Pride, academic standards and assessment

I've been off-blog lately (lost my server so lost my feed-on-feeds newsfeeds :-( ) and have also been struggling with my conscience. This year, to deter plagiarism, I've requested the early submission of a subsection of the work I usually have handed-in at the end of term (to check on progress and provided earlier feedback, ostensibly.) Because I'm keen on promoting web standards I warned the students I would expect valid XHTML and CSS in all their work. Most of 'em did validation in year 1 and this is year 2 so it was not an unreasonable thing to expect. So I gave 10 marks out of a possible 33 for valid XHTML in a particular exercise whose main point was to take some nasty old HTML4 and XHTML-ise it.

So far, so good, still many students lost the marks but it's 3% of one exercise out of 12 that'll form 40% of their final assessment, so overall the validation points are worth at most 1% of the final module mark (and probably less as the exercise was kinda trivial it'll receive a lower weight than the more complex JavaScript exercises later in the module.)

However one particular student was disappointed to lose those marks as he made a minor change to his work (in good faith) just before submitting it and it resulted in an invalid document. The change was laudable and garnered the two students (out of 140) who attempted it a few bonus marks, and so lost this student 6 marks overall due to the loss of validation. (So that's 6/33/12 of 40% or less than 1%.)

He requested that I explain why he got less then 100% for the exercise at the end of a lecture that finished early (4.30 PM rather than 5 PM) explaining that he knew I was probably tired but that it was what I got paid for, which I felt was unnecessarily combative IMO but I agreed and we spent some time wading through his mark-up whilst I explained my reasoning (which he already knew as I had published my marking scheme in lieu of direct, individual feedback.) I explained that as his mark-up was invalid XHTML it would lose the relevant marks but that his attempt to be clever had earned him some bonus points. He left after 20 minutes, I guess slightly abruptly, but I was tired and felt I'd done enough explaining to satisfy him.

Apparently not: he sent me an email a couple of hours later with a definitely chewed-over tone to it that annoyed me and took me an hour to reply to in a calm, reasonable tone -- pointlessly as it turned-out because I simply irritated him further and his second email just reiterated his position that he felt I was being unfair. So I spoke to him the next day at the start of his lab session and asked if he was OK with my decision regarding the points. This led to a further 20 minute discussion which I eventually terminated with no progress (after becoming increasingly upset by the student's attitude and attempts to use psychology on me.) My standpoint was that he submitted invalid XHTML so lost marks. His was that he'd tried to do something innovative that had led to the mistake and he'd felt under pressure due to the approaching deadline and had accidentally forgotten to re-validate the mark-up so he did not deserve to lose the marks and should be treated "as an individual".

Overall it was a major waste of both of our time and I learned a valuable lesson: sometimes it's pointless to explain/reason/whatever, don't bother, be dictatorial and say "That's the way it is." It saves time...

Faculty of Computing, Information Systems and Mathematics

Hooray! The Dean-designate has announced the new Faculty name and it is to be Computing, Information Systems and Mathematics ... inclusive, long and unfortunately close to "Fascism" as an acronym but a good compromise choice IMO.

In-class test

In-class test time, again. This year the Blackboard^® system behaved quite well (only 6 students out of 140 started their tests only to have them rejected when they'd finished this year ... unlike last year where dozens of problems occurred.) Sadly, this year's class average is much less than last year's :-( Happily one student got 98% <grin> so kudos to her ... sadly she's an outlier in the data!

Approachability

Sadly it seems I've lost the knack of appearing approachable this year :-(

Yesterday a group of students came to see me regarding my Web Tech. module because the chap they liked from last year who taught HTML was unavailable -- the spokesperson confessed that the others were unwilling to talk to me due to being scared(?!) Today there's an anonymous post on a discussion board complaining that the workload is too high this term ... but this 3^rd year is obviously also unwilling to talk to me about it... I don't feel more ferocious this year, perhaps they're more timid and I'd not noticed? Ah well, perhaps I'll reduce the lecture sarcasm next week...

Support procedures: "want, take, have"

2 weeks ago our ICT department informed me (via a roundabout route) that the server I administer seemed to have been infected with a trojan. I worked on removing it for a day or-so and heard nothing further from support so relaxed ... until today, 2 weeks later, I arrive at work to find that ICT have marched in and shut down the server without informing or asking anyone other than the Science tech. staff who have the key to the server room! A bit heavy-handed, in my opinion. So, the web pages hosted on the server, databases (student and mine), student work and lecture material are all gone¹ without so much as a by-your-leave :-( If we want access to their resources we ave to fill-in a form, submit it, wait 3-5 days, and hope. If they want something it's "want-take-have" (to misquote Faith in a certain episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer <grin>)

¹"OK, what about a backup?" you say. Sure ... it's backed-up, but the server is corrupt and the backup is on a system only that server can read (durrrrr...) I've a DAT tape backup too, but no PC-compatible DAT reader whilst our Science tech. is in sick-leave... <sigh>

HTML tables

Good article from 456 Berea Street on using HTML tables the way they were intended ... the definitive, complex description is in the W3C's HTML4 table documentation.

School of Maths + Computing and Information Systems = what?

Our Vice-Chancellor decided to merge us with CIS so what's the new faculty going to be called? One suggestion is "The Faculty of Informatics" but wtf does that mean to UK students?! My Polish colleague suggests it's a common-enough term on the continent but a quick survey of our students suggests they have no idea ... my preference is for something like "Faculty of Maths and Computing" or even "Faculty of Information Systems and Maths" (an "F-ism" <grin>) but I'm convinced that the "debate" that's being encouraged by management is a smoke-screen: we waste our effort arguing over relatively small issues while the management make all the important decisions without us and eventually (when we're worn down and permanently divided over this issue) they step-in with a "solution" that they had in mind all-along, getting it all done with the minimum of "moo". <sigh> but I hope I'm being too cynical and pray the University management will keep us all in the loop re. the new structure.

