A lecturer's tale...

Groan

2011-09-12T17:43:00.002+01:00

The Times covered a two-day conference on heavy metal at the University of Wolverhampton on 5 September in a piece unlikely to dispel the popular misconception that academics tend towards self-indulgence. Scott Wilson, professor in media and cultural studies at Kingston University, cranked the absurdity up to 11 when he told the newspaper of his experiences playing a Motörhead song to a class. "

Trolling

2011-06-30T09:13:00.002+01:00

Here's a nice response from a blogger to probable comment-trolling that made me laugh so thought it was worth reposting: It’s quite a hot day in the UK today, but you must be feeling nice and cool beneath that bridge of yours. I am afraid your wait for an apology will be a rather long one. Happy Trolling. — mjp6034 in The Babeling of Miss_Snuffy Hat-tip to the HTML5 Doctor for the HTML5

Fifteen movie questions meme

2011-06-18T15:23:00.007+01:00

Inspired by Katie, I'm not good at "top 10" (too fickle) but here are a few ephemeral choices... Movie you love with a passion Snap! Movie you vow never to watch 'nuff said... Movie that literally left you speechless Watched it late at night on my own in an almost empty cinema ... I know it's not a real classic but I was speechles at the end. Movie you always recommend Timeless! Actor/Actress you

Defining what education is really for

2011-06-15T10:15:00.004+01:00

Bizarrely, I've just had a congruent conversation with a very eloquent and switched-on Students' Union president-elect and our equally insightful L&T Coordinator: Multiplication smackdown: Sal Khan vs Vi Hart – who’s got the ‘insight’? (from Quantum Progress).As a maths and computing lecturer I know something about both sides but I'm still siding with Vi: Khan is brilliant as a resource and the

Marking desperation

2011-05-31T14:11:00.002+01:00

1st exam paper marked and already I've resorted to cheering myself up with a cake & coffee :-( Hopefully not the shape of things to come, but at least my marking scheme is objective and unequivocal!

Students Should Check Their Sense of Entitlement at the Door - Commentary - The Chronicle of Higher Education

2011-04-04T13:18:00.000+01:00

Not shocking, not surprising, just disappointing: Students Should Check Their Sense of Entitlement at the Door - Commentary - The Chronicle of Higher Education:The sad thing is, I'm not alone. Every college teacher I know is bemoaning the same kind of thing. Whether it's rude behavior, lack of intellectual rigor, or both, we are all struggling with the same frightening decline in student

Bad semester for cheating :-(

2011-02-17T23:08:00.001Z

Unlike last year (when the game was "sliding blocks puzzle") this year's Snake game in my Javascript module seemed to encourage lots of copy-off-the-web cheating :-( mainly because there's lots of crappy DOM0 downloadable examples out there - the students all got 0% because I mark their "mini viva" presentations but it's a depressing waste all the same. One group was different: their game went

True story

2011-01-13T22:13:00.003Z

An electronic engineering academic complained to an administrator today that the link to [a file I wanted] is broken ... upon investigation the administrator established that the academic thought that the text announcement on our VLE which contained the name of the file underlined was a broken link because it was underlined text that did nothing when clicked upon! Is that the most severe

Plagiarism: It's not fair excuse doesn't work

2010-10-11T22:20:00.002+01:00

The exact same excuse appeared in the papers last year IIRC ... let's hope it doesn't catch on ;-)

Assessment tasks shouldn't be Googleable

2010-05-19T14:36:00.002+01:00

If your students can complete your assessment task and receive high grades by copying from Google or Wikipedia, the problem is not with the student but with the task. Amen to that!

21st century academic

2010-05-10T17:17:00.003+01:00

via MASHe: more than a quarter (28.7%) said they deal with over 250 emails a week and those with 250 or more emails a week said they did just 0-5 hours of research a week, 5-15 hours of teaching, but 25 hours or more of administration sad but true :-(Until the academy recognises that a true academic (not an ersatz one who (a) isn't a Reader/Prof but (b) "focuses on research") has to balance all

What Harry Potter can tell us about teaching styles

2009-12-23T09:43:00.002Z

Great post from Dot Physics summarising "teaching styles" from Harry Potter & the Order of the Phoenix — when I first read the book I thought Dolores Umbridge's comments were pretty horrifying but, sadly, close to what's said in HE circles about the UK's National Curriculum and what the government's obsession with targets forces schoolteachers to focus on …Sadly we're not immune:

Meeting verbiage

2009-12-11T10:38:00.003Z

Thanks to Swans On Tea for this morning's moment of amusement:On Thursday I accumulated the datum that the phrase I might work better wearing lederhosen, but we’re just not going to find that out instantly ends the meeting.http://blogs.scienceforums.net/swansont/archives/4388Don't you just love/hate (depending on side of fence) people who derail meetings with "amusing" absurd analogies, reductio

IELTS not spell-checking own web

2009-12-08T15:18:00.003Z

We were discussing the use of IELTS for PhD students so I was amused by the irony — stackeholders?!

