoying mess of nonstandard IE crap. No functionality at all in DOM1-compliant browsers like Mozilla Firebird (my current fave) and I doubt they've ever hear of web accesibility. Ho hum...
21st Nov: Bloody hell, why did "Alien Resurrection" have to have such a crap ending! It's a pretty good adventure romp up until the Alien womb debacle! Such a shame...
23rd Nov: I thought Dr Fun was dead but I was wrong <grin>!

God must love idiots -- he makes so many of 'em! (Garfield does, anyway!)There's an assignment deadline approaching and today I received the following email:Doubt itz all rite bro but do wat u can wit it. Suggest u change the layout of it or somethin fella so it dont look identical.
Later,
     Mr Brain (NHBCTPTS) This was obviously intended for the 3 student recipients and, eventually, Mr Brain was supposed to submit the assignment by email, but he had added my name to the address list! The email text suggests Mr Brain and his 3 friends were "collaborating" (read: copying) on the assignment and he accidentally copied it to me prematurely?! The level of stupidity beggars belief! Attached to this email was a spreadsheet, nicely laid-out with godawfully-poor calculations (the assignment was modelling the weight of growing yeast yet their results were negative numbers) -- style over content.

The depressing corollary of this is: In a class of over 200, these 4 collaborators were sufficiently stupid (charitably: unlucky) to catch themselves out -- how many other groups of happy plagiarists are there? <gloom>

Cool collection of CSS tips from Zeldman: CSS Smorgasbord and the new ALA Sliding Doors CSS tabs is also excellent. At last decent browser support for CSS prompts designers to begin using 'advanced' (hardly!) features like descendant selectors.

Now this has to be a useful resource for anyone developing 'serious' JavaScript applications: Mozilla.org's Venkman JavaScript Debugger - Development Page. Yet another reason for adopting Firebird/Mozilla browsers instead of going for the easy, pre-installed but increasingly unsatisfactory Micro$oft Internet Exploder.

An oldie but goodie: Conall's Blog: Nerd Humour

So what's with this usage of the word "safe" to mean "thanks" etc? As in "Safe for that" meaning "Thanks for that".

The funniest Shockwave game I've seen in a while: BigIdeaFUN.com - Penguins - Arcade - Spaced Penguin! (well I did do a Maths with Astrophysics degree!)

Graduation Day today -- kinda uplifting to see students so happy to receive their degrees (or is it just relief that it's all over?!) My congratulations to everyone who got their degree today, but especially to Tom & Leeanne -- I tried to find you afterwards but to no avail (pointless taking my camera, really!) Good luck in your careers, everyone...