Coursework submission

I love coursework submission day :-) It makes the labs that follow the deadline so peaceful as the majority of students don't turn up, no doubt exhausted by the effort of creating 3 web pages, putting them in 3 separate folders and putting the lot in a ZIP file for submission... However I was truly impressed with a few students who turned up for the lab and managed to work through some exercises using the W3C's DOM node methods. Kudos to them, and a restful evening to the rest, fragile darlings! Now to get on with marking 120 sets of work :-(

Feedback and professionalism

Today we had our SSCC where student representatives get to (usually) air grievances and raise problems for our attention. It's a great forum, perhaps a bit slow having just one meeting per term but we are, usually, a friendly, open school that welcomes feedback. Feedback from my module seems to be that I've mistakenly given the impression that the DOM0 is old-fashioned (true) and useless (false), which is useful feedback but I'd have been happier to hear about it after a lecture so that I could correct the misapprehension immediately. Level 3 students also expressed the opinion that I'd asked them to read too much -- 1 chapter per week seems fine to me, perhaps it's the 3 chapters for their "reading week" (no lectures!) that they feel is excessive. I'd have expected final year students to be better at reading than second years, but apparently not... Ho hum.

Tidy applet

Wouldn't it be fun if someone compiled jtidy into an applet <grin>

It's a frickin function...

To mis-quote Dr Evil: it's a frickin function ... Working with 2^nd/3^rd year students on computing-related degrees who don't know what a function is, what arguments do and why you don't have to call function f(x) with an argument named x is rather frustrating, to put it mildly. Especially after the lecture where I said if you don't know what a function is, revise before this week's lab class or come and talk to me ... IMO, a jolly good time to frickin Google it!

Question Mark Perception

Last year our Educational Technology Unit arranged for the University to purchase Question Mark Perception and this year it's available for "early adopters" to test. Throwing caution to the wind I had my Blackboard tests converted for Perception (a time-consuming task, for some dumbass reason, as they both speak variants of XML.) The Perception system has been set up so that we must follow a long-winded procedure to create tests:

1. Create test offline.
2. Add obscure (Blackboard internal) module code to a comment field in the test.
3. Export test to "QPack" file (?!) with specific name space convention.
4. Log on to a module in Blackboard.
5. Take three clicks to find the Perception tools link and get authenticated for Perception server by Blackboard.
6. Import QPack file into Perception (3 more clicks & a pause.)
7. Return to Blackboard, 3 more clicks to add one from the list of Perception tests for the module ... if you forgot the obscure module code the test does not show (so go back 5 steps! + see below.)
8. Add the test, pretty-much as usual for Blackboard, sit back and relax...

This seems excessively complex, especially as Perception has a built-in publishing facility. Also apparently designed-in, is the inability of ordinary users to delete tests from the Perception server themselves. So if you forget the obscure module code you're stuck with a test you can't delete.

Now they always say caveat emptor to early adopters but it seems rather vital that when my students take their tests that their marks will get recorded in Blackboard for them to see. Perhaps it's a minor bug, but not only does this not happen (despite assurances to the contrary) the grade reporting software in Perception seems to be broken! And this has taken a full year to implement... <groan>

Update 15Oct04: The man in charge returned from a week-long conference today and has assured me that fixing the lack of grades is a top priority. Now we wait! your call is important to us, please stay on the line while we try to connect you...

Preparation for a new term

Am I alone in thinking that preparing for a new term featuring modules that have prerequisite material clearly includes revising the old material? Judging from the lack of prior knowledge from some students in my practical lab this afternoon it's not an obvious thing to do! What do they expect? To be taught the same stuff every year for three years? <groan>

Starting as I mean to go on

1^st lecture of the new term today for my Web Technologies module. I tried a novel (insane?) trick today that I'd been toying with last year but hadn't got around to: After the break, when the talking began to increase and the first mobile phone rang I stopped talking and wandered up to the young lady whose phone was ringing, asked if I could borrow it and (without doing-so) pulled out of my pocket another phone that I'd bought off eBay for the purpose (�2 well spent!) I then threw my phone towards the front of the lecture theatre where it smashed apart with a loud crash. <grin> it had shock value if nothing else (& I was careful to lob it over the heads of the class and check that no-one was near the crash site. Probably a health and safety violation all the same...) I've no idea if my subsequent plea to turn off mobile phones will have more weight this year (or have I just inadvertently challenged the class to disobey?!) but they seemed attentive for the latter half of the 2 hour lecture period, which is unusual in itself. Now what to do next week?

Wasting a day on management bull

The new term starts next week so it's rather busy at work. Apparently that means it's also the perfect time for management to decide we need a team-building event with the school we'll be merging with in a year's time! So myself and fifty members of academic, admin and technical staff spent today considering the journey metaphor as a means to coping with the merger ... madness! We apparently surprised the hired management consultant with our cynicism and could have achieved a similar level of networking over morning coffee or evening beer, either of which would have saved money, time and effort all round. Ho hum...

New voices in my head

Got an MP3 player? (Mmmm ... iPod!) Get some inspiration from IT Conversations.

Currently marking and listening to...

I'm currently marking Web Technologies resit coursework :-( and listening to the rather excellent Finnish metal band Nightwish ... oh for sound-proof offices and a big hi-fi :->

Hellboy

What can I say? <grin> good fun, no idea if it's faithful to the comics, but pretty cool, Hellboy makeup/CGI is excellent and Selma Blair is rather cute!

Resit test day

Today's the day the teddy bears have their picnic... In fact today's the day that the students who failed the module not too egregiously get a 2^nd chance to pass (with their mark capped at 40%/D-) and (I hope) the CBT will be no picnic <grin> ... after-all, this one test + some Web Tech. exercises substitute for a whole module's assessment! It has to be tough to be fair to those who passed at the 1^st attempt. So the work deadline was mid-day and the test is at 2.30pm and the whingeing has started:

• I only just failed last time (got between 30 and 35%) so can you be lenient this time? [Ha! No favouritism ... if you deserve to pass, then you'll pass!]
• My computer got infected with a virus and after a few days it stopped working so I lost my work. [What? No backup after three days?!] Rather than fix the virus I've bought a new machine [!] so I can do the work now ... in fact it's nearly done, oh, but it's at home so I can't give it to you yet. Can I email it to you on Monday for no penalty?
• Can I do my test in the earlier slot rather than the one you scheduled me for as I {have a Halifax appointment, am off on holiday}? [As it turns out the Halifax guy turned-up at the correct time despite claiming Halifax could not reschedule his appointment ... was he lying?]