Basic time knowledge absent?

2009-11-04T23:02:00.002Z

Currently the Odeon web site contains the following notice: Important InformationPlease note the performance of THE TWILIGHT SAGA: NEW MOON listed at 00:01 on Friday 20th November is actually showing at 00:01 on the night between Thursday 19th November and Friday 20th November and therefore is showing in the early hours of Friday 20th November.Grumpy-old-man: I weep for the youth of today!

Hybrio rechargeable batteries

2009-10-03T21:58:00.004+01:00

Just bought four AA 2100mAh Hybrio NiMh batteries and a Technoline BC900 iCharger (which is cool!) Tested the four Hybrios with the iCharger, which reported capacities of 1907mAh, 1949mAh, 1950mAh and 2000mAh — is that normal?

Keynotes: Old school!

2009-08-26T13:58:00.002+01:00

Perhaps should be a poll: Are conference keynotes predominantly given by poor speakers?At the conference I'm currently at it's 50:50 so-far (decider, keynote#3, is tomorrow) — both professors, the first was a current lecturer and got his message across with minimal PowerPoint-text-abuse, the second is a high-up University IT manager who has a tendency to use reams of what looks like 10pt text and

What we learn

2009-07-31T15:40:00.003+01:00

According to William Glasser, we learn... 10% of what we read 20% of what we hear 30% of what we see 50% of what we see and hear 70% of what is discussed with others 80% of what is experienced personally 95% of what we teach to someone else (via etre.)

Misfits of interaction design

2009-07-22T12:20:00.002+01:00

Amusing WTFs. To-date just 2 Adobe snafus, but maybe worth watching for the occasional smile :-)

University Websites crit by Paul Boag

2009-07-16T09:44:00.002+01:00

... Paul (from Headscape & Boagworld) makes some good points ;-)

Why you can't discount IE6 (for certain sectors...)

2009-07-16T09:36:00.002+01:00

… Hats off to the Department of Culture, Media and Sport which expects to complete its move to IE7 by the end of August. Less brilliantly, the Department of Children, Families and Schools plans to move from IE6 in 2010/2011. The Department of Health has no plans to upgrade - indeed it has yet to decide which browser to move to or when any such upgrade might happen…

End of another assessment season :-)

2009-07-10T14:25:00.003+01:00

Whoopee! The final exam board of the year is over at last :-)Some excellent results have been achieved, so my thanks to all of the students whose final year results I've been involved with: Most of you worked really hard and I'm very pleased with the results of your efforts :-DNotable mentions go to all of my project students: Andrew, Katy, Martina, Sam, Sayvai, Wei, and those whose projects I

Binless stupidity

2009-07-04T10:48:00.004+01:00

The HE sustainability bandwagon seems to be populated with micromanagers: Let's not tackle the big issues, such as the appalling cost of heating outdated buildings and the insane "policies" of facilities management types who insist that "heating goes on at a set date and off at a set data every year", but we'll look at tiny projects like removing bins to encourage recycling. Not that encouraging

Corrupted files for sale

2009-07-01T12:08:00.003+01:00

via Bruce Schneier:Here's a site that sells corrupted MS Word files. The idea is that you e-mail one of the files to your professor when your homework is due, buying you a few hours -- or maybe days -- of extra time before your professor notices that it's corrupted. On the one hand, this is clever. But on the other hand, it's services like these that will force professors to treat

Mitigating Circumstances

2009-06-12T13:44:00.003+01:00

I don't begrudge 2½ hours of my time for a meeting discussing the merits of various mitigating circumstances claims -- some are very sad and deserve every sympathy and all the help we can give (sometimes over-constrained by regulations).However, what's with the massive number of I missed the exam because I got confused about the time/date/title/code/venue? whingers?! I guess they punish

Should I use tables for layout?

2008-11-16T19:32:00.003Z

Now there's a simple, definitive answer to that age-old question: No! :-DThanks Chris. I particularly like the source code! (via WTF Is the Big Deal? Don't Use for Layout!.)

