Greg and Kat's blog

I have decided to sit in on Ted‘s writing course, CMPT 376. This is the first time the course has been offered. I would like to be the kind of person that can teach a course like this, and this seems like a good way.

Notice the careful wording in the last sentence. It didn’t say “I’d like to teach this course in the future.” That’s a stronger statement that I’m just not willing to make yet.

After one lecture, I have learned one important thing: CMPT 376 is like Burning Man. There are no spectators, only participants. My plan all along was to participate in lectures, so I’m not too worried there.

The work I had planned on ignoring was the writing exercise for each class. (Thrice-weekly? Lecturly? There needs to be a word for that.) But, after a lecture, I have decided to give it the old college-try. But, there’s not much point in printing out what I write and giving it to Ted. I don’t need the marks.

So, I’m going to try to post here three times a week, approximately on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. My own version of NaBloPoMo.

Like everything else in 376, I make no promises about making it all the way to the end of the semester. Some of the posts may lack my usual wit and sparkle, in favour of volume, but you’ll deal.

Well, the semester is winding down for me. All of my marks are in and approved. [Angelina: your mark is in.] Relatively few students are complaining about their marks. There are a few with inflated senses of their accomplishments, but it’s pretty quiet.

I have a few more sets of grades to approve, and a few last meetings, but it’s all pretty much over.

I had a discipline hearing today. I was on the board; it wasn’t a CMPT case. It was a serious case that they have been trying to schedule the hearing since May. The end result was the harshest I have seen: upheld department’s Fs, retroactive removal of degree, student must surrender parchment, 9 semester suspension, permanent notation on transcript. This was considered somewhat lenient.

Kat should be hitting YVR tomorrow at about 21:00, so that’s good.

After that, it’s all food and drink until the new year.

Edit: On the subject of complaining about marks… What goes on in a student’s mind to get 74.6%, and then ask if 75% is the cutoff for the next letter grade, and shouldn’t that be rounded up? Do students really think some spreadsheet has a roundoff error just for them? If I had wanted the cutoff at 74.5%, that’s where I would have put it. There are 180 students, so some of them are going to be close to boundaries no matter what I do.

Do you remember Estelle Getty’s character in Golden Girls? The premise was that she had a stroke and lost the ability to filter what she said, thus always said what was on her mind, no matter how abrasive.

I think I had that stroke.

I have sent no less than seven potentially inflammatory emails in the last 24 hours. Tones have ranged from “has the potential to cause problems in the future” to “please increase your stress level right now”.

And it feels good.

Several things seem to have recently come to a point where they need to be dealt with. The options are pretty much “ignore”, “placate”, or “try to fix”. I am basically just opting for the third… and doing it directly.

I think this all started when I went on a co-op site visit with Harriet in the summer. One of the students we visited was a little awkward and kept playing with his pen and the desk chair beside him during the meeting. About 5 minutes after it started bugging me, Harriet said “Put the pen down and stop playing with the chair. It makes people think you’re not listening.” My internal reaction was “OMG, you can say that out loud?”

For example, I was talking to Amanda earlier today (who is, of course, in favour of this behaviour). We were, as always, discussing the functioning of the School. My argument in favour of giving myself a potentially horrible future task was “people’s lives get ruined all the time; why not mine?”

This cannot be healthy behaviour.

So, I’m sitting in my office, putting icing on cupcakes for our Halloween potluck. (It’s way easier to transport un-iced cupcakes.) It’s my office hours, but nobody ever comes anyway.

Which brings me to the reason for this post…

There is a list of things that a student expects when they arrive at an instructor’s office hours. The instructor turning around and saying (cheerily) “Cupcake?” while shoving one in their direction? Let’s say that’s probably pretty far down the list.

It was all I could do to keep it together until he finished his question and left. So somewhere, there’s a CMPT 120 student who is very confused, but has a cupcake.

So, it’s been a while. I’m in the middle of a crazy-busy semester, as I mentioned before. Certain things have become luxuries: hobbies, a personal life, leisure time. Other than that, things are going well.

One of my big stress things happened last Friday. We (and by “we”, I mean “I”) hosted a day of professional development activities for IT teachers. This is like the third one of these we have done. My plan is always the same: get them in a room and talking about the good ideas they have had for their classes. Bounce ideas around with just enough structure to keep things moving.

This time, Richard came and we talked about robotics projects and ideas. Richard really knows his shit (which I guess shouldn’t be a surprise, since it is his research area), and I think the teachers came away with some ideas that never would have occurred to them otherwise. The feedback I’ve had has been really good.

Anybody else that wants to take my quiz is welcome to: consider the phrase “High School Robotics Competition”. Form a mental image of what that looks like. Tell me about it.

I just finished putting together my CMPT 120 midterm for Friday. I hate making up exams like a five year old hates eating asparagus. I whine, bitch, moan, procrastinate, and complain about how horrible my life is until it’s finally done. It’s done, so I’ll be much happier until the final exam comes around.