Update: Surprisingly the recently-upgraded Blackboard v6.1 system worked very well for my 40-strong test subjects (none of the oft-repeated problems...) so kudos to our ETU for finally getting an upgrade worthy of the name!

How many hours do students put in?

I love reading other lecturer's blogs -- it's the shared experience, I suppose. However I've been "off blog" for over a month and missed jill's post about student feedback questionnaires. For comparison, my modules are ¼ of a semester so maybe students should expect to spend 9 hours per week ... my University suggests something like 13 hours (maybe we have a longer working week <grin>) Feedback for my two modules is as follows:

Answers to survey question "On average, I spent the following hours per week on independent study for this module"

Hours	Web Technologies	Databases and the Web
Over 10	10%	7%
7 to 10	17%	30%
4 to 6	39%	52%
1 to 3	29%	11%
None	0%	0%
No response	5%	0%
Responses:	76	27

Independent Study is in addition to the 4 hours per week of lecture and lab sessions. So, like Jill, there are two students putting in more than the equivalent of a full working week on the 3^rd year module and 8 on the 2^nd year module -- well done them! The module evaluation questionnaire is anonymous (I suspect like Jill's) which is a good and bad thing in some ways ... it would be interesting to know whether the extra hours have a positive benefit and also how truthful the students are in their self-evaluation! (E.g. their attendance rates usually seem to be higher than my records ... even with their friends signing them in.)

Jaws in 30s with bunnies!

The latest in an excellent sequence of irreverent, oddball humour, angry alien productions gives you Jaws in 30s, re-enacted by bunnies! (Make sure you click on the bunny at the end of the credits...)

What is considered harmful, according to the web?

Typing 'considered harmful' into Google brings up an interesting selection of obviously geek articles :-) Now I'm no computer scientist (actually a mathematician turned meteorologist who happens to teach computing) but maybe I should be -- the top article in that search (as of today at 4.30pm BST) is a link to an article by the famous mathematician/computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra (I recognised the surname; now I know a little more!) which appeals to me. It presents a clear case for ditching the "GO TO" statement in computer programs. I'd always been told it was a bad idea in FORTRAN (sorry, meteorology has a long history with that so-called dead language!) and now I know why ... so, if you're learning to program and curse procedures, functions and methods, read the article and try to understand what it's on about!

Sneaky semanticness (?!)

Neat separation of style (clickable images) from content (text links) from SimpleBits ... useful to know about IE's flickering issues when <a> tags are involved!

Simplifying DHTML design with good CSS

Stuff and Nonsense has a nice article using the DOM to simplify forms ... cool, but his JavaScript loops over form elements to set their display property to show/hide them (which everyone does, is simple to code/understand but is a tad inelegant!) Serendipitously (!) Sitepoint has a companion article that subtly uses CSS's descendant selectors (also known as contextual selectors e.g. in the W3C CSS 1 spec)so that all the JavaScript needs to do is change one class ... the form takes a "hide the optional bits" class which does nothing to it ;-) but the optional elements disappear due to a rule with a descendant selector rooted in the form's "hide optional" class ... excellent synergy! Using classes is such a better idea than manipulating element's style properties directly as -- ta da! -- it can be soooo easily adapted for media stylesheets, starting with print and moving on to anything! Nice one...

Great revolutionary Scott!

I and my colleagues do live in interesting times ... The Vice Chancellor (read: leader of the University) has decided to restructure. At the same time has commissioned a review of computing teaching in the Uni. There are 4 'units' doing it: us "Scientific Computing" and "Media Technology" in the Faculty of Science, "CIS" in the Faculty of Technology and "Business I.T." in the Faculty of Business. So we hire a no-doubt expensive external consultant to consider the situation. In my group's meeting he mentions how difficult it is to find out where a particular IT-related course will be taught (e.g. not evident from our web site!) so we can see where the wind's blowing ... And then, lo! and behold!, after a period of FUD where all sorts of radical restructuring proposals are rumoured, we learn that the University executive group has settled on the not-so-radical merging of "Scientific Computing" and "CIS" into a new Faculty, leaving "Media Tech." behind and "BIT" as it is! Not so radical and still leaves the computing fragmented ... what a pointless waste of everybody's time! (Oh, there are some other proposed changes, but the gossip says they're waiting on agreements with other organisations) And in case you're wondering about the title: The V-C's name is Professor Scott... Changes to be in place by 1^st July 2005?!

Accessibility

A collection (maybe, eventually....) of links to web/accessibility articles:

• 10 Accessibility Blunders of the Big Players
• Accessible, stylish form layout

Floating thumbnails

HTML forms ... accessible warts'n'all

The Man In Blue has a great tutorial styling accessible HTML forms here.

Straight eye for the straight guy :-)

"Hey, mate. Want a beer?" "Sure!" "You see what Barry was wearing?" "No, mate. Didn't notice ... Nice fridge." (From The Fishbowl) <grin>

Collaborative "Open Textbook"

Interesting idea ... restricted to (at present) Math content. Uses CVS and T_EX which is kinda techie!

Mobile platforms for e-learning

Only yesterday we were discussing encouraging student involvement (they don't read their emails!) by targetting students' preferred platform (they do read their SMS!) and today I read a serendipitous & neat post: Mobile CSS is a Reality - HTML Dog Blog. So we can begin to write useful tools for the latest PDA/smartphones that I'm confident students will be buying to keep up with the (student) Jones'! Now gotta encourage the manufacturers of our LMS (Blackboard) to get rid of frames (!) and give us media style sheets <grin> ... call me back in a few years!