Phishing and stupidity

2008-11-14T10:35:00.003Z

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

2008-07-13T17:22:00.003+01:00

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

Degree classifications: take 2

2008-07-01T15:12:00.004+01:00

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

Degree classifications

2008-07-01T14:50:00.003+01:00

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

Student threats

2008-06-23T09:45:00.001+01:00

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

IE8

2008-02-26T11:00:00.002Z

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

Head First JavaScript (O'Reilly)

2008-02-12T21:47:00.000Z

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)

2008-02-08T21:26:00.000Z

:-) been there, done that! (from http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=974)

Hallelujah

2008-01-17T20:57:00.000Z

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

Bare-faced cheek

2008-01-17T20:19:00.001Z

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);

JavaScript tips

2007-12-05T21:21:00.000Z

You know how occasionally you read a tip and have a "wow" or "lighbulb" moment? Well, this collection of seven JS techniques from Dustin Diaz contained six such events for me (seriously: I read them over several days and had a "ding!" moment from all six code tips -- nice!)

Possum Death Spree!

2007-11-28T10:19:00.000Z

Sick but funny! Get ready for Possum Death Spree! ... I particularly liked the they've been frozen in the permafrost ... now global warming has set them free and:Dying cop:They killed the dinosaurs?Handcuffed scientist-guyNo, they killed half the dinosaurs; they made the other half watch!

@media AJAX 07 final thoughts

2007-11-21T20:57:00.000Z

It was a great conference, with a good mix between "techy" and some "designy" stuff from some really world-leading presenters. Well done Patrick :-) If I can get the funding I'll be back for @media 2008.(& my reason for the over-long, verbose summaries of the talks was to give some flavour of the conference to my students.)

@mediaAjax day 2.6: Wrap-up discussion panel

2007-11-21T20:36:00.000Z

The final session of @mediAjax was a discussion panel, starring Brendan Eich [BE], Stuart Langridge [SL], Alex Russell [AR] and Douglas Crockford [DC], ably chaired by Jeremy Keith (so Patrick & Jeremy made up, which is nice) and it ran with JK posing questions submitted by the audience and moderating the discussion:Mobile & JS:[Nobody mentioned Cameron Moll-style mobile user-centred design.]Not

@mediaAjax day 2.5: JavaScript: The Good Parts

2007-11-21T20:01:00.000Z

Douglas Crockford's title and opening remarks were complimentary to JS, emphasising that there are very good parts to the language, as evidenced by the range of users, from computer science graduates to cut'n'paste coders. JavaScript is succeeding in an environment where Java failed.Good things include prototype inheritance, 1st class functions (lambda) and loose typing. Closures work because of

@mediaAjax day 2.4: Dojo 1.0: great experiences for everyone

2007-11-21T09:19:00.000Z

The enthusiasm of Alex Russell, the speaker for the fourth session of the second day of @mediaAjax, was apparent instantly -- he spoke almost continuously, rapidly and coherently for the full hour of his talk: quite an achievement! He opened by listing "Maslow's hierarchy of needs" and relating them to the web, but there was so much new information contained in this part of his talk that I

@mediaAjax day 2.3: Metaprogramming JavaScript

2007-11-20T21:54:00.000Z

Dan Webb's talk turned out to be an explication of the JS language, notably the primitives, objects, functions and prototype inheritance. It was good to see those concepts explained in a clear fashion again but at the time I didn't get the link with metaprogramming which Dan defined as: Metaprogramming is the writing of computer programs that write or manipulate other programs (or themselves) as

@mediaAjax day 2.2: Building Interactive Prototypes with jQuery

2007-11-20T21:23:00.000Z

In day 2, session 2 of @mediaAjax, John Resig gave an excellent demonstration of the elegance and simple syntax of jQuery, so much so that I'm inspired to use it to replace/augment my teaching of the DOM next year. He said his slides would be available and that the jQuery site has lots of documentation and tutorials, so I'll not reproduce the example code here; suffice it to say that jQuery looks

@mediaAjax day 2.1: JavaScript 2 and the Open Web

2007-11-20T19:44:00.000Z

Brendan Eich's the father of JavaScript – – and opened the 2nd day of @mediaAjax. He started with some excellent geek movie/culture references (Star Wars, Lord of the Rings and Firefly!! Who could want more? Well, the audience apparently: Sadly hangovers were in evidence and these did not get the cheer they deserved — sorry, Brendan), followed-by general reasoning behind the need to extend

