This varies a good deal from institution to institution. I've gone from places where you were expected (read, bullied) into achieving a certain pass rate (of aroud 90%, regardless of how much work the students were willing to put into the course), where the pass-rate is used only as a possible warning sign of operational difficulties. By far, the institution that I am currently in (which has the latter approach) has the best national reputation for teaching of all the places I have worked. If your course has a low pass rate, you'll be expected to identify it, justify it, identify issues that may have caused it, and provide a *reasonable* plan of action for improvement[1]. It works well.
Student attainment levels are a ridiculous metric, because they are so easily gamed. I plan the course, I deliver the course, I set the assessment, I write the exams, I mark the exams. If I want a pass rate of 94.34% on the nose, I can be damn sure to get it, no matter what level of oversight (short of the Orwellian) there is. Attach consequences to low student attainment, then you will force people to game the system. That's the way we are built as people.
But, it's a cheap, easy, and to those who no longer remember how teaching really works, convincing way to rate teacher ability. It's not really a big surprise that the worst teachers in many institutions (those who don't have the benefit of a high-repute research output to insulate them) often have the most consistently impressive pass rates. You raise a good point, but I think the problem exists primarily in those instutitions that don't really have the confidence to say 'This metric makes no sense'.
[1] A reasonable plan is not 'make the material easier', FWIW.
I don't have any quarrel with what the article says, for the most part. However, it falls into the same trap so many of these things do as equating bad teaching with a bad tool. It's one of my pet hates to see people dismiss Java/C++/C#/Whatever as a 'bad teaching language because ' when every one of those reasons is that it's a tool being used by a bad teacher. As someone who has been teaching programming for coming up to a decade, I find it more than a little frustrating. 'Java is a bad teaching language because it has all the standard data structures built into the library' is one such example. Sure, that's true, but there's nothing stopping you from making people roll their own. I just wish people would stop claimi
Powerpoint is not inherently bad. In fact, for what I use it for, it's an absolutely fantastic package - it is really my cue cards writ large. I don't use animations, sounds, videos (unless appropriate), diagrams, or even coloured backgrounds. It's literally just something I use for cueing my lecture. It contains perhaps 20 minutes of the 60 minutes in a regular lecture, the rest being provided by me and done via whiteboard/blackboard descriptions, contextualising, diagramming and (when I'm lucky) direct dialog with students.
Really the article is - it's bad to deliver the material of other people (I agree, but probably for different reasons). It's bad to deliver material too fast for the class (Well, yeah). It's bad to skip the important contextualising and diagramming in a lecture (sure). None of those things are flaws in powerpoint though. A bad teacher will be a bad teacher regardless. The same thing was very evident when professors taught from the same overhead slides for years. They're not going to get any better if you remove powerpoint from the equation.
Because there is more to the story than the summary indicates.
1) He used a keylogger and a magnetic stripe reader. Essentially he made copies of the keys to the car and then wrote a snotty letter to the owner saying 'I urge you to look after your car better'.
2) He stole access to *32* accounts. That's well beyond what could reasonably be claimed as necessary to prove security holes.
3) The access he stole gave access to personal files, email, and debit accounts. While there's no indication that he used he debit functionality, there is reasonable suspicion that he would have violated the privacy of the account holders, and I suspect no way to prove his innocence on that score. Indeed, his previous behaviour puts the benefit of the doubt outside of his reach.
4) He sent his summary to the administration, and also to 37 other students. He put these techniques out in the wild with all the attendant financial and privacy problems that will cause.
I suspect the difference in opinion is between those who read the 'gloss over the nastiness' summary and those who read the actual article.
I wouldn't say they are of a neccessity a cheat - done properly, they can provide tremendous value by specialising. The trend in higher education is to 'dumb down' - things I did in second year in my degree ten years ago are now fouth year topicsi n some universities. There is some benefit to be had in arresting that process with a 'hard' degree.
However...
Certainly in the university that makes the biggest deal about how it introduced the UK's first gaming degree, those few members of staff who had previous industry experience have long gone (because of a lack of the authority neccessary to keep the material up to date). Those that remain, at least when I last taught there, are unspecialised with no games industry experience. Indeed, hardly any of them are gamers in general.
Done properly, a games degree has value... but that requires a significant investment in technological infrastructure, lecturers who know the industry (or have significant relevant experience in general) and who love games, and a commitment at all levels to continually update the course material. In today's climate of creeping managerialism in education, none of those things have the same value as a vanilla CS course with a 'games' label on it.