Update Knock me down with a feather ... our LMS support are testing Blackboard on small format devices <grin> gotta get me some of that!

Google it!

<grin> I simply must remember this for next year when students start asking me the usual dumbass questions-without-thought. My standard response might then be to say Fucking Google It! (via incorporated subversion).

Tufte said PowerPoint Is Evil

More argument for (I think) using PowerPoint intelligently: Wired 11.09: PowerPoint Is Evil. Avoid style-over-content!

Exam marking

Marking exam papers. Finding the process difficult enough (boring!) until I reach a new all-time low with a paper from someone who thought it was worth his while writing 2 pages of illegible scrappy diagrams and not at all amusing comments. I generously (IMO) give "method marks" so have to wade through all sorts of crap and it certainly was not worth my while deciphering this mess only to find it was worth no marks whatsoever... (But posting this has improved my frame of mind so I can return to the other scripts afresh!)

Update 10^th June: Hurrah! Finished!!! All that remains is to get the marks double-checked and submit them to the Faculty <phew> Some excellent results and some stunningly poor ones: Some students seem to thrive on learn-it/regurgitate-it exams and others on continuous assessment ... others won't take the hint in year 1 or year 2 and leave it until year 3 to fail very badly. Ah well, at least they're not all obviously copying each-other!

Security of browsing behaviour

Interesting article over at CollyLogic -- by styling a:link/visited using background images nefarious web content providers can easily track which links you've visited by watching what images are requested along with the web page. Sneaky ... It's common practice to track "click throughs" with a redirect script or cookie and possible to abuse client-side scripting to the same end. Tracking a:visited background images is different because you can't turn it off (without disabling images or imposing a user stylesheet) and it (potentially) provides a peek into your browser history whenever you visit a page that contains a link to the same URL. Is it worth worrying about? Probably not ... but worth being aware of ("they" have many ways of watching you!)

Plagiarism, procedures and penalties

An article in last week's Evening Standard (Thursday 27^th May) reported that a final year student at the University of Kent at Canterbury was told not to bother with his last exam as he'd been caught submitting copied essays off the web for credit. The article has a bit of a slant against the University as even though the student admits it, the Uni informed him by email (inappropriate, IMO, and ineffective here -- I get 'return receipts' from students up to 6 months after sending the email!) and implies the essays were not submitted recently. The student's parents are understandably pissed but apparently not at their son! I don't get it -- my parents would have been livid if I'd done something that shameful. The lecturer supposedly saying Everybody does this. You're unlucky ... you got caught does not excuse the crime! (But suggests a firmer line needs taking ... as we're doing here and here and here!) The student deserves to have this issue follow him into the workplace. If he's happy to cheat at Uni, where else will he cheat? Or has he learned his lesson?!

However the Uni's approach (as reported in the article) seems poor. As much as I hate to admit it (!) the tortuous procedures in place here (they seem designed to discourage lecturers from prosecuting students) are much better. We'd never email a guilty student to inform them of any penalty! They may get an email as well as a letter inviting them to their initial inquiry but everything else is in writing. And even after they admit the offence, the penalty varies according to the offence (4 penalties, from a weak zero & 2^nd chance up to, eventually, chucking them out) and is not final until ratified by the relevant assessment board, which is chaired by a very senior member of staff. That's not to say I like the damned process but it does seem to cover our butts!

6^th April 2005: from Guardian online The report notes that an increasing number of UK institutions have specialist officers located within the school or department who deal with all cases of plagiarism. If only...

University to The Real World and back again

Graduation -- is it like this? uComics Web Site: Non Sequitur <grin>

I told you I was ill...

LOL

Exam today

Students from my Databases and the Web module are taking my examination today and I'm nervous! It 's the 1^st exam paper I've written for a while so I hope it goes smoothly ... good luck to everyone at the exam venue in Chessigngton!

Backup your work! Don't be an unprepared dumbass...

PC users know that shit happens when using PC software (maybe Macs are less prone?) so it's ridiculous to forget to backup your work ... Please do a backup that works (test it!) and don't end up on this list of Computer Stupidities: Backups.

The Lecture List

A service advertising lectures in the UK at various public places (e.g. Borders bookshop in Kingston!) and institutions (e.g. The Darwin Centre, part of London's Natural History Museum): The Lecture List. (And KU School of Maths is here.)

Newsmap in Flash

Interesting visual display app. for Google's news aggregator -- size reflects the "importance" of the item (as measured by Google's "related articles"). Here's a link to UK's Nation+Business+Tech+Entertainment+Health: newsmap ... best viewed on a big screen!

Cool new Blogger features

Kudos to the Blogger team! My quick'n'dirty blog now has pages-per-post and comments facilities  :-)  ... no trackback yet but I can hope!

The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

Yay! H2G2 movie progress at last! Hitchiker's Movie Blog ... All it took was DNA's untimely death :'-(  (via Boing Boing Blog)

Sasser virus hits

Lo! and behold! Despite M$'s patch for the exploit used by Sasser being a month old my University was not protected and today every PC in the place was hit ... Admittedly it took less then 2 hours for the necessary updates to be propagated (go support!) but still it was embarrassing to explain to the dozens of students trying to hand-in electronically assignments for my module that they had an extension due to the problems. Ironically the most historically unreliable service in the Uni (Blackboard) was safe as it's not running on a Window$ system <grin>

Developing With Web Standards

Good article for next year's WebTech: Developing With Web Standards. Especially the CSS crib sheet?

The daily/weekly/monthly "oh my god!"

14 weeks after the 1^st class, I've just had a student come to see me asking for an account so he and his 3 friends can complete the assignment I set in February ... Theories: (1) They've really been working hard at home using a laptop as he maintains, or (2) they've done no work (despite assuring me they were comfortable with their group and had started planning the project in our meeting before Easter) and plan to copy the work off someone or (3) they already have copied the work/paid for it to be done/made a deal with satan. Needless to say, I'm looking forward to the viva they've signed-up for next week!

