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Why Professors Love (and Loathe) Technology
dougled writes "A survey of 4,500 college professors (and campus technology administrators) reveals what faculty members think of digital publishing (they like it, but don't do it very much), how much they use their campus learning management systems (not nearly as much as their bosses think), and how digital communication has changed their work lives (they're more productive, but far more stressed)."
I can tell you, working with some very smart profs, that they fall into the exact same classes that you find anywhere else.
You have people that are unreasonable (wanting things to be perfect in an imperfect world), you have people that can't apply basic common sense to using their computer (someone today, for instance, that they can have unlimited disk space and has magical thinking about the situation), people with poor problem solving skills, oldsters whom the world changed around and can't deal with it, people that can't use google, etc. etc...
So I guess what I am saying is that sometimes I wonder if singling them out as a class has any use at all. They're simply people.
Man..glad they didn't have this crap when I was in school....I just wanted to get in there, listen, take notes....and GTFO. I just need enough interaction to take the test and make the grade and get out to get a job.
Strange tho...I'm actually quite a sociable person...outside of the class and work, I have lots of friends and go out, have fun, I have no problem talking to strangers and making new friends.
But at school, and usually at worksites...I'm there to go in, get a job done...and get out. I'm not there to make friends. I don't hardly ever socialize with co-workers. I didn't ever want to really socialize with anyone in my classes, hell, I never really knew anyone's name in the classes (unless it was a good looking girl I'd like to meet and bang)....
I dunno....i guess to me, work is work...get in, get it done, get out...and then go into "real life" mode..where I have my friends and my fun.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
It does the simple stuff so we can focus on the hard stuff.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Any word on what percentage of them shudder and/or spew corrosive bile if you sneak up behind them and whisper "Blackboard!"?
When you are a computer science student and you get your grade by manipulating the computer system the school uses (whether it is remote access to laptop or anything else), you should automatically pass. Isn't that the point of computer science, to understand how they work better to make them do what you want?
sudo make me a sandwich
of use and understanding of classroom technologies among my professors. Some are very skeptical and perhaps a little afraid of using the management software (we use CTools which is open source and pretty awesome). The biggest difference in adoption that I notice is between colleges. The professors in the school of education use way more technology and with much more confidence than my liberal arts professors.
In other words, professors are ordinary human people?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
I'd like to know why the medical profession isn't embracing technology. They still use antiquated 20th century tech: i.e. fax machine. It would be nice if you could email your doctor and save yourself time and money with a followup visit. The doctors could determine from the email if patients needed to physically come in or the doctors could determine that the patients didn't have to come in and they knew enough to prescribe the next step. If it is about wanting you to come in for a follow-up visit so they can charge your insurance money, then why don't then do what lawyers do and charge you when they respond to emails. We could save money at not having to pay the copays, the doctors would still be able to charge our insurance companies, and doctors' offices would be crowded less with people who didn't have to be there. It would also be nice if everyone in the medical field would adopt electronic patient records that patients can be in charge of: i.e. Microsoft Health Vault. That way a patient's medical records would centrally stay with the patient instead of many different doctors.
If your class is about engineering your way into someone else's computer, then yes. If it is about writing code that is, say useful for whole teams of developers and support people, or code that needs to run longer than 2 seconds in a production environment that is regulated by various laws and rules, then no, you should fail because you didn't learn shit.
The professors I know say that "technology" has had a bigger effect on their students than it has on themselves -- specifically, their lack of concern with plagiarism. Having grown up with Google and the Internet, when asked to write a paper discussing, say, the contributions to Twentieth-Century culture of recently-deceased Lithuanian tennis champions, the students' normal way of research is to Google the topic, find a relevant web site, copy the material, and present it.
They're often shocked when the plagiarism is noted and the fail the assignment because, after all, the paper is on-topic and factually true (let's suppose); what's the issue? The concept that one needs to come up with his own ideas and opinions is often a foreign one to someone who has grown up using the web as an immediate source of all the world's knowledge. I suspect, but of course cannot prove, that developing one's own opinions was an easier and more natural thing when one had to search multiple libraries for bits and pieces of the subject matter here and there; often your opinion developed over time, based on the facts you were able to find, and the order in which you found them.
Students (and professors) have been plagiarizing since the second piece of paper was made, of course; the new issue is that many students today do not see a problem with it. Because of this, the highest level of technology some professors use is their plagiarism-detect software.
what you described is computer operation, not computer science.