@mediaAjax day 1.6: Ajax at work -- a case study

2007-11-19T22:20:00.000Z

ppk's been one of my favourite JS developers for years so I was excited to see he was scheduled to be the 6th speaker on the 1st day of @mediaAjax. His talk focused around a genealogy application he was writing using Ajax/XHR-methods. I really enjoyed the "case study" approach (it was also very polite of him to use British royalty as his data source on this day, the Queen's 60th wedding

@mediaAjax day 1.5: Planning JavaScrip and AJax for large teams

2007-11-19T22:02:00.000Z

Christian Heilmann's was the 5th talk on @mediAjax's first day and it was an excellent description of managing teams of developers, which we probably ought to be expounding to our students and some of which I'll be trying out ("code review" as assessment practice and "lightning talks" for Faculty dissemination seem like good ideas...) His list of bad assumptions is worth repeating here -- don't

@mediaAjax day 1.4: How to destroy the web

2007-11-19T21:54:00.000Z

A funny wake-up after lunch on day 1 of @mediaAjax, Stuart Langridge firmly tongue-in-cheek described ample ways to keep the web from becoming useful and in the hands of we, the web geeky-elite ;-), including sucking bandwidth by ignoring Yahoo's YSlow plugin style recommendations, discouraging the use of well-designed libraries & reinventing the cross-browser wheel, permitting cross-site request

@mediaAjax day 1.3: Real world accessibility for Ajax-enhanced web apps

2007-11-19T21:42:00.000Z

Derek Featherstone is an entertaining speaker and I always enjoy his @media talks. The 3rd talk of @mediaAjax was no different but he touched only lightly on the Ajax accessibility question: he talked about taking Google Maps and replacing the naff

"buttons" with real buttons for his ironman site, demoed using DNS (everytime I see someone else use DNS I find out better ways of

@mediaAjax day 1.2: But I'm a bloody designer!

2007-11-19T21:32:00.000Z

The second talk on the 1st day of @mediAjax was an entertaining talk from Mike Stenhouse about the upskilling necessary to be a good designer in a modern web development team and how Ajax makes it even more-so: Ajax means you're designing the user experience and need to know how that's going to interact with the server, which means you need to know some JavaScript, front-end and back-end code etc

@mediaAjax day 1.1: The State of Ajax

2007-11-19T20:18:00.000Z

The State of Ajax@mediaAjax opened with a fascinating comparison with the current state of Ajax wrt the state in 2006 according to Ajaxian (where the authors wanted better/faster JavaScript, offline support, framework consolidation, tools inc. debugging: Speed increases in Firefox and Safari were contrasted with no change from IE, and the tantalising suggestion of a JIT compiler from Adobe from

Busy, busy, busy...

2007-10-11T10:14:00.000+01:00

The usual excuses about being too busy etc here's a quickie for what I've been doing recently:Spent the summer supervising a visiting French student, helping him to learn PHP and MySQL programming (I over-estimated what he knew before he arrived, so the project he was to work on proved very challenging ... still, it's 75% complete & working) Been to an excellent conference in

Moving home...

2007-08-16T11:07:00.000+01:00

Apologies: I'm moving physical house tomorrow which also entails a move of vitual home space so housekeeping-wise I'll finally have to get a proper web host ... this may take some time! Until then, au revoir...Update 20/Aug/2007: House-move has happened and I'll be sticking with Blogspot for a while...

POSH (pointlessly oversimplifying semantic HTML)

2007-08-16T11:03:00.000+01:00

I'm afraid I totally agree with this post: We don't need an acronym to "sell" semantic HTML (i.e. using HTML tags to represent the information they were designed for and/or that current best practice says they should be used for) ... but I have no aspirations to be a web-rock-star, so no worries!

When teaching feels worthwhile

2007-08-10T09:32:00.000+01:00

It's stories like this that make this job worthwhile...

More MySQL tips

2007-07-08T12:02:00.000+01:00

Nice list of yet more MySQL tips here courtesy of Fabulous Entertainment (entertaining indeed!) who cites a talk on Google Video by Jay Pipes which I must look at...

Scrolling and the page fold: data!