One of the other things I need to do for 120 is create the last assignments. I have always had the last assignment as an open-ended problem that the students don’t have a hope of “finishing”. The goal is for them to work on it, think about algorithms, and get some good stuff done. This lets the just-okay students accomplish something, and really pisses off the good students who work their asses off, learn a lot, but still don’t “finish”.

I was on the bus tonight and finally had the idea I’ve been waiting for. Their assignment is going to be programming the behaviour of a NPC (non-player character) in some kind of game. I haven’t worked out the game, but I’ll create a library to play the game, and their code will have to control the NPC(s) to be good opponents. The game will have to be fairly simple.

Any of the CS types want to help me work that out in exchange for lunch?

I haven’t blogged for a while. Being really busy has caused me to have little time to blog, and little to talk about if I did.

The new semester started. I’m teaching CMPT 120 (intro programming, etc) and CMPT 470 (web-fu). I’m also supervising CMPT 165 (web-fu-lite) distance ed. And, I’m supervising Angelina in a directed studies course. And I’m undergrad director. Yeah, it’s going to be a big bag of crazy all semester.

Angelina’s project is quite cool: She Builds Robots. The finished product will be a series of video tutorials (with some other stuff in the mix) on building and programming autonomous robots. I’ve signed on because of the outreachy part of the whole thing. The fact that I don’t know crap about robots bothers me a little, but Angelina seems to be doing okay on that front, so I think we’re good.

On the admin side, it’s still pretty much all restructuring all the time. The smart money is on Computing Science and Engineering forming a new faculty together. I’m campaigning for the “Faculty of Engineering and Computing Science” because it has a pronounceable acronym: FECS. I still have a side bet that we will end up in the Faculty of Science (with the other end of that bet being the status quo).

Honestly, I pretty much stopped caring what happens when I couldn’t think of anything that would be better or worse depending on the outcome. I might like my dean more… or less. Anything other than the status quo would be more coherent for recruiting, so that would be good.

Teaching-wise, all is well. I could do 470 in my sleep at this point and 120 is chugging along too. My 120 students seem to have some reading comprehension problems (e.g. being unable to determine what room their labs are in, after I email with the room numbers), but that’s annoyingly normal for first year.

As I mentioned previously, I’m trying to get some student data for a side project. The data is housed in SIMS (Student Information Management System), which is pretty much the internal group that does goSFU.

This led me to spending a chunk of the day learning about SIMS, both the system and the group that manages it.

First, remember that we paid tens of millions for the whole SIMS/goSFU/Peoplesoft thing. That doesn’t count the productivity lost across the University to the horrible interface. Admittedly, a lot of what we paid for was a level of certainty that there would be no catastrophic failure. When we wake up tomorrow, there will still be a record that I work there, and the students in my courses will still be registered.

The SIMS team is apparently either swamped with necessary customizations or paralysed by the complexity of the task before them. I was told today about a two and a half year wait by a staff member to get a simple minor customization.

What tipped me over the edge tonight was a document I received titled “SIMS Reporting Database Tables–Field Descriptions”. The reporting database is most, but not all of the student-related data in the system. This document is a list of fields in each table (with a sentence or so about each one).

It is 154 pages long. One hundred and fifty-four.

And, it obviously wasn’t even included in the millions we paid Peoplesoft. It is information compiled by SFU staff. It contains useful snippets like:

• “Not sure what field represents or if field is used. Most values are (blank) with a few exceptions”
• “Some dollar figure, no idea???”
• “A level between 1-5. Not sure which end of the range is the high end.”
• “A flag . ‘Y’, ‘N’ — All ‘N’ so not used?”

I don’t want to knock the poor employee(s) that wrote those things: they did the best they could with what they had to work with. But, if you were selling a database-backed system that was customizable and cost millions of dollars, wouldn’t you throw in some documentation?

As I was looking into the new Facebook application interface, I found myself thinking “what could I do with this that would be cool?” I figure a good Facebook application should contain information that people want to share with their friends and would help them connect with others.

What I quickly realized: students want to know what courses their friends are in, and what friends are in their courses. Thus the “SFU Courses” application was born.

My plan (and it’s still a plan) is to get nightly data from goSFU and push it to Facebook so students (who have added the application and authorized the data release) can have something like this in their profile, automatically updated when they register/drop courses:

Step 2 would be to display a list of people (who have added the application) who are in a particular course. I want to get the basic course list working first.

I know Facebook has a “Courses” section in the profile already, but nobody bothers updating it because it must be done manually. This would eliminate all of the upkeep, and just automatically display the current and registration semesters.

I have started working with it, and I’m starting to understand the Facebook API. Publishing regularly-updating data is a bit of a hassle, but it will work out.

I’m still working on getting the goSFU data. I have permission from the Director of Records and Registration to do it. We’re now working on doing the technical part: actually getting the right data to me every night. That is being slowed by what I will call “interdepartmental politics”.

I’m hoping the whole thing will be working by mid-July for the fall course registration period.