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>

Nice Blog from a Norwegian lecturer: jill/txt -- her educational category makes for interesting reading!

Chaos today! A resit CBT was scheduled to run in a lab with 56 seats -- no worries, I thought, only ~40 students will be taking it. Booking the room through official channels seemed like a good way to ensure the room is available (natch?) but , oh no, that would be too easy! The room is being refurbished (no-one was told) and the largest available room seats 36, with 2 broken PCs (34 working seats). 38 students turn up so one starts off doing the test on paper whilst standing up! And another wants to come back 30 minutes later for a free PC ... meaning I'll be there for longer than anticipated just because there is no "joined-up thinking" in the University admin. :-(

Further admin-derived chaos: The letters telling 13 students they had to do a CBT and a coursework didn't go out complete ... they tell me the day before the test that the coursework was OK, the test notices never went out! So I have to waste time phoning these poor souls, some of whom had heard through various channels that there was a test, to cancel the test so as not to disadvantage any of them! Not to mention the hours I spent designing the damn CBT in the first place!

Irony: The Faculty Admin Manager earns £50k+ (a bit less then double a lecturer's salary) and was "promoted from within" ... which is the usual fate for management-types who can't seem to cope in lesser positions in this University! Moral: Don't have standards, be crap at your job, rubber-stamp the students through as the University will do its damnedest to make assessing them correctly bloody difficult!

Email from a student this morning (NHBCTPTG):

Title: hey sir
Body Hey i think you have forgotten to give the password for the resit material. I was wondering it email me the password. You email me on <hotmail address>

My reply was measured and politely suggested that the student was a rude, thoughtless idiot for committing this offence against the primary tongue of this country ;-)

Moral: Email is a very convenient communication tool but it's easy to come across as a thoughtless idiot who couldn't be bothered to put any effort into the message! Put some effort in and you're much more likely to get some effort out.

In case you don't understand how to write a decent email or even can't see what the problem is, here are some links to pages discussing "netiquette": our-kids.org, From Kass Johns -- scroll down a bit!, George Dillon and a Google search.

Argh!

Student

I don't like programming. Can I change from my COBM degree to the BIT course?

Lecturer

Check the course description -- BIT contains more formal programming than COBM and you don't like programming! (D'oh!)

Moral

Look up relevant information before wasting lecturer's time asking stupid questions!

(This student phoned me after failing to pass his level 1 modules!)

Gotta get me one of these <grin> Mangonel LART!