a thaumaturgical compendium

Yesterday was one of those 14 hour days, dashing to each appointment, and fighting a cold to boot. In that haze of near consciousness, I dashed out of the lecture hall without my USB flash drive. I didn’t realize this until I was driving home from dinner (with Steve Sawyer and Pauline Cheong). Every single thing I’ve done since the beginning of the year was on that drive. But, luckily, since I am an “information professional” I know that the drive should be periodically backed up. Unluckily, that knowledge was never translated into action. There is no excuse for this, since I suffered a catastrophic drive failure a year or so ago.

So, after trying the places such things are supposed to go, I’m trying to figure out how to reconstruct my life. Some things actually exist on hard drives or servers (not many), and thank goodness for gmail—much of what I’ve sent to others or gotten from them can be recovered. My worst fear is that I won’t catch all of the 25+ open projects I am working on and something will fall through the cracks. I was barely staying on top of them as it is.

Just because you read it on the web does not make it true. However, I found this to be an amusing observation of a paper sale “in the wild”: A Week of Kindness Blog: Laura K. Krishna is a Plagiarist. (Via Prof B..)

Chris Lott has a post seeking to end the end-of-semester community destruction:

Top-down LMS like Blackboard are exactly the wrong answer because the social tools (I’m being generous with the plural here) are pathetic, locked down, and not created to go beyond the instance of a single semester or course.

One of the nice things about the New Media Research Lab at the University of Washington is that we managed to build a fairly strong community of undergraduate and graduate researchers, outside of the curriculum. While I like the ability to do something new every semester, and I still wish we were on quarters so that I would get that opportunity more often, it seems like such a waste to dissolve the community at the end of each course.

Another thing that they did at UW (and not here) was Freshmen Interest Groups, a set of freshmen who took the same sections of the same courses for the first year, as well as some seminars outside of the regular curriculum. This took at least some of the sting out of being at a huge university.

One of the most difficult parts of teaching a course that has hundreds of students in it is not in conveying material (I am one of those strange people who actually enjoys lecturing—at least when it is a good lecture), but in fostering communities among the students. I think the best solution for this is to refuse to teach any courses with more than 25 students (ha!), but barring that, I think some social uses of computing, if well integrated into the social processes, could really help.

ZoomInfo is a search engine that provides “people information summarized.” It seems to be a hybrid of search engine and resume. Interesting, given the frequency with which people now use Google to populate their Farley Files.

How do they do with me? Well, the first hit is pretty good, naming me as an Assistant Professor at the University of Buffalo’s School of Informatics (you are correct, sir!). Additional titles it assigns me are: Assistant Professor of Communication, Communications and Technology Issues Teacher, Professor of Informatics, Social Scientist, and Communications Professor—all of which are fairly correct. It seems to have pulled these largely from newspaper stories.

But I far more prefer the other possible Alex Halavais. For example, did you know that Alex Halavais is a Reverse Cowgirl at Gawker? An interesting experiment—and I suspect we are going to see a lot more such public experiments in auto-summarization in the near future—but I’m not sure how useful this is.

I taught a short-course in prediction a few summers ago. I wish we could have all contributed to the new Wikicity wiki on future s. Maybe at some point in the… um… future.

The NY Daily News (bastion of journalism) is reporting that a Bronx middle-school teacher either paid $2 or coerced (not really clear) a former classmate to take the teachers’ certification exam. The teacher had flunked several times, and his plan failed because his fill-in (who has Asperger’s syndrome) did too well on the exam, and this raised suspicions.

I’ve been toying with the idea of taking some time off from “The Academy” to teach in a public school in New York (as a teaching fellow), and this certainly makes it clear that the need is there. (via Alex via Gawker)

I’ve just (finally) finished writing the third exam for the cyberporn class. I hate writing and giving multiple-choice exams. (Ironically, I don’t mind taking them, but I don’t really get much opportunity to do that.) Here are some of the reasons:

They test superficial knowledge.

You can get them to probe deeper knowledge and comparisons, but such items are really, really difficult to write. It’s easy to find out if students know who started Esquire, but it is a lot harder to write a question that can tell me if they have an understanding of the political and cultural context in which this occurred. In a blue book exam, I can write “What was the political and economic context in which… [etc.].” And then, students actually get to demonstrate not that they can identify a more correct response when presented with it, but that they can think and write intelligently about the matter.

They encourage superficial knowledge.

Because they test superficial knowledge, this is what students try to get out of the lectures. Can’t blame them. Messed up, though.

They encourage students to think quantitatively about learning.

In an essay exam, the different between an A and a B is subjective, and really that makes sense. Is it true that someone that gets 90% rather than 80% on a multiple-choice exam really knows a specific amount more. I don’t just mean that the questions sample the possible space of learned material—I have little difficulty with sampling. What I mean is that the student who forgets a piece of vocabulary, but who could actually say something intelligent about the material, receives a lower score. And he or she then gets a lower grade and thinks that they are somehow “dumber.” The really bright ones catch on and realize that the grades don’t reflect their knowledge, and many of these manage to fake it and train themselves to learn to the test. But many actually believe that they are not very bright because that is what the test says.

I should note that few actually think the final grade in the class represents what the student knows about the material. As faculty we complain that students see the grade as something to be “won” or “granted.” Unfortunately multiple-choice exams feed into this mentality.

They are hard to write.

I know: whine, whine, whine. Bubble tests don’t have to be graded, so what’s the fuss. It takes at least 10 times the amount of effort to write a decent multiple-choice exam as it does to assign a paper or create a blue-book exam. Yes, I know it takes a lot longer (approaching infinitely longer) to grade, but at least that grading is telling you something about the students and what they know.

Cheating is easier.

I do a lot to try to stop this, but I already suspect a pair of people in this class of cheating. Hard to catch them red-handed, though, since the amount of information that needs to be conveyed is so small and discrete. A lot harder to cheat on an essay exam, particularly when it is open book.

But, despite all of this, until they assign me more than a single TA for a class of 400, and until they consider teaching as a serious part of the promotion process, multiple-choice exams are going to be where it’s at.