2007-07-06T10:20:00.000+01:00

Nice data illustrating users' scrolling behaviour from ClickTale on their blog. It helps to dispel the myth that users don't scroll (but Nielsen himself reported this in his 1997 Changes in Web Usability Since 1994). I love the histograms -- it's great to see data (plus they look like meteorological Talagrand diagrams, aka rank histograms, which I used to work on!) Interesting... plus the

Firefox grunges RSS feed display

2007-07-05T09:06:00.000+01:00

Just trying to adapt an RSS feed with an XSLT stylesheet: Works fine in IE6 :-) but lo! Firefox ignores the XSLT and renders the feed itself :-(Seems I'm not the only one (but at least a year behind the rest!): Bugzilla #338621 includes the following suggestion (and a lot of discussion!)The emerging workaround for this problem (which isn't new to us, since we're using the same heuristic that IE7

I'm going to @mediaAjax

2007-06-28T15:55:00.000+01:00

There are times when I love working in the University sector: we benefit from flexible attitudes to working and CPD (sometimes! Depends on management, budgets etc.)Today I got my ticket for @media Ajax November 19th — 20th, 2007 at The Church House Conference Centre, in Westminster, London SW1P 3NZ, UK.]: The @media Ajax conference brings together some of the leading figures in the field to

The student journey

2007-06-27T10:31:00.000+01:00

Maybe not a typical student in HE (we hope they reach the "enlightenment" stage before the 1st year!) and unlikely to be from the UK, but a good story detailing the journey from a compulsory-education-slacker to an empowered, independent learner. Hopefully inspiring stuff for other students: http://rateyourstudents.blogspot.com/2007/05/graduate.html I recently received a mail via Facebook from a

@media 2007

2007-06-10T16:51:00.000+01:00

London's @media 2007 was last week. Good content as ever, oddly the venue had no public WiFi (as usual!) Emotional "goodbyes" from Molly Holzschlag and Joe Clark at the start and end, respectively, bumped-up the emotion (I'll miss their talks: they've both had an influence on my web development educational practices.)I particularly liked it when the "Hot Topics" panel (chaired and hopefully

Facebook

2007-06-03T12:04:00.000+01:00

OK, so I'm late for the Facebook party but, in the words of Monty Python, I'm 37 ... I'm not old! ;-) Most amusing thing so far (other than: where do people find the time?) is the following found on the YOU KNOW YOU'VE BEEN IN UNIVERSITY TOO LONG WHEN... group: BEFORE I CAME TO UNIVERSITY, I WISH I HAD KNOWN... That Psychology is really Biology, that Biology is really Chemistry, that Chemistry

MySQL configuration for security

2007-05-16T10:28:00.000+01:00

fuþark started an interesting discussion on the possibilities of a MySQL worm ... not wanting to get embroiled in the technicalities I was struck by the sense of his suggestions for administrators securing their installations and so I've reproduced them here for future reference: It's obvious but probably still has to be stressed again: Disable all default accounts on any installation

Climate of fear?

2007-05-15T11:29:00.000+01:00

The BBC's report of a "bat box" being investigated by bomb squad was not a case of mistaken identity (it looked like a bomb!) but fear-induced over-sensitivity (terrorists want to blow-up the UK ... it might be a bomb!)Oddly, something similar's happening where I work: several people have commented to me recently (post-Virginia Tech. and UK knife attacks) that it's only a matter of time before a

MySQL and Flickr

2007-05-13T20:30:00.000+01:00

...an excellent example of using MySQL and a distributed DB strategy (not a DDBMS) by Flickr ... wish I'd seen it a month ago!

Web design profession survey

2007-05-12T18:54:00.000+01:00

A list apart has produced a survey asking questions of "our" profession (I count myself as an educator of web professionals and, by association, one of 'em!) ... fill it in and await the results ;-)

Minutes to Midnight

2007-05-09T14:57:00.000+01:00

Eagerly-anticipated (by me, anyway!) new album from Linkin Park ... a bit concerned about the fact that (according to their press) the album takes a more melodic and progressive direction than its predecessors, with the band utilising new instruments and recording techniques ... nu-prog-metal? say it ain't so! ;-)

The IQ speed bump

2007-05-02T16:31:00.000+01:00

From a friend observing a chat session: Some people should not be allowed on the internet! Observe:dftpnkezln:For all of you reporting a score more than 100 as you iq lol @ you. How can you possibly score more than 100%?dftpnkezln:I'm very happy with my score of 89.

LOL

2007-02-27T21:39:00.000Z

From http://xkcd.com/c221.html -- made me genuinely LOL: :-D

Ripoff software Unicode support

2006-10-13T17:10:00.000+01:00

We're currently upgrading from v3 to v4 of a well-known application for authoring, scheduling, delivering and reporting online assessments, namely Perception.v4 supports Unicode.Yay! :-)v4 has 2 licenses, one supporting less than one-tenth of one percent of the Unicode gamut, and the other supporting all of it.Boo! :-(This seems a little strange because if you support ASCII and your browser