Thinking aloud...

Student blogging

oscal — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 09:59:49 +0000

Tony Hirst pointed me to a lovely blog by a T189 student. It’s a stunning example of the usefulness of blogging in education. It provides the student with a tool for publication and self-expression, and it provides very useful information for teachers (e.g. in this case about the difficulties T189 students are experiencing with our Flash-based tutorials). I wish more of our students would blog.

Update: Bill Larnach also publishes an interesting blog which often touches on OU-related stuff.

What Vice-Chancellors sometimes forget…

oscal — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 23:15:06 +0000

The physicist I.I. Rabi and General (later President) Dwight Eisenhower became friends after Eisenhower was appointed president of Columbia University soon after the end of WW2. When introduced to Rabi, Eisenhower said, “I am always very happy to see one of the employees of the university,” to which Rabi replied, “Mr. President, the faculty are not the employees of the university. They are the university.”

Quoted in J. S. Rigden, Rabi: Scientist and Citizen, Harvard University Press, 2000.

OU wises up?

oscal — Thu, 24 May 2007 06:30:23 +0000

Well, well. Looked what popped up on my Facebook screen!

How to teach about IP

oscal — Wed, 23 May 2007 18:05:33 +0000

Cory Doctorow has been teaching an undergraduate course at the University of Southern California called ‘PWNED: Everyone on Campus is a Copyright Criminal’. The class was open to anyone on or off campus, and lectures were podcasted. The students edited a class blog and were expected to improve Wikipedia posts relevant to the class. For the end of semester, each student turned in a final project that related the course material to their lives and major areas of study.

In this post Cory highlights some of the projects. “From the class discussions and one-on-ones”, he writes,

I knew I had a really amazing bunch on my hands, but I was absolutely gobsmacked by the incredible quality of the final projects. From founding a record label to conducting public polls to writing guidelines for journalists to interviews and classroom materials, my students did me better than proud.

I encouraged my students to do work that would be of use to the world at large. I hate the idea of the usual college final paper, which the student doesn’t want to write, the prof doesn’t want to read and no one else wants to ever see. Instead, I challenged them to produce useful work that the world could benefit from, and they met and exceeded the challenge…

Worth reading in full. Wonderful stuff.

Google sees the light — at last

oscal — Wed, 23 May 2007 09:22:03 +0000

From BBC NEWS…

Google is to ban adverts for essay writing services – following claims that plagiarism is threatening the integrity of university degrees.

About time, too. Stand by for squeals of protest from purveyors of bespoke essays to clueless undergraduates.

“Schools stifle creativity”: discuss

oscal — Sun, 20 May 2007 18:01:33 +0000

Masterful TED Talk by Ken Robinson.

Aesthetically pleasing wiki service

oscal — Fri, 18 May 2007 08:12:43 +0000

Martin thinks Wetpaint is cute.

Forbes on Networks

oscal — Thu, 17 May 2007 23:40:08 +0000

Forbes.com has an interesting series of essays on networks. Useful for T214.

My Twittervision movie

oscal — Thu, 17 May 2007 22:40:22 +0000

Bill Thompson and I had a hilarious conversation the other morning with an incredulous former newspaper editor in which we tried to explain why Twitter might be interesting, even if it is currently just an example of leading-edge uselessness. Afterwards I thought that perhaps a movie might help. So I made one. See it here.

The joys of software monopolies

oscal — Thu, 17 May 2007 10:52:18 +0000

Charming message in my OU in-box this morning reads:

We are aware of a significant number of people experiencing problems starting their computers this morning. After initially starting up normally, the machine becomes ‘bogged down’ as applications are started. This is apparently down to a widespread problem with Windows Update and Microsoft think they have a solution.

There is a process on machines called svchost.exe running under the System username and during updates, some machines find this takes up 99% of the processor’s resources. If you press Ctrl-Alt-Delete and select Task Manager, under the Processes tab, you will find references to svchost.exe. If the instance running under System is showing 99%, then leave the machine to run through this for 20 minutes by which time the process should have run its course and the machine will operate normally.

If you cannot raise the Task Manager, then a manual shutdown of the machine might be the best approach before attempting the advice above.

As advised, there is a proposed fix from Microsoft and this will be applied during the next month.

Hmm… Just as well I don’t use the desktop PC so kindly provided by my employers. And it’s so consoling to know that the bug will be fixed “during the next month” too; I’m sure my colleagues will be delighted.