In-class test

In-class test time, again. This year the Blackboard^® system behaved quite well (only 6 students out of 140 started their tests only to have them rejected when they'd finished this year ... unlike last year where dozens of problems occurred.) Sadly, this year's class average is much less than last year's :-( Happily one student got 98% <grin> so kudos to her ... sadly she's an outlier in the data!

Approachability

Sadly it seems I've lost the knack of appearing approachable this year :-(

Yesterday a group of students came to see me regarding my Web Tech. module because the chap they liked from last year who taught HTML was unavailable -- the spokesperson confessed that the others were unwilling to talk to me due to being scared(?!) Today there's an anonymous post on a discussion board complaining that the workload is too high this term ... but this 3^rd year is obviously also unwilling to talk to me about it... I don't feel more ferocious this year, perhaps they're more timid and I'd not noticed? Ah well, perhaps I'll reduce the lecture sarcasm next week...

Support procedures: "want, take, have"

2 weeks ago our ICT department informed me (via a roundabout route) that the server I administer seemed to have been infected with a trojan. I worked on removing it for a day or-so and heard nothing further from support so relaxed ... until today, 2 weeks later, I arrive at work to find that ICT have marched in and shut down the server without informing or asking anyone other than the Science tech. staff who have the key to the server room! A bit heavy-handed, in my opinion. So, the web pages hosted on the server, databases (student and mine), student work and lecture material are all gone¹ without so much as a by-your-leave :-( If we want access to their resources we ave to fill-in a form, submit it, wait 3-5 days, and hope. If they want something it's "want-take-have" (to misquote Faith in a certain episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer <grin>)

¹"OK, what about a backup?" you say. Sure ... it's backed-up, but the server is corrupt and the backup is on a system only that server can read (durrrrr...) I've a DAT tape backup too, but no PC-compatible DAT reader whilst our Science tech. is in sick-leave... <sigh>

HTML tables

Good article from 456 Berea Street on using HTML tables the way they were intended ... the definitive, complex description is in the W3C's HTML4 table documentation.

School of Maths + Computing and Information Systems = what?

Our Vice-Chancellor decided to merge us with CIS so what's the new faculty going to be called? One suggestion is "The Faculty of Informatics" but wtf does that mean to UK students?! My Polish colleague suggests it's a common-enough term on the continent but a quick survey of our students suggests they have no idea ... my preference is for something like "Faculty of Maths and Computing" or even "Faculty of Information Systems and Maths" (an "F-ism" <grin>) but I'm convinced that the "debate" that's being encouraged by management is a smoke-screen: we waste our effort arguing over relatively small issues while the management make all the important decisions without us and eventually (when we're worn down and permanently divided over this issue) they step-in with a "solution" that they had in mind all-along, getting it all done with the minimum of "moo". <sigh> but I hope I'm being too cynical and pray the University management will keep us all in the loop re. the new structure.

Coursework submission

I love coursework submission day :-) It makes the labs that follow the deadline so peaceful as the majority of students don't turn up, no doubt exhausted by the effort of creating 3 web pages, putting them in 3 separate folders and putting the lot in a ZIP file for submission... However I was truly impressed with a few students who turned up for the lab and managed to work through some exercises using the W3C's DOM node methods. Kudos to them, and a restful evening to the rest, fragile darlings! Now to get on with marking 120 sets of work :-(

Feedback and professionalism

Today we had our SSCC where student representatives get to (usually) air grievances and raise problems for our attention. It's a great forum, perhaps a bit slow having just one meeting per term but we are, usually, a friendly, open school that welcomes feedback. Feedback from my module seems to be that I've mistakenly given the impression that the DOM0 is old-fashioned (true) and useless (false), which is useful feedback but I'd have been happier to hear about it after a lecture so that I could correct the misapprehension immediately. Level 3 students also expressed the opinion that I'd asked them to read too much -- 1 chapter per week seems fine to me, perhaps it's the 3 chapters for their "reading week" (no lectures!) that they feel is excessive. I'd have expected final year students to be better at reading than second years, but apparently not... Ho hum.

Tidy applet

Wouldn't it be fun if someone compiled jtidy into an applet <grin>

It's a frickin function...

To mis-quote Dr Evil: it's a frickin function ... Working with 2^nd/3^rd year students on computing-related degrees who don't know what a function is, what arguments do and why you don't have to call function f(x) with an argument named x is rather frustrating, to put it mildly. Especially after the lecture where I said if you don't know what a function is, revise before this week's lab class or come and talk to me ... IMO, a jolly good time to frickin Google it!

Question Mark Perception

Last year our Educational Technology Unit arranged for the University to purchase Question Mark Perception and this year it's available for "early adopters" to test. Throwing caution to the wind I had my Blackboard tests converted for Perception (a time-consuming task, for some dumbass reason, as they both speak variants of XML.) The Perception system has been set up so that we must follow a long-winded procedure to create tests:

1. Create test offline.
2. Add obscure (Blackboard internal) module code to a comment field in the test.
3. Export test to "QPack" file (?!) with specific name space convention.
4. Log on to a module in Blackboard.
5. Take three clicks to find the Perception tools link and get authenticated for Perception server by Blackboard.
6. Import QPack file into Perception (3 more clicks & a pause.)
7. Return to Blackboard, 3 more clicks to add one from the list of Perception tests for the module ... if you forgot the obscure module code the test does not show (so go back 5 steps! + see below.)
8. Add the test, pretty-much as usual for Blackboard, sit back and relax...

This seems excessively complex, especially as Perception has a built-in publishing facility. Also apparently designed-in, is the inability of ordinary users to delete tests from the Perception server themselves. So if you forget the obscure module code you're stuck with a test you can't delete.

Now they always say caveat emptor to early adopters but it seems rather vital that when my students take their tests that their marks will get recorded in Blackboard for them to see. Perhaps it's a minor bug, but not only does this not happen (despite assurances to the contrary) the grade reporting software in Perception seems to be broken! And this has taken a full year to implement... <groan>

Update 15Oct04: The man in charge returned from a week-long conference today and has assured me that fixing the lack of grades is a top priority. Now we wait! your call is important to us, please stay on the line while we try to connect you...