to which one of my colleagues summed-up the CodeSOD-style approach that might have been in-use with the elegantApparently ... we now have a member of staff at the University with more than 50 characters on his/her name and the data feed could not accept more than 50 characters and thus broke the entire system.
char full_name[50]; /* this should be fine */
Literal LOL :-)
section element and a real H1?:-(
We migrated from internally-hosted Blackboard v8 to Blackboard-hosted v9 from November'11-January'12 and I've just spotted a stupid XML error in the export/import of error-free v8 content in computer-based tests: I've 30 or-so tests & pools with 200+ items and in those that have HTML markup in their question responses all apostrophes (') have been converted to XML entities (')! For example
//Start #1-----------------------------------
echo '<ul>';
foreach ($result as $name) {
echo "<li>$name</li>";
}
echo '</ul>';
//End #1-------------------------------------
//Start #2-----------------------------------
echo '<ul>';
while ($result) {
echo "<li>$result</li>";
}
echo '</ul>';
//End #2-------------------------------------I know a fair bit about XML so I know it's sometimes technical & complex, but for the price we paid, I'd expected better :-( If they want to hire me as a consultant my university charges £500/day...
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. "Someone knocked and said: 'Can you turn it down, there's a physics exam next door.' Turn it down? It's Motörhead. It's my right as a teacher to play the music at the volume it should be," he said, identifying a hitherto unknown facet of human rights law.
... what an ignorant, selfish response (playing to the audience at the time?), of which he obviously feels proud to cite it in a newspaper interview!
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.
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 surface approach works well alongside something designed to develop deeper understanding ... hmmm, isn't that what higher education is for, after all? ;-)
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!
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 performance and academic standards at institutions of higher learning. A sense of entitlement now pervades the academy, excellence be damned.
Set to get worse in the UK as fees increase and the I'm paying for it
attitute grows. Hold on to your hats...
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 beyond the module, using <canvas> and object-orientation, so I was really looking forward to discussing it with them! Sadly they disappointed me by not being able to explain the simplest decisions that the author of the code had made to make the game work and so they got 0% too. Academic misconduct hearing anyone? Sad end to the module...
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 Pavlovian reaction ever or gross stupidity?
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!
via MASHe:
sad but true :-(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
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 three legs (teaching, research and admin) instead of just playing lip-service, things will not change. You'll get promotion from research or admin, but teaching is the main income-generator and raison d'être of higher education!
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: Learn-by-rote-memory is an easy/lazy approach for the lecturer, Learn-by-suffering is an ego-trip for the sadist, and whilst Harry's apparent workshop approach is better it doesn't work for every subject/topic — sometimes knowledge/information/curriculum needs to be learnt and experienced that has no practical analogue.
Thanks to Swans On Tea for this morning's moment of amusement:
On Thursday I accumulated the datum that the phrase
http://blogs.scienceforums.net/swansont/archives/4388I might work better wearing lederhosen, but we’re just not going to find that outinstantly ends the meeting.
Don't you just love/hate (depending on side of fence) people who derail meetings with "amusing" absurd analogies, reductio ad absurdum arguments, etc., no matter how fallacious? In my experience the likelihood that someone will bring one of these up depends on the length of the meeting (long => more likely) or, of course, the ridiculousness of the subject from that person's p.o.v. ...
It's a useful tactic in one's arsenal (as a meeting attendee) and motivation for having short, focused meetings (chairs please take note! — academia is notoriously plagued by ouroboros-like sequences of long, pointless meetings that seem to exist for their own sake & no other purpose.)
We were discussing the use of IELTS for PhD students so I was amused by the irony — stackeholders
?!
Important Information
Please 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!
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 asks us "yeah?" on a regular basis (like it's for punctuation...)