Seriously: You might ask "should I not have policed the accounts better and identified the stragglers, chivvied them along, checked to make sure they were attending and coping with the work, given them a shoulder to cry on and generally changed their nappies for them?" This is a fewkin level 3 module! They've been here for 3 years (at least!) and I think I'm justified in leaving these supposedly older/maturer/wiser students to sort the basics out themselves ... I give them lectures, lecture notes, weekly exercises, lab sessions with twice the usual number of available tutors, exercise walk-throughs, group meetings and discussion forums. Anything else? Oh yes: Respect! I respect the fact that they are final year students and leave the "nannying" to level 1 and (sadly) level 2. So, in the words of a colleague: If you're a student, tattoo this on your heart/eyelids/mobile phone "If I don't turn up, I don't deserve to fucking pass!" (Apologies for the swearing ... it's been an annoying couple of days!)

Update 13^th May: Quelle surprise... The above dimwits group could not explain a single (important) thing about their code in their 10 minute viva/presentation that turned into a 45 minute remake: "Desperately Seeking Reason" starring me as the person giving the "lost ones" every opportunity to prove me wrong & show some understanding ... alas, it was not to be! We're all off to another plagiarism inquiry instead :-(

Update: What a waste! 1 hour wasted writing to the students to invite them to a hearing, 1 hour wasted (2 staff) interviewing them and 1 hour wasted writing to inform them they're guilty and will receive "zero crates" for the piece of work their "cousin" did for them. <gloom>

PBL: Addressing academic needs

Chris Beaumont and Claire Fox on Using PBL to introduce programming. Something I'd like to investigate but think is probably infeasibly expensive (resources/time) for a module with 180 students :-(

Rationality: Gmail and Privacy

At last! A rational discussion of Google's Gmail service & privacy considerations: O'Reilly Network: The Fuss About Gmail and Privacy: Nine Reasons Why It's Bogus [Apr. 16, 2004]. Especially: No one is going to be forced to use gmail. If you don't like ads in your mail, don't use the service...

Kill Bill 1 -- WOW!

Saw "Kill Bill Vol 1" this evening and all I can say is WOW! Visually interesting, typical Tarantino storyline & direction ( a la Pulp Fiction, I guess) and superb action sequences (Wo Ping rules!!!) Lots of gore but kinda stylised in its exaggeration and beautiful swords ... drool.

University theft

No, my University has not been stolen, but a rack of servers essential to my University have been stolen! Some time yesterday evening 11 rack-mount servers running the web site and various internal services were nicked off the premises, toether with the Blackboard "Learning Management System" server that was a brand-new upgrade! �100k? That's the rumour...

15^th April: Bloody hell! I know I moan about our IT support on a regular basis but this time I'm impressed -- just 40 hours after the theft we've email and most internal services running again!!! (Another 6 hours to regain external access to the Uni network...)

16^th April: Blackboard reappears! Kudos to our support people...

Internet Archive Wayback Machine

Now this is a service that ought to get support -- kinda like calling-up Grandpa and asking about the family roots, the Internet Archive does what it says! Here's the School of Maths entry: Internet Archive Wayback Machine

Touched by a slumbering lungfish

Isn't it odd how occasionally something encountered online will have an unexpected, even emotional impact? This did it for me today: The Slumbering Lungfish Dybbuk Hostel and All-Night Boulangerie

The Exorcist in 30 seconds with bunnies.

Today's funniest moment? Stumbling upon this ...

Stupid MySQL Benchmarking Lesson #153 (Jeremy Zawodny's blog)

So that's the right way to do it ;-) Note for future self... Stupid MySQL Benchmarking Lesson #153 (Jeremy Zawodny's blog):

1. create schema
2. write data generator
3. write benchmarking plan
4. write benchmarking code
5. load data
6. run tests

2.4 Building in universal accessibility checklist

2.4 Building in universal accessibility checklist

April fool from the Web Standards Project

;-) Not adhering to web standards may be bad for your sex life!

Matrix scene parodies

Jill has posted a link to a ping-pong game matrix-style that I'd seen before. For your amusement here's another: On Wednesday (as it was the last lab before Easter & only 10% of the class turned-up) we spent a little while laughing at this Mario Bros version of the Matrix Reloaded Smith vs Neo fight scene ;-) Kudos to Chiraag for pointing-it out...

Be warned: The Mario page opens with popups -- Opening it in Internet Exploder quickly reminded me why I love Mozilla Firefox!

The Register BOFH

If only it were legal to behave like the BOHF! BOHF @ The Register

Fencing

<grin> Went to the Surrey Novices and Intermediates foil fencing competition on Sunday -- my first! Slightly marred by a lack of rest/sleep the previous day/night as we'd been into town with friends to see "When Harry Met Sally" at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, and "Matrix Revolutions" at the iMax (wow!) but it was an excellent day. I'm a beginner fencer so was not expected to win (& did not disappoint in that respect) but I did beat one person so it wasn't a total washout. First novice 'pool' had the eventual 1^st and 2^nd place fencers in it (tough group!) I was crap in the subsequent 'direct elimination' round where I was beating another novice for a while but lost after letting him take the last 5 points. In the 'intermediates' I was thrashed by the more experienced guys (but had fun) & the subsequent elimination round was against one of the best fencers in my club (Wimbledon) & I was quite happy to get 2 points off him (out of 15!) Good fun, but exhausting...

The electric sheep screen-saver

How cool! the electric sheep screen-saver, noticed on Boing Boing Blog.

Nanny State in Education!

As if over-regulation wasn't bad enough in real life, my University is getting increasingly into having a written, approved policy for all sorts of dumbass pointless things. Today's gem: The wording on office doors! We have "office hours" where we're (almost) guaranteed to be available + an instruction beneath the written hours saying "Outside these hours please email for an appointment." A colleague (well-known for her "policy-driven" thinking) insinuated a question into an official meeting whereby the Head of School was asked where the policy on appointments was written down! Not just the fault of the colleague-concerned, however! Why did the questioner not engage brain and realise "I am about to ask a senior member of University staff (a Professor no less!) a seriously pointless question" and sit down and shut up! Quit wasting our time with bureaucracy and let us get on with (trying to) educate!

