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Professors Rejecting Classroom Technology
CowboyRobot writes "The January edition of Science, Technology & Human Values published an article titled Technological Change and Professional Control in the Professoriate, which details interviews with 42 faculty members at three research-intensive universities. The research concludes that faculty have little interest in the latest IT solutions. 'I went to [a course management software workshop] and came away with the idea that the greatest thing you could do with that is put your syllabus on the Web and that's an awful lot of technology to hand the students a piece of paper at the start of the semester and say keep track of it,' said one. 'What are the gains for students by bringing IT into the class? There isn't any. You could teach all of chemistry with a whiteboard. I really don't think you need IT or anything beyond a pencil and a paper,' said another."
In my experience students pay more attention to a piece of paper handed to them than if I say "the syllabus with all the test and assignment due-dates is available on-line". If an instructor assumes that everybody in the class is comfortable with computers and will actually look at an electronic-only syllabus, it's a recipe for disaster, although I admit that in a computer science department it's probably a safer assumption than usual.
In one of my classes with over 100 students, it's a month into classes and I still get questions about where the electronic class notes are, even though I explained it on the first day, it's on the syllabus (both on paper and on-line), and it's in the same location for almost every other course at the university. Although most students get it, some students are quite clueless. At least if you hand them a piece of paper in class they don't have the excuse that "they couldn't get it to work" or "my computer was broken", or "my interwebs aren't working from home". I treat it the same way as e-mail versus paper mail: if you want people to pay attention, send it to them on paper. It's harder to ignore or claim for technical reasons that you somehow missed it.
We are unimpressed *and* actively impeded by the University bureaucrats.
I want to post a lot of things in a web-accessible fashion for my students: most of that is static, so the assorted CRMs are overkill (not to mention the giant PITA it is to post static content via the CRM *without* bullshit CRM dressing all over it), and for the content that has a *real* dynamic component (not just "I blogged again, teehee" dynamic), the CRMs are a nightmare.*
Yet, if I want to just deal with rolling my own? Good luck with that. Uni. (and occasionally even Dept.) IT will not only be of no assistance, they will *actively thwart* attempts to do this sort of thing.
*Maybe people accustomed to having their hands tied can tolerate that sort of treatment long enough to learn it, but not me.
No, "how to manage programming projects" isn't software engineering. "How to manage programming projects" is IT Project Management.
Software engineering is how to design software systems (particularly, large software systems). The CS:Software Engineering relationship is loosely analogous to the Physics : Aerospace Engineering relationship.