Should I use tables for layout?

Now there's a simple, definitive answer to that age-old question: No! :-D

Thanks Chris. I particularly like the source code!
(via WTF Is the Big Deal? Don't Use <table> for Layout!.)

Phishing and stupidity

I probably ought to cross-post this to my Stupid Questions blog... What's the appropriate headline? "Students warned not to disclose user information by email disclose information anyway." D'oh!

In praise of PC imaging

My institution has hundreds of PCs so it's perfectly reasonable to expect our tech's to install software and operating systems using disk images prepared once and deployed many times. A stealth problem arose recently as a consequence of the Windows XP image from a few years ago which had been "interfered with" by central tech's responsible for administering our (then new) SharePoint server What a great idea it'd be if PCs could quickly access SharePoint without all that tedious mucking about with DNS? Let's put the name of the server and its IP address in "hosts" -- that'll speed things up for everyone!

So, lo! and behold!, the inevitable happened as Nature intended, and those self-same tech's changed the IP address of the server when the server hardware was upgraded a year or-so later (to ease the changeover). Nothing seemed wrong, since the University's desktop PCs had been upgraded in the interim with a different image to accommodate Office 2007 but quite a few staff laptops slipped through the net. I don't know how many hours my faculty's tech's wasted trying password changes, HTTP header analysis, Novell tweaks and client upgrades because of this blunder (it was tricky as SharePoint was the last server in a line of authentication redirects for external logins), but I'm glad that one of them eventually located the problem in "hosts" amidst the hundreds of out-of-date ad-blocking localhost name resolutions some other bright spark had included ;-)

Moral: Neat ideas need to be tempered with expert knowledge and every man needs to know his limitations!

Degree classifications: take 2

All this post-Burgess, league tables era discussion of degree classifications and grade inflation is shifting my viewpoint: The Burgess report pretty-much suggests we do away with the 1st/2:1/2:2/3rd/unclassified degree class system & replace it with a transcript ... when I first read about it, I was annoyed: I like the idea of a 1st etc (it's what I'm used to). However, a natural institutional response to all this measuring/league-tabling/student-satisfaction-scoring malarkey is to fiddle things (that's easier than fixing things!) and the emails from MMU, the discussion on the Beeb and stuff that's happening internally here are devaluing the classification system so that it's not fit for purpose any more. How will an employer treat a 1st in Maths from MMU, Nottingham Trent, Oxford Brookes and Thames Valley? By giving it partial credence as a primary filter and then concentrating on the real evidence: Grades, references and interviews. So for future students it's even more important to get a good profile (as well as a "good" degree). I suspect it's all a subtle plan to make 1st/2:1/… meaningless so that it dies a natural death, and that would be closing a chapter in UK HE history :-(

Degree classifications

The BBC article is based on a leaked email from Manchester Metropolitan University quoting an email from their Maths & Computing dept's "academic standards manager" not-so-subtly hinting that a failure to award as many 1st/2:1 degrees as other Universities is a bad thing. I disagree that it's necessarily bad to have some institutions with a smaller rate of 1st/2:1 (variability is natural) and I am wholeheartedly against the implied hint to "drop your standards, the institution needs better statistics". Professional University staff work hard to (a) maintain standards (internally) and (b) maintain comparable standards (with the help of external examiners etc.) and we should continue to do-so.

I and my colleagues are under the same pressure: The institution where I work also awards fewer 1st/2:1 than the sector average. So what? It's a meaningless statistic! What about intake? Compare like with like! Where I work we're proud of the fact that we take students with lower A-level grades than at some other places and give 1st/2:1 degrees to a good proportion of those who make it to final year ... we add value, they work hard to reach the standard. I say to students: Keep it up! And to staff: Resist grade deflation!

Student threats

I've never had abusive threats from a student, but I know people who have ... shocking state of affairs.

IE8

OK, so I missed the initial IE8 furore, have now caught-up with a few views and here's my tuppence:

• A proprietary <meta> tag to say "Use IE6/7/8/… rendering mode" is an olive branch to the web design community (it says "Hey, you don't have to redo the IE7-compatible layout right now but please do-so later, when you have time.")
• The IE7 default layout says "We're about to push IE7 through Windows Update to everyone and we know you've invested time/money/effort into getting those old IE6 sites working in IE7" now:

  Optimistic head?

  "We'd like to keep updating IE8 and beyond but just so's you don't have to everytime we do, get it working in IE7 and we'll guarantee that IE>7 won't break the site (unlike last time.)"

  Pessimistic head?

  "We'll pre-announce IE8 to make it look like we're committed now and in the future to improving IE's web standards support but by telling everyone that IE7 will be the future default we can happily let IE8+ languish if it looks like there's insufficient ROI to continue developing IE."

I'm happy to be optimistic and believe the IE development team guys will be allowed and willing to continue their efforts towards moving-target-standards-compliance, I just wouldn't be surprised if in the not-too-distant future IEx once again was left to moulder.

Head First JavaScript (O'Reilly)

Couldn't say it better than Web Teacher so I won't bother: Head First JavaScript by Michael Morrison (O’Reilly, 2008) may not ring up five stars for everyone, but I like the Head First books so much so that it'll be going on my "strongly recommended" (short) list of core texts for "Web Technologies" next year.

Marking n papers (for sufficiently large values of n)

:-) been there, done that!

(from http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=974)

Hallelujah

I'm totally with this RYS post:

Not all students act horribly...and it's those students I worry most about. When Paula Plagiarist gets a C because she whined to a faculty-hating administrator about her F, what does that do to Marvin Mediocre who actually earned his C by performing with a basic level of competency? When Big-Mouth Barry bombs a class, bitches his way through a grade grievance and is awarded a C just to go away, what does that do to Sally the C-Student, who had some health problems and earned a C because she came to the final exam with a sinus infection?

I love (platonically, you understand!) the student that works and deserves the grade they get, even if they're not the most academically gifted (there's a real thrill in working with the student who suddenly "gets it" after some hard graft). I do my damnedest, & consider it my job, to make sure that they all get the grade they deserve, including

• Whining William and his endless set of excuses,
• Cheating Charlene and her group of plagiarists who paid "some bloke off the internet" to do their project,
• Loophole Larry who thinks that exerting effort getting around the regulations is academically-equivalent to doing the work,
• Mike the Muppet whose idea of catching-up after a prolonged (genuine, mit. circ. style) absence is to copy a pile of work off the internet etc.

If you're not one of these (or those listed on RYS) then make sure you take advantage of the opportunities we try to provide -- I hope I'll never turn away a deserving student (not permanently, anyway: we are all busy people, after all...)

Bare-faced cheek

Today was final assessment day for this year's Web Technologies module: A Questionmark Perception test and short JavaScript assignment. Sadly the start to the test malfunctioned and I was forced to remove the Blackboard setting that restricted students to one attempt at the test. Happily Perception gives easy access to all attempts by every student (something Blackboard does not, easily anyway); unhappily, in hindsight, I should have restricted them to a few attempts rather than unlimited...

Amusingly, one student assumed I wouldn't check and he used this lapse to attempt the assessment over-and-over until his time ran out, utilising the fact that the assessment showed the marks to gain an unfair advantage. Happily I did check and so we'll be enacting the relevant part of the "Cheating in Assessment" regulations on his behalf. What a waste of time!!

And the bare faced cheek? He had the chutzpah to complain at the end of the test (before I'd discovered his perfidy) that he'd arrived late & unfairly lost time. This fell on my unsympathetic ears -- no good excuse => no extra time. Tough monkeys! But cheeky, nonetheless...