Busy if not productive

[altivo]

The cotton session went OK but not excitingly so. I do think a few people carried away some new concepts and understandings, though, so that's OK.

Gary has spent much of the day struggling with badly designed and untested homework assignments from instructors who simply do not answer their e-mail even after days of effort. Assignments that require certain operations to be performed in software packages certainly should be tried out first by the instructors. An assignment that requires you to overlay a floor plan with only ten windows onto the image of a building that has 13 windows, for instance, is utter crap.

Likewise one that requires you to map certain points onto North America only the points have coordinates somewhere in the South Pacific. What is with these people? They evidently throw these assignments together at the last minute, and then disappear until the assignment is due. Sorry, that does not qualify as "teaching".

I had to drag him away from the computer and make him go out for lunch. Likewise at dinner time I again had to forcibly interrupt him. I expect a bad night in which he dreams of being back in the air force or at his consulting job. This always follows excessive stress.

Birds are waking up. Red winged blackbirds and grackles arrived here today. Juncos are becoming less common. Cardinals are singing all day, in spite of the gloomy drizzle.



Reference photo of the farm in autumn color, with two horses standing at the fence, selected for that limited palette assignment. Too late to start it tonight, but I'll work on it tomorrow. Fairly small scale, like about 8 x 10 in. I think, to make it go fast and reduce the level of detail. I don't expect much trouble with the colors as the specified palette will be mostly weak in the purple region. A clear orange may be hard to obtain, but for autumn foliage a rusty orange is just fine. Much of what appears in the picture is oak and hickory, which go to rusty crimson and greenish yellow respectively. Both of those should be easy to obtain with the specified primaries.

Comments

[avon-deer.livejournal.com]

Things are certainly looking greener around your parts. In my part of the world, the concrete is looking a lighter shade of grey too. :D

[altivo]

Well, actually we don't have much green yet, just warmer temperatures, rain instead of snow, and spring birds arriving. Spring bulbs are just poking their little green beaks above the surface of the mud now.

The photo might need clarification. It's old, was taken in the autumn of 2000.

[avon-deer.livejournal.com]

Ah, yes. I thought it was recent.

[moonhare]

Our software hangups with the schools were always due to 'versions' and 'system requirements.' When assignments came through in Office2003, we had 1997; Documents in Word2007 wouldn't open with my 2003. Software supplied with classes wouldn't run on my aged array of processors. Thank goodness for work access to laptops and public machines to get through these annoyances.

Looking forward to the Autumn studies. Hopefully my 'roadside find' monitor does justice to your efforts.

[altivo]

Yeah, these newly-invented "incompatibilities" on the part of Microsoft are particularly irritating. Especially since it seems to have been done just to make people yell enough so that institutions and corporations all buy new MS-Office licenses. To that end they made the new "unreadable except by this version" file formats the default, knowing full well that most end users have no idea that they even CAN change those. I'm pushing to switch our few remaining Windows machines to OpenOffice.

[merik]

They evidently throw these assignments together at the last minute, and then disappear until the assignment is due.

I always hated instructors like this, and I've dealt with my fair share of them over the years, both as a student and professionally. Gary certainly has my best wishes as he struggles with his assignments from hell.

That is one thing I like about my job - I often get to preview assignments and exams before the students do, so I usually have the chance to do some quality control checks before students ever see things. The professor teaching the 900+ person General Chemistry II course didn't let me check his exam from a couple of weeks ago because he finished writing it the day before the exam and sent it straight to be copied. Interesting results developed. ;-) Not because the exam was too hard, but because it was far too easy. A median grade of 87% is not a good thing, especially when 10% of the class scored between 98-100. *chuckle*

[altivo]

And I see in the FCC's new "Broadband Plan" one of the reasons given for the need to extend broadband access to everywhere in the US is that students need to use BlackBoard, which is so abominably written and designed and so poorly utilized by colleges and universities that it is unusable over low capacity connections.

I agree that we need better universal access to broadband connectivity, but not just so fat cat corporations can get fatter, or bad software can be used without noticing how terrible it is.

[merik]

that students need to use BlackBoard

Yuck. Like PeopleSoft, BlackBoard's another piece of software that's been forced upon us by people who really have no idea about what's going on in the real world of people who actually have to use it. Most courses in my department use it for only the most simple things, such as announcements and posting handouts, because the rest of the package is so bad. It's a real pain in the backside that BlackBoard allows students to join a class, but they can't remove themselves from the course site if they decide to drop the course - someone with Instructor powers has to remove them manually, and that someone is usually me. :-P

Once upon a time some professors had their own websites for their courses, but those were all but officially forbidden by the University administration, supposedly because students were complaining that they had to check multiple websites (I suppose no one in the administration has heard of browser bookmarks) instead of being able to go to one central site. I think the real reason was that some faculty websites made BlackBoard really look bad by comparison...

I agree that we need better universal access to broadband connectivity, but not just so fat cat corporations can get fatter, or bad software can be used without noticing how terrible it is.

I agree completely.

[altivo]

Yes. My last academic job was like that too. They brought in PeopleSoft and BlackBoard and decreed that no one could use anything else. Of course, no one could figure out how to make either of the new packages work, and at the time, the Mac users were especially unhappy about it.

Politically, it does often look as if the point is to keep anyone from looking any more competent than anyone else. Even when I was an undergraduate (Dare I say it? 40 years ago?) the same issues were evident. Of course nothing was done by network then, but tenure was regularly denied to award-winning and otherwise stellar faculty. The only reason one could imagine was that they made the old boys' club look bad.

The current move by the Obama administration and FCC is also just politics. They do NOT understand the issue in any depth, and it's often clear that FCC commissioners are so far removed from the real world that they don't get it either. Looking at the proceedings of some of their recent "discussions" it seems clear to me that they think their main role is to increase profitability for corporations, not to improve service to citizens.

[hrrunka]

My sister's daughter's teachers seem to like sending her home with a computer assignment and no clues as to how it's supposed to be accomplished. I suppose the aim is to get her to work it out for herself, but sometimes the relevant package's learning curve is a bit steep...

[altivo]

We see a lot of that here too. Typically they come into the library with some vague notion of something they are supposed to do "on the computer" and often it turns out that we don't even have the relevant software packages. The teachers have no idea themselves what they are asking. It's "standardized curriculum" of some sort.

Of course, the schools are all Windows-based. We are almost exclusively Linux-based.

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

What a beautiful scene O.O

As to Academia, I'm afraid it was very much like that in 1998 too