Admin "support" (EMWIDL!) & over-complex procedures

I've just wasted an hour solving problems for a member of staff who should've been able to exercise a bit of personal initiative and sort it out herself: Our Faculty plagiarism procedures are a tad complex with reports being written & copied to half-a-dozen people for each and every student interviewed. Senior staff quite naturally felt (after the first 20 or-so) that admin people could easily do the typing & photocopying. Unfortunately writing to 15 students on my module has been delayed by lack of experience with the procedures (& a certain "it's not my job to work it out; I just type!" attitude) so I was keen to get the ball rolling after 2 weeks! As it happens they're all guilty (have admitted it) so I'm not stressed about the effects on them -- in fact, IMO, they get off very lightly with the minimum University penalty: "Get zero for plagiarised assignment, otherwise process module as normal." But I am keen to get the paperwork right to avoid having the assessment boards overrule the "guilty" verdict in June! Ah well, every day is a school day ... some days you learn new skills, others you learn things about yourself or others ;->

Cricket

It's actually quite pleasant to hear the cheers, whistles and roars of approval from the Students' Union today -- the cricket is obviously pleasing some of our students! (It beats the usual sound of loud arguments from the car park beneath my window...)

Personal hygiene

OK, maybe I was the same when I was a student (I doubt it!), maybe I'm too fastidious these days but I wish students would bathe before coming to University! Yuckola...

MIT World

Now this is an amazing and thought-provoking streaming video resource: MIT World. Check out the intriguing titles in the Science category. (Take note, all you educational technology centres with intranet streaming video servers ... although I guess MIT has the cash to fund this. Kudos to them!)

Shocker: Students do well in a test!

Pleasantly surprising: My in-class test yesterday on PHP, regular expressions and basic web database stuff saw some excellent results: For the 1^st time in a CBT that I wrote a student got 100%! It also went reasonably smoothly ... at least relative to my recent experiences with Blackboard here! ("Just" 4 students out of 60 had problems, one resat the test today.) There was a good spread of results, average was ~50% but one smug student proclaimed he'd got 48/60 without revising ... so he'll be getting a personalised test next time ;->

Plagiarism and convicting the guilty

Today we interviewed two groups of students about why it was possible to download a copy of their 6-stage "Breakout" assignment from a web site (that has recently gone offline) ... amazingly when presented with the evidence one dumbass persisted with "copying and pasting off the web is just like learning from lecture notes isn't it?" If I have time/feel safe to do-so I'll post the full story here -- it makes for a cautionary tale!

Calvin and Hobbes at Martijn's - Calvin and Hobbes Extensive Strip Search

Calvin & Hobbes -- cartoons for childhood and (cynical) adulthood <grin> Calvin and Hobbes at Martijn's - Calvin and Hobbes Extensive Strip Search

Interviews today

6 interviews today for the School's vacant "Lecturer/Senior Lecturer in Computing" post -- a bunch of strong candidates gave varyingly comprehensible short research talks this morning (sorry -- I was struggling in the sixth...) Their interview were this afternoon so they're done and dusted now (I was not in on the interviews, just the morning's antics.) Good luck to you all (obv. 1 post, 6 candidates, you can't all "win".)

More group work

I'm doing Group Work with a 3^rd year group (technically: Level 3 as some of 'em have been around for more than 3 years.) To try and avoid the chaos that the 2^nd years' group work always causes I've sacrificed 12 hours of my valuable work time to meet with them all (this is a new module that takes a disturbing amount of preparation & they're already complaining that I'm too slow with my lecture slides.) It's supposed to be a chance for their notional business group to meet their pretend client (me!) and in the process check that their group can work together and has begun to plan the work ... So I make a nice page for them to see available appointments and book their preferred slot, check that I'm making slots at appropriate times for the majority of timetables and offer to schedule other times to meet in exceptional cases. There are 26 groups and lo! at the end of the first week 3 appointments have been wasted, 9 groups have signed-up and 17 have yet to pick a time! At least at Level 2 they have 7 other modules to replace a messed-up score with, at level 3 every module counts to their final degree classification! I (& maybe you) would think they'd put a bit of effort into things at this critical stage...

It has prompted some activity -- a few lazy students who couldn't be bothered to form their own groups within my 3 week timescale (c'mon! You have to do it quickly to give yourselves time to work!) are now whinging that they're not working with the people they want to work with & can I please sort them out -- 3 students from 3 separate groups means disrupting 6 other students. Simple mathematics ...

Update: Grrrr ... due to University policy on registering modules & admin inefficiency I actually don't know who's enrolled on the module. It means I have to sort out the bleeping groups in case the 'active' (complaining) students are grouped with inactive/unenrolled students :-( Ho hum...

Solaris administration panic!

Argh! The problem with running a server for students' use when you're an 'amateur' sysadmin is that occasionally things will go wrong ... Today a problem with account permissions and orphaned uid's meant a selection of my students suddenly were denied their home directories, dumped into the root and saw everything! Fortunately they were the good students and didn't go hacking about through the file systems <shudder> but reported it ... 3 h. later and 5 years of ad-hoc mismanagement by 2 separate, amateurs is undone and the permissions are 'sensible' again. It was a nervous time! (But nothing confidential was on the server, just my lecture notes and research data.)

"At" symbol added to Morse Code

<grin> 160 years in the making, morse code can now describe a bit more of valid email address syntax: SYMBOL ADDED TO MORSE CODE 02/17/04 (spotted on www.dmxzone.com)

Annoying

A student I'm offering a chance to do some extra credit work to increase his failing grade to a marginal fail/bare pass (why I let myself be persuaded I don't know!) phoned 20 minutes after his supposed appointment time to say he'd just crashed his new BMW but was otherwise uninjured (emotional scars!) So, am I more annoyed because he missed the appointment or that a supposedly "impoverished student" has a BMW to crash? You decide...

