Saturday, June 26, 2004

Accessibility

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

Thursday, June 24, 2004

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>

Monday, June 21, 2004

Collaborative "Open Textbook"

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

Thursday, June 17, 2004

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!

Tuesday, June 15, 2004

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).

Saturday, June 05, 2004

Tufte said PowerPoint Is Evil

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

Friday, June 04, 2004

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 10th 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!)

Thursday, June 03, 2004

Plagiarism, procedures and penalties

An article in last week's Evening Standard (Thursday 27th 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 & 2nd 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!

6th 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...