One of the advantages that paper journals have over electronic distribution is in the permanence of the source... that's especially important in 'checking the working' when someone is going through the references. It's immensely frustrating to try and check up on an interesting (or unbelievable) assertion to find a URL provided as a reference. Chances are, by the time you check it the reference has been lost, moved, reshuffled, renamed, or simply taken offline. If the reference is to a source that isn't peer reviewed (which has been amply dealt with in this thread) or fixed in some way, you even run the risk that by the time someone checks your reference it's saying something completely different from what it said when *you* checked it.
A reference to an actual paper journal ensures the permanence of the record - it's a fixed point against which you can always reliably check. Books that are out of print are still available in libraries - papers from fifty years ago are still (moderately) easily accessible in their paper forms. In twenty years time, will I even be able to read any of the digital papers I have now?
I think the two different mediums work best in combination - I almost never check out a journal article in an actual paper copy, I get them from the online 'arm' of the publisher. In that way, you get the best of both worlds - a permanent record combined with convenient access.
Not quite what you are saying here, but I thought this was interesting enough as a factoid to bring up:
During a phase of Bletchley Park's expansion, the Government Code and Cipher School place a challenge to the readers of the Daily Telegraph for anyone who could solve it in under twelve minutes. Those who did were brought to Fleet Street for a followup test, and those who passed that (six of them in the end) were brought to work at Bletchley Park.
In Victorian Times, newspapers used to carry columns of encrypted messages from young thwarted lovers to the objects of their affection. These agony columns were a source of mystery for many, and amusement for others (the codes were sophisticated enough to vex a semi-casual analysis, but not enough to stand up to those who actually wanted to invest time reading them). Charles Babbage was a big fan of this.
Not nearly as subtle as you are suggesting, but there is a precedent.
Or perhaps that they are having a time of great pleasure, which seems perfectly accurate, and valid under the informal definition you posted of field day.
Indiscriminate pedantry is all well and good (read 'annoying as fuck'), but if you don't actually read your own post it just makes you come across as a twit.
(P.S. I think you mean 'open season' not 'field day', unless you meant to say that it was a period during which it was legal to hunt or catch game or fish... ?)
The third one (Mice Galaxies) looks an awful lot like a Jedi with a lightsabre to me. This close to the release of the next Star Wars movie, does this strike anyone else as a little odd?
I bet if we looked into this new Hubble funding we'd find George Lucas somewhere on the investor list.
As if faking the moon landings wasn't bad enough...;-P
Slashdot Mirror
This varies a good deal from institution to institution. I've gone from places where you were expected (read, bullied) into achieving a certain pass rate (of aroud 90%, regardless of how much work the students were willing to put into the course), where the pass-rate is used only as a possible warning sign of operational difficulties. By far, the institution that I am currently in (which has the latter approach) has the best national reputation for teaching of all the places I have worked. If your course has a low pass rate, you'll be expected to identify it, justify it, identify issues that may have caused it, and provide a *reasonable* plan of action for improvement[1]. It works well.
Student attainment levels are a ridiculous metric, because they are so easily gamed. I plan the course, I deliver the course, I set the assessment, I write the exams, I mark the exams. If I want a pass rate of 94.34% on the nose, I can be damn sure to get it, no matter what level of oversight (short of the Orwellian) there is. Attach consequences to low student attainment, then you will force people to game the system. That's the way we are built as people.
But, it's a cheap, easy, and to those who no longer remember how teaching really works, convincing way to rate teacher ability. It's not really a big surprise that the worst teachers in many institutions (those who don't have the benefit of a high-repute research output to insulate them) often have the most consistently impressive pass rates. You raise a good point, but I think the problem exists primarily in those instutitions that don't really have the confidence to say 'This metric makes no sense'.
[1] A reasonable plan is not 'make the material easier', FWIW.
I don't have any quarrel with what the article says, for the most part. However, it falls into the same trap so many of these things do as equating bad teaching with a bad tool. It's one of my pet hates to see people dismiss Java/C++/C#/Whatever as a 'bad teaching language because ' when every one of those reasons is that it's a tool being used by a bad teacher. As someone who has been teaching programming for coming up to a decade, I find it more than a little frustrating. 'Java is a bad teaching language because it has all the standard data structures built into the library' is one such example. Sure, that's true, but there's nothing stopping you from making people roll their own. I just wish people would stop claimi
Powerpoint is not inherently bad. In fact, for what I use it for, it's an absolutely fantastic package - it is really my cue cards writ large. I don't use animations, sounds, videos (unless appropriate), diagrams, or even coloured backgrounds. It's literally just something I use for cueing my lecture. It contains perhaps 20 minutes of the 60 minutes in a regular lecture, the rest being provided by me and done via whiteboard/blackboard descriptions, contextualising, diagramming and (when I'm lucky) direct dialog with students.