18Feb Update: He turned up today with a piece of work he was adamant was his own but could not explain even the simplest thing about and had failed to validate his XHTML -- they start that in year 1 and I spent 11 weeks in their year 2 giving them weekly exercises where validation was necessary! The result: He was wasting my time, had not put in the effort, could not demonstrate progress towards any learning outcomes from the work so his grade remains a fail => Resit time! Moral: If given a second chance, don't throw it away!

The oddest thing for me was his statement Oh but I can't possibly make a summer resit as my sister is getting married abroad ... I don't know how it is with you lot but in my culture that's a really busy time. Is that a racial slur? Fun fun fun...

Max Design - Definition lists - misused or misunderstood?

Neglected HTML tags: The Definition List <dl>, <dt>, <dd> discussed by Russ Weakley Max Design - Definition lists - misused or misunderstood?

So today I gave out my the specification for a group project to my Databases and the Web class (lecture 3) and discussed a web database design technique that I wanted them to follow in the project. Lo! and behold! my lack of surprise when a dozen or-so (out of 50) left at the "5 minutes I'm exhausted and so are you" mid-lecture break. I thought I was presenting a vaguely interesting workthrough example but obviously that's not enough! I even noticed the student who spoke to me after lecture 2 sneaking out and she'd said she was finding everything difficult -- what kind of extra help will she expect in the future?! Blimey...

Hmmm that reminds me though: When she spoke to me (started with a bad question: Can you help? None of it makes sense.) I said: Read the slides, work out what you still don't understand and bring me a list of question. She never got back to me! Quelle surprise... What students get out of module is often related to what they put in: GIGO!

Feedback from standardised "module questionnaires" is often useless (so many students draw pretty patterns on their MCQ grids!) apart from the written comments section that I often enjoy reading. The dominant theme from WebTech last term seemed to be "It's too hard with too much work!" Well excuse me for having high standards!! It always amuses me to read comments like that and then see the same student ticking the "1-3 hours a week spent on the module" box or (funnier!) the "Found this module no harder than my other modules" or (funniest!) "I attended over 80% of the lectures" -- the average attendance is below 2/3 so it's a bit unlikely! However if you're reading this and genuinely found it hard work then ... good! I happen to think that there is an ideal workload that is often more than you/I/the student feels comfortable working at ... it's the balance that matters and I aim to make the workload challenging but not (hopefully) impossible. Not everyone is motivated by high expectations but as "they" say ;-) "You can't please everyone all the time"! (So a note for next year: The high workload stays!)

Now this is way cool <grin> -- Orson Scott Card's book "Ender's Game" (definitely on my list of books I'd pay to replace) and Heinlein's "Starship Troopers" (the book is better than the film -- trust me!) are both on the US Marine's reading list! (Thanks to Jen for the entertaining link.)

Beginning HTML pedagogically

Jill presents a lovely example of creative students using a creative medium and being inspired by their lecturer. If only our students were (a) creative and (b) could be inspired -- large groups, students disengaged from the beginning and other excuses (!) tend to doom us to failure in this regard (weeding out the wastrels needs doing quicker!) This year's beginning HTML class has over 150 students enrolled and last week's lab sessions had less than 25% attendance :-(

Mozilla Firefox

For various reasons my favourite browser (Mozilla Firebird) has been rebranded as Mozilla Firefox, accompanied by a 'new' release <grin>

The power of the human brain...

The pweor of the hmuan mnid

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch codnutced at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are tpyed, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit oedrer. The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh?

That looks amazingly similar to some communiqués I get from students (in a hurry? not paying attention? dyslexic?) so it's a good job we do have the power to interpret information beyond strict ordering of letters <grin>

Hmmm ... more applications for SVG: Mapping and Visualization Resources :: hebig.org/blog. I've a 3^rd year project students looking at this kind of stuff but I'd not thought of GIS before -- cool!

Andy Budd::Blogography: The Business Case for Web Accessibility

Nice exposition of The Business Case for Web Accessibility (& a relatively local person too!) It's more and more important as we attempt to further widen participation.

Using Lovelock's "Daisyworld" metaphor to represent temperature: dealmeida.net : A garden of cellular automata. Now that's meteorological-geekyness <grin>

The Dumbass Daily

Customs people do not think some things are funny (with some justification): The Dumbass Daily: "Repeat After Me: Don't Make Jokes About Bombs at the Airport " (Reminds me of the Chicago guy who got deported on the UK TV "Airport" show for joking that his concert violin case contained a gun...)

Plagiarism

• taking someone's words or ideas as if they were your own
• a piece of writing that has been copied from someone else and is presented as being your own work

To avoid plagiarising this I'm happy to admit that it was copied from www.hyperdictionary.com and the only way in which it's my work is that I entered the word as a search term into Google. Unfortunately a number of students seem to think that copying from Google deserves the same credit as pains-taking research...

Today I'm not particularly proud to say we severely damaged the degree prospects of a student over a plagiarised essay -- admittedly it was worth 50% of a whole module so we were (technically) right to do-so, but University rules allow for one penalty and only one penalty for the lowest-level of plagiarism: 0% for that piece of work (and that's the minimum penalty.) Two students were interviewed separately, both admitted the offence. The first's essay was 100% plagiarised off the web and completely unreferenced. The second was 90% plagiarised and fully referenced. Both receive zero for the piece of work. Unfortunately the second student was finishing his degree by taking just two modules ... he's now likely to fail one of them which puts his degree classification in serious jeopardy ...

I feel very sorry for the student as the University rules are black and white whereas this situation was clearly not as clear-cut: Student #1 is mid-way through his third year and can still recover his grades; student #2 has no opportunity to recover. Admittedly it was very stupid to submit a piece of work where 90% of the text was copy/pasted from web pages, especially in the final module of his final year, and the University rules are known to the students (this one was involved in a module with me last year where I made it very clear what happens to plagiarists.) However I feel it would have been fair to offer the student a second chance (this was a 1^st offence ... sort-of.)

