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...)
Saturday, January 31, 2004
Wednesday, January 28, 2004
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 1st 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!)
Sunday, January 25, 2004
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 2nd and 3rd years not the inexperienced first years mentioned elsewhere so the majority of copiers may have hidden their tracks better :-(
Friday, January 23, 2004
Something for the office? The BBC makes this excellent radio programme available online: BBC - Radio 1 John Peel
Thursday, January 22, 2004
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 :-(
Sunday, January 11, 2004
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
Saturday, January 10, 2004
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!
Friday, January 09, 2004
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.
Thursday, January 08, 2004
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:
- Don't leave starting complex assignments until it's too late!
- Tread carefully when group-working with friends -- remember mutual respect comes from both sides.
- Manage your time!
Saturday, January 03, 2004
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!
Thursday, January 01, 2004
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...