Ways Blackboard could be better

Semantic HTML5 markup please, not this unsemantic cruft:

E.g. how's about a nice section element and a real H1?:-(

Blackboard incompetents!

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 &#039;<ul>&#039;;
while ($result) {
echo "<li>$result</li>";
}
echo &#039;</ul>&#039;;
//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...

Groan

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!

Trolling

Here's a nice response from a blogger to probable comment-trolling that made me laugh so thought it was worth reposting:

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.

— mjp6034 in The Babeling of Miss_Snuffy

Hat-tip to the HTML5 Doctor for the HTML5 blockquote markup ;-)

Fifteen movie questions meme

Inspired by Katie, I'm not good at "top 10" (too fickle) but here are a few ephemeral choices...

Movie you love with a passion

Snap!

Movie you vow never to watch

'nuff said...

Movie that literally left you speechless

Watched it late at night on my own in an almost empty cinema ... I know it's not a real classic but I was speechles at the end.

Movie you always recommend

Timeless!

Actor/Actress you always watch no matter how crappy the movie

Actor/Actress you don’t get the appeal for

Actor/Actress living or dead you’d love to meet

Sexiest actor/actress you’ve ever seen (picture required!)

Sorry, can't answer that one: too brief an attention span...

Dream cast

Favourite actor pairing

Favourite movie setting

Favourite decade for movies

Can't choose! Star Wars, Blade Runner, Alien vs. Aliens vs. Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter...

Chick flick or action movie?

Hero, villain or anti-hero?

Fence-sitter!

Black and white or colour?

All of my favourite films are colour but some of the most memorable have black and white sequences...

Defining what education is really for

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? ;-)

Marking desperation

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!

Students Should Check Their Sense of Entitlement at the Door - Commentary - The Chronicle of Higher Education

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...

Bad semester for cheating :-(

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...

True story

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?