So if you're a student at the University where I work then beware! I loathe plagiarism and am determined to seek it out in assignments I'm asked to mark ... even when it costs me time, sleep and (this time) adds a little tarnish to my soul.

Moral: Don't be tempted to submit plagiarised work for credit. (And if you're unsure what constitutes plagiarism then ask someone! Your lecturer will be delighted to tell you ... probably at great length & you may have difficulty shutting him/her up, it depends on the time of year and how recently he/she has had to mark a piece of plagiarised work!)

I'm off on a "Multicultural Awareness" training day tomorrow ... <grin> I thought maybe it would help me to better understand my students so signed-up when the opportunity arose! OTOH maybe it'll be a major tree-hugging, touchy-feely waste of time ... I'll find out soon!

Update: OK, I'm feeling more Multiculturally Aware but not particularly enlightened about my students ... ah well.

Marking

Oh joy! The Web Technologies marking is due on Wenesday (so says Faculty Admin.) so I have 200 assignments to mark, each made up of 11 web pages mostly with CSS. I've just spent 2 solid 14-hour days and am ¾ of the way through -- it's the plagiarism that takes time! Cross-referencing unique solutions between cheating scumbag students is so disheartening. Last year ~40% of the class copied at least one assignment so I tried to persuade this year's class not to, evidently with not much success.

Last year the irony-highlight was 2 students copying a file and not changing the birthday contained within (durrrrr...) This year I've had 2 "skeleton" solutions submitted complete with "insert your name here" comments. Worrying -- these are 2^nd and 3^rd years not the inexperienced first years mentioned elsewhere so the majority of copiers may have hidden their tracks better :-(

Something for the office? The BBC makes this excellent radio programme available online: BBC - Radio 1 John Peel

What a joy it is to be a carnivore in an (approximately) open society: die puny humans on organic food -- made I laugh, it did!

Jeremy Zawodny's blog: The Value of a Sanity Check

Should be in "Debugging101" -- 99% of the time a solution to a problem will become obvious when explaining the problem to someone else ... the other 1%? Someone else will spot the solution, not you!

Accessibility

From The Register: Disabled users struggle to access FTSE 100 sites. A darned good example of how common inaccessible (unaccesible?) web sites are ... Is this page accessible? I must confess to not having checked :-(

Clever marriage of RSS/XML and the US Government's policy of making weather information freely available: Boy Genius Incorporated - Weather Feed. I wonder if there are UK forecasts available and is the software open source?

A jumbo web-design, HTML and CSS reference list compiled by a lecturer and her students: Web Design References. Bookmark it & subscribe to their RSS feed (big useful lists like that need RSS feeds ... cool!) Pointed out by Jeffrey Zeldman.

Mozilla Firebird is my current favourite browser -- this looks like a cool extension for it: Web Developer Extension on chrispederick.com

An absolute howler today! A group of students submitted a broken Group Project and attached the following note to the submission: (My emphasis)

I am submiting my group project in the form of a zip file like you asked the other 2 files are also attached any problem please let me know. when u open the zip file the game might not play properly because the way we have structured the game is all our image files are in a sub directory called my textures i will add it with my workfolder i am sure u are smart enough to spot the problem and i hope i wont lose marks for this because to us its neater programming.

Are they so frighteningly stupid that they really thought insulting their lecturer's intelligence was a good idea?! In this particular case the game was so obviously broken (no pictures meant nothing at all was visible!) that a partially-sighted mongoose suffering from a bad rattlesnake bite could probably have spotted the mistake (maybe not understood the cause, but spotted the difference anyway!) ... I might be stupid at times but I ain't that stupid!

Needless to say in the caring'n'sharing educational system in which I work I gave them an opportunity to fix their code before the deadline ... in a not so distant time they'd probably have failed the whole module for being so stupid (even though the assignment is 'only' worth 30%.) Ahhh, nostalgia!

Bad questions

We all (should) know how to ask questions in a sensible, informative and useful manner (the smart way?), even if we don't do it all the time. However even the brightest of my students (level 2, undergraduate level) occasionally comes-up with an excellently bad question like this: ur proof dont show what its ment to but its k i belive u ill mush have missed someting. What on earth is meant by this? I've no idea and the context (not shown here) does not help much either!

Interesting use of SVG with fallback IMG using OBJECT goer.org: October 2003 Archives from this tutorial.

HTML and CSS - HTML Dog

Some excellent XHTML and CSS resources from this UK web developer: HTML and CSS - HTML Dog.

Leaving it late

Sadly 2 student who seem to be finally putting some effort into a module have left it too late to effectively salvage their 30% group project. They chose (in October) to form a group of 5 friends (a sixth joined them eventually). They then left the work until 2 weeks before the deadline (wasting 5 weeks) as they felt it looked straightforward from my outline of the project. Finally they were (all) given an extension of a further 3 weeks and these two actually started the work with 2 weeks to go and have realised that (a) it is hard and that (b) their friends have given up on the module (either planning to plagiarise or hoping to pass on a summer resit.) ... this leaves them with 2 options: either form a splinter group (as they're the only ones working!) or 'vote' 0% effort for their friends. Neither choice is an easy one to take when working with friends, but if they're leaving you to do the work then and expecting to take credit for your effort then they are not showing the proper respect friendship enatails (IMO, of course!)
Moral:

1. Don't leave starting complex assignments until it's too late!
2. Tread carefully when group-working with friends -- remember mutual respect comes from both sides.
3. Manage your time!

The author of my recommended text for the Web Technologies module has a new web developor web site: Webmaster information, tips, and tutorials - Michael Moncur's Website Workshop ... hopefully it'll fill up!

CSS, Accessibility and Standards Links

Holy CSS Zeldman! CSS, Accessibility and Standards Links

Finished phoning my folks, drinking & revelling so ... Happy New Year everyone!

2004 looks set to be the year I learn about Web Databases PDQ as I'm teaching a module on it this coming semester. Hopefully this year I'll also (finally) learn some lessons about Group Work assignments and implement them in a more useful way for my students...