The Register BOFH

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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...