New voices in my head

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Currently marking and listening to...

I'm currently marking Web Technologies resit coursework :-( and listening to the rather excellent Finnish metal band Nightwish ... oh for sound-proof offices and a big hi-fi :->

Hellboy

What can I say? <grin> good fun, no idea if it's faithful to the comics, but pretty cool, Hellboy makeup/CGI is excellent and Selma Blair is rather cute!

Resit test day

Today's the day the teddy bears have their picnic... In fact today's the day that the students who failed the module not too egregiously get a 2^nd chance to pass (with their mark capped at 40%/D-) and (I hope) the CBT will be no picnic <grin> ... after-all, this one test + some Web Tech. exercises substitute for a whole module's assessment! It has to be tough to be fair to those who passed at the 1^st attempt. So the work deadline was mid-day and the test is at 2.30pm and the whingeing has started:

• I only just failed last time (got between 30 and 35%) so can you be lenient this time? [Ha! No favouritism ... if you deserve to pass, then you'll pass!]
• My computer got infected with a virus and after a few days it stopped working so I lost my work. [What? No backup after three days?!] Rather than fix the virus I've bought a new machine [!] so I can do the work now ... in fact it's nearly done, oh, but it's at home so I can't give it to you yet. Can I email it to you on Monday for no penalty?
• Can I do my test in the earlier slot rather than the one you scheduled me for as I {have a Halifax appointment, am off on holiday}? [As it turns out the Halifax guy turned-up at the correct time despite claiming Halifax could not reschedule his appointment ... was he lying?]

Update: Surprisingly the recently-upgraded Blackboard v6.1 system worked very well for my 40-strong test subjects (none of the oft-repeated problems...) so kudos to our ETU for finally getting an upgrade worthy of the name!

How many hours do students put in?

I love reading other lecturer's blogs -- it's the shared experience, I suppose. However I've been "off blog" for over a month and missed jill's post about student feedback questionnaires. For comparison, my modules are ¼ of a semester so maybe students should expect to spend 9 hours per week ... my University suggests something like 13 hours (maybe we have a longer working week <grin>) Feedback for my two modules is as follows:

Answers to survey question "On average, I spent the following hours per week on independent study for this module"

Hours	Web Technologies	Databases and the Web
Over 10	10%	7%
7 to 10	17%	30%
4 to 6	39%	52%
1 to 3	29%	11%
None	0%	0%
No response	5%	0%
Responses:	76	27

Independent Study is in addition to the 4 hours per week of lecture and lab sessions. So, like Jill, there are two students putting in more than the equivalent of a full working week on the 3^rd year module and 8 on the 2^nd year module -- well done them! The module evaluation questionnaire is anonymous (I suspect like Jill's) which is a good and bad thing in some ways ... it would be interesting to know whether the extra hours have a positive benefit and also how truthful the students are in their self-evaluation! (E.g. their attendance rates usually seem to be higher than my records ... even with their friends signing them in.)

Jaws in 30s with bunnies!

The latest in an excellent sequence of irreverent, oddball humour, angry alien productions gives you Jaws in 30s, re-enacted by bunnies! (Make sure you click on the bunny at the end of the credits...)

What is considered harmful, according to the web?

Typing 'considered harmful' into Google brings up an interesting selection of obviously geek articles :-) Now I'm no computer scientist (actually a mathematician turned meteorologist who happens to teach computing) but maybe I should be -- the top article in that search (as of today at 4.30pm BST) is a link to an article by the famous mathematician/computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra (I recognised the surname; now I know a little more!) which appeals to me. It presents a clear case for ditching the "GO TO" statement in computer programs. I'd always been told it was a bad idea in FORTRAN (sorry, meteorology has a long history with that so-called dead language!) and now I know why ... so, if you're learning to program and curse procedures, functions and methods, read the article and try to understand what it's on about!

Sneaky semanticness (?!)

Neat separation of style (clickable images) from content (text links) from SimpleBits ... useful to know about IE's flickering issues when <a> tags are involved!

Simplifying DHTML design with good CSS

Stuff and Nonsense has a nice article using the DOM to simplify forms ... cool, but his JavaScript loops over form elements to set their display property to show/hide them (which everyone does, is simple to code/understand but is a tad inelegant!) Serendipitously (!) Sitepoint has a companion article that subtly uses CSS's descendant selectors (also known as contextual selectors e.g. in the W3C CSS 1 spec)so that all the JavaScript needs to do is change one class ... the form takes a "hide the optional bits" class which does nothing to it ;-) but the optional elements disappear due to a rule with a descendant selector rooted in the form's "hide optional" class ... excellent synergy! Using classes is such a better idea than manipulating element's style properties directly as -- ta da! -- it can be soooo easily adapted for media stylesheets, starting with print and moving on to anything! Nice one...

Great revolutionary Scott!

I and my colleagues do live in interesting times ... The Vice Chancellor (read: leader of the University) has decided to restructure. At the same time has commissioned a review of computing teaching in the Uni. There are 4 'units' doing it: us "Scientific Computing" and "Media Technology" in the Faculty of Science, "CIS" in the Faculty of Technology and "Business I.T." in the Faculty of Business. So we hire a no-doubt expensive external consultant to consider the situation. In my group's meeting he mentions how difficult it is to find out where a particular IT-related course will be taught (e.g. not evident from our web site!) so we can see where the wind's blowing ... And then, lo! and behold!, after a period of FUD where all sorts of radical restructuring proposals are rumoured, we learn that the University executive group has settled on the not-so-radical merging of "Scientific Computing" and "CIS" into a new Faculty, leaving "Media Tech." behind and "BIT" as it is! Not so radical and still leaves the computing fragmented ... what a pointless waste of everybody's time! (Oh, there are some other proposed changes, but the gossip says they're waiting on agreements with other organisations) And in case you're wondering about the title: The V-C's name is Professor Scott... Changes to be in place by 1^st July 2005?!