Really the article is - it's bad to deliver the material of other people (I agree, but probably for different reasons). It's bad to deliver material too fast for the class (Well, yeah). It's bad to skip the important contextualising and diagramming in a lecture (sure). None of those things are flaws in powerpoint though. A bad teacher will be a bad teacher regardless. The same thing was very evident when professors taught from the same overhead slides for years. They're not going to get any better if you remove powerpoint from the equation.
Because there is more to the story than the summary indicates.
1) He used a keylogger and a magnetic stripe reader. Essentially he made copies of the keys to the car and then wrote a snotty letter to the owner saying 'I urge you to look after your car better'.
2) He stole access to *32* accounts. That's well beyond what could reasonably be claimed as necessary to prove security holes.
3) The access he stole gave access to personal files, email, and debit accounts. While there's no indication that he used he debit functionality, there is reasonable suspicion that he would have violated the privacy of the account holders, and I suspect no way to prove his innocence on that score. Indeed, his previous behaviour puts the benefit of the doubt outside of his reach.
4) He sent his summary to the administration, and also to 37 other students. He put these techniques out in the wild with all the attendant financial and privacy problems that will cause.
I suspect the difference in opinion is between those who read the 'gloss over the nastiness' summary and those who read the actual article.
...make the gheyness legal, they stop breading...
Oh no, my sandwiches!
Drakkos
I wouldn't say they are of a neccessity a cheat - done properly, they can provide tremendous value by specialising. The trend in higher education is to 'dumb down' - things I did in second year in my degree ten years ago are now fouth year topicsi n some universities. There is some benefit to be had in arresting that process with a 'hard' degree.
However...
Certainly in the university that makes the biggest deal about how it introduced the UK's first gaming degree, those few members of staff who had previous industry experience have long gone (because of a lack of the authority neccessary to keep the material up to date). Those that remain, at least when I last taught there, are unspecialised with no games industry experience. Indeed, hardly any of them are gamers in general.
Done properly, a games degree has value... but that requires a significant investment in technological infrastructure, lecturers who know the industry (or have significant relevant experience in general) and who love games, and a commitment at all levels to continually update the course material. In today's climate of creeping managerialism in education, none of those things have the same value as a vanilla CS course with a 'games' label on it.
One of the advantages that paper journals have over electronic distribution is in the permanence of the source... that's especially important in 'checking the working' when someone is going through the references. It's immensely frustrating to try and check up on an interesting (or unbelievable) assertion to find a URL provided as a reference. Chances are, by the time you check it the reference has been lost, moved, reshuffled, renamed, or simply taken offline. If the reference is to a source that isn't peer reviewed (which has been amply dealt with in this thread) or fixed in some way, you even run the risk that by the time someone checks your reference it's saying something completely different from what it said when *you* checked it.
A reference to an actual paper journal ensures the permanence of the record - it's a fixed point against which you can always reliably check. Books that are out of print are still available in libraries - papers from fifty years ago are still (moderately) easily accessible in their paper forms. In twenty years time, will I even be able to read any of the digital papers I have now?
I think the two different mediums work best in combination - I almost never check out a journal article in an actual paper copy, I get them from the online 'arm' of the publisher. In that way, you get the best of both worlds - a permanent record combined with convenient access.
Not quite what you are saying here, but I thought this was interesting enough as a factoid to bring up:
During a phase of Bletchley Park's expansion, the Government Code and Cipher School place a challenge to the readers of the Daily Telegraph for anyone who could solve it in under twelve minutes. Those who did were brought to Fleet Street for a followup test, and those who passed that (six of them in the end) were brought to work at Bletchley Park.
In Victorian Times, newspapers used to carry columns of encrypted messages from young thwarted lovers to the objects of their affection. These agony columns were a source of mystery for many, and amusement for others (the codes were sophisticated enough to vex a semi-casual analysis, but not enough to stand up to those who actually wanted to invest time reading them). Charles Babbage was a big fan of this.
Not nearly as subtle as you are suggesting, but there is a precedent.
Drakkos.
Or perhaps that they are having a time of great pleasure, which seems perfectly accurate, and valid under the informal definition you posted of field day.
Indiscriminate pedantry is all well and good (read 'annoying as fuck'), but if you don't actually read your own post it just makes you come across as a twit.
(P.S. I think you mean 'open season' not 'field day', unless you meant to say that it was a period during which it was legal to hunt or catch game or fish... ?)
Perhaps you don't have to at all !
Drakkos.
The third one (Mice Galaxies) looks an awful lot like a Jedi with a lightsabre to me. This close to the release of the next Star Wars movie, does this strike anyone else as a little odd?
;-P
I bet if we looked into this new Hubble funding we'd find George Lucas somewhere on the investor list.
As if faking the moon landings wasn't bad enough...