Last night a student in my class duped me briefly by pretending to work for a security firm investigating email porn ;-} Moral: Don't take everything they say at face value ... methinks that's the lesson I'm learning the most slowly! (Naïve?)

Woohoo! My feed is back <grin> ... http://king-maths.kingston.ac.uk/seminars/rss.php

Doom, gloom -- I'm lacking inspiration today! I've read three journal papers and accidentally seem to have deleted a PHP file that took 3 hours to create on Friday [setting-up an RSS feed from the programme of seminars I manage] Definitely an Eeyore-moment :-(

Bloody hell! Why do we have prerequisites for modules if course directors don't insist on applying them? My 2^nd/3^rd year "Web Technologies" module (glorified title for "Dynamic HTML and a brief XML introduction") requires 1^st year HTML (Obv: You need to know HTML as a basis for many web technologies!) Yet I have a dozen students who have no HTML prior knowledge for whom (poor suckers!) I have to arrange extra tuition for them to have a hope of getting anything out of the module :-(

Note I'm not complaining about the other dozen who have expressed an interest in extra HTML because they've "forgotten" it in the 6-18 months since finishing the module -- AFAIC you revise your prerequisite modules before embarking on new and interesting stuff that builds on prior modules. If you can't be bothered to do-so then so much the worse for you...

This Higher Education thing should involve effort on both sides of the lectern -- I put in the effort to "teach", students should put in the effort to "learn". If I don't do my job then fine! Complain -- you've every right to. If students don't do their job, to whom can we complain? No-one! Bring-on "learning contracts" and student accountability, I say!

Some never-to-be-sufficiently cursed, expletive-deleted student stole my laser pointer during my first lecture! Moral: When dishing-out course documents don't leave anything lying around that's small enough to stick in a pocket! (I'd probably have noticed if they nicked my textbook...)

Fri Oct 10: Lo! and Behold! Don't judge all students by the scummy minority!! A generous student has replaced my pointer (his dad apparently gets loads of freebies from company rep's...)

Administration: Part of a lecturer's duties are a certain amount of course admin. This varies between Universities & mine seem to be one of the worst (compared to the experience of a small sample of colleagues) as lecturers are expected to

• Prepare (i.e. photocopy) duplicate copies of resit exam papers for every student,
• Man the subject-specific "clearing hotlines" in mid-August,
• Advise students of programme routes they can take based on their module failure (surely an automatable task!),

As I've moaned here before -- the Faculty's Admin Manager earns twice what I do yet admin support for lecturing staff is minimal ... as a co-worker said yesterday: We're cheaper therefore we get to do the rubbishy jobs.

Gratuitous plug -- my new module web page: Web Technologies

Musings on "viva voce": So what kind of car would a Vauxhall Viva-voce be? You're terrified of driving it, the first time you get in the journey lasts an indeterminate amount of time and the radio is stuck on one of those aggressive talk-radio programmes, shouting questions at you.

If you're lucky you reach your destination and never drive the car again. If you're unlucky the car breaks down, you have to make expensive repairs and then have to do the same journey again. For a time afterwards the car stays shiny & new but, after a while, begins to look really dated. Inexplicably you still hang on to it...

Bloody hellfire: Two (false) fire alarms yesterday! Nothing to do but hang around the car park, chatting! Note to students: Setting of the fire alarm is not a cool way to avoid lectures or exams! We still have to cover/examine the same material so it'll get squeezed in some time...

Whoop-de-doo ... 2 weeks until teaching starts and we finally get our teaching schedules (i.e. find out what new material we'll be teaching this term!) No criticism intended of the beleaguered chap in charge of timetabling (exacerbated this year by losing one good lecturer and gaining 2 unknowns), I'd have to lay that one at the door of "admin" (my hobby horse, obv.) Quicker processing of student numbers & streamlined timetabling would all help! (Oh please³ don't ever give me the timetabling job!)

My "Web Technologies" class last year had ~120 students. This year it's (LOL - estimated!) to be more than 200. Ho-hum. Last year one or more pieces of weekly work from ~50% of the class had, shall we say, suspicious similarities? This year I need to redesign the exercises to (a) make it easier to assess (2 weeks solid marking with 120 scales up to 3 weeks this year if I'm not careful! Helluva way to spend Christmas ;-}  ) and (b) help the darlin's avoid the temptation of working too closely together <grin>