Grades would probably be focused on projects that require an understanding of the materials and real problem solving skills rather than on tests that usually just require that you regurgitate a bunch of facts. In other words, learning by doing. Of course, with 200 people in a class that would be hard to grade. I think in the future we will be using computers to learn the facts and concepts and then go into learning centers to interact with others intellectually and complete projects that are actually graded.
I hope this is what we end up with. It would be a huge gain over what we have now and it would definitely give a more accurate view of if someone has learned the material. So many are good at regurgitating facts but can't apply it it save their lives.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
Buying books for class? You'd better buy the new book, with the online access code. That way you can access your online assignments and do your homework. God forbid you buy the used book and fail the class.
The book racket has reached a new level of thievery. How much for the access code you ask. That depends. It could be as little as $75, but is could be a real value at $150.
I easily get more than 100 a day too, but it drops quite a bit after I delete the anonymous cowards and all the emails from that guy who is CERTAIN that he'd better forward everything to everybody, just in case they missed it the first three times from various student lists, staff lists and concerned secretaries.
You must be a application developer.
Just the other day, I was asked by a post-grad researcher to help them get SSH working on their server. They were unable to remote login to their server. So they come into my office, I open a command line, and have them type in the credentials to get into this server. I log in just fine, no problems. Then this person, with a Master's degree in computer science, tells me they are using OpenVPN to log in to their gateway server, so they can SSH into the rest of their servers. So I ask, "Why do you need to VPN into one and SSH into the others? Both are encrypted." The researcher did not know that SSH was encrypted and is generally approved for remote connections to servers.
The moral of the story is, that writing mass amounts of code is only one aspect of COMPUTER science. You can be a coding genius, but if you fail to understand the difference between SSH and VPN, you should have a computer programming degree, as you obviously do not understand enough about the SCIENCE behind computers.
sudo make me a sandwich
If your class is about engineering your way into someone else's computer, then yes.
No, not even then. Do you think a professor that teaches a security class has any control over the LMS that the school selects or the security built around it? Even so, being able to manipulate a computer system that way is merely one aspect of computers and does not constitute mastery of the subject.
Using your same logic, if the student who breaks into the computer system and changes his grade also fails another student, that's OK too, because hey, that's what the class is about and if the now-failing student can't protect themselves, so be it.
Programming a computer = manipulating a computer
I welcome any computer science major to write programs without any understanding of how to exploit the same program. It makes for good reads on Slashdot, when [insert large company here] gets hacked because some "programmer" forgot the usefulness of a regular expression to prevent a SQL injection. Myself, in agreement with every CISSP and Cybersecurity major, welcomes these programmers into the workplace, because it keeps us employed.
sudo make me a sandwich
I never understood the point of any kind of exams in a comp sci class really. Some of the more theoretical ones (like the logic classes that are 'comp sci' but are really math classes), sure, it makes sense...but for an actual programming class? You want me to hand write code? What the hell is the point of that? I'm never going to need to have these things memorized -- at worst I'll have an IDE to help, at best the internet (and hell, this is coming from the guy who does all his coding in text editors...) I'm pretty sure a lot of my comp sci classes just gave exams because they were supposed to though -- usually projects were most of your grade, they just had the exams to make the administration happy I guess...
I'm an adjunct professor at three local colleges, so I get to experience a variety of educational technologies and IT departments. My frustrations don't come from the technology itself, but from the policies administrators and the IT staff implement. All three schools have a campus email system for students, faculty, and staff. But two of them are web-based systems that do not allow auto-forwarding. I have to manually log in to the clunky web-based system and sift through a mountain of intra-spam. The feature exists on these platforms, according to my research, its just been disabled. I guess they want to make sure we're all using the outsourced webmail system they spent millions of dollars importing from the late 90's.
When it comes time to submit my grades, one school's system flips a coin each semester to decide whether it supports Mac users. Not whether it supports Safari, not "the Mac version of Firefox" or even "the Mac version of IE" but logging in from a Mac computer at all. When I call the registrar's office, they claim to have never supported Mac. Except, they did. Last semester.
One school has a laptop loan program for faculty and students. We can request to borrow a laptop to run our classes with. For one month. Then we have to return the computer and resubmit the request. The same school installed 3M Smart Boards in many of the classrooms. They have loads of cool features, but the remote controls and digital pen devices you need to use them all disappeared within months of installation. Now they serve as very expensive white boards.
The list goes on . . . None of these are failings of technology, but how technology is implemented. I often get the impression that the people in charge of acquiring, installing, and managing tech at my schools are being brought in from the business sector. They are attempting to implement methodologies and policies suited to smaller, homogeneous work environments. Classrooms aren't office buildings; faculty and students use tech differently from the office staff.
Yes, I am a college professor.
Paraphrasing does not free you from plagiarism; paraphrasing without attributing the source is plagiarism.
You can legitimately create a work consisting mostly of (properly cited) paraphrases and quotes, while completely avoiding personal opinion or analysis. This is called a literature review, and there are times when they are completely appropriate (in the introduction to a graduate thesis, for example). Where plagiarism comes into play is when you state or imply that an idea is your own without properly crediting the author from whom you obtained the idea. It's not a question of identical wording, but of the idea expressed by the words. You can rewrite a sentence so that it doesn't contain a single word found in the original, and still be guilty of plagiarism.
When I evaluate student essays and reports, I'm not only judging your ability to find and summarize relevant information from other sources, but also your success at analyzing, interpreting, and responding to the information using your own creative thinking skills. To pass off someone's analysis of the issue as your own without clearly identifying it as such is indeed plagiarism... all you've done is performed a literature review, but left out the citations.
I think the problem you're describing is a bit more complex than you make it. I used to know this kid who, in elementary school, was doing DirectX 3D games in C++. Brilliant coder...but he knew nothing else about computers. He probably wouldn't have been able to install an operating system on his own. Universities are starting to divide things up a bit better, but it's still very vague.
The way I see it, you've got computer science, which really should be theoretical things -- not about how to program an application to do X, not about what SSH and VPN do, but how to do REALLY analyze a sorting algorithm, or devising a new cryptography system. Theoretical stuff. Then you've got software engineering, which is more about how to actually write code to do something useful. You still need to know something about analyzing algorithms and such, but just enough to avoid the common mistakes. If it's O(2n) when the best algorithm is O(1.7n), that's not a huge deal. But still, you may not know SSH and VPN, you may not know Linux administration, you just know coding. Then there's what Penn State was doing in their IST degrees -- basically that was comp sci for project managers, or tailored to some more niche needs (they had things on security, risk analysis, disaster recovery, etc...) -- and that's your more holistic approach. Those are the people who may not be able to write SSH, may not be able to design the crypto system behind SSH...but they know what it is and when to use it.
A lot of people on the comp sci side would make fun of the IST program, and it's my understanding that there were a lot of legitimate problems with it...but that is something that we probably do need. No one person can know how to develop and analyze various efficient and secure algorithms AND how to write quality code in multiple languages and which language is best for a particular task AND every enterprise level tool and how to use them and analyze them and combine them. There's just too much of it.
As a CS instructor, I use Blackboard for homework and program submission, for posting solutions and for recording grades. Nothing else. Making a full-fledged web site out of Blackboard is too terrible to think about.
Excellent points. Perhaps giving computer science degrees some variation. Like a Computer Science - Software Engineering, Computer Science - Systems Administration, Computer Science - Digital Forensics, etc.
Core classes are still the same, but senior year is when the student takes 30 credits in their specific discipline, whatever that may be.
sudo make me a sandwich
Me too. We have lock boxes for the remotes but whenever I actually remember the darn thing what I want is not in the box.
IT is underfunded and they seem to have temp student workers as filler for real IT. I had to fight to get external email access which they do not advertize but I knew they had it. They will not turn on IMAP or POP even though I know their server supports it. They had unix systems and now it is all windows crap; including the incorrectly implemented MS DNS server and the occasional issues that causes with it's odd caching scheme. The top IT are real IT staff from industry and while the head guy is a unix person he's given in to using windows because it is cheaper (that is, they don't have to hire somebody who can use a real server.)
Whiteboards smell and it bothers me. Chalk boards were replaced; whiteboards COST more and are more environmental the dust isn't really a problem.
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You don't know what computer science is. It's not "learning to use a computer."
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
This is really interesting, as there is some anxiety within the public university system about tenure and LMSes, and how with the private institutions you have the freedom to implement them, whereas with public universities, there is a lot more resistance to things the faculty sees as wasteful.
Also, to run a really good flipped class, the time investment is rather insane. You might be spending less time working on powerpoint or whatnot, but you've got an email queue to deal with.
Nitpick: O(2n)=O(1.7n)