The Haves and the Have Nots of Common Sense

As a general rule of thumb, students are to be evaluated using portfolio assessment, wherein the final grade is determined by more more than a single performance so as to get a better measure of student performance, as well as to avoid "bad luck" singularities. The most common forms of portfolio assessment are either a midterm or mandatory hand-in assignments (typically pass/fail) in addition to a final exam.

If you were in charge of implementing a change in the way the portfolio assessments are being used, would you: a) Announce the changes in time for the new regime to be defined in the study catalogue, which is the binding document outlining what form the course will have. b) Announce the changes the semester prior to changes taking effect, thus enabling the subject teachers to make the changes necessary to make the (mandatory) portfolio assessment work. c) Announce the changes in mid-semester, just before the midterms, with a three working-day time limit to implement the necessary changes.

If you answered c) - congratulations. You just might possess the tridefecta of lack of common sense, inability to understand the linearity of time, and a sociopathic streak which would qualify you for a position in central university administration.

I just received an email the effects of which is that I need to convert from giving midterms to assigning mandatory problem sets. The midterm is Thursday. In order to comply with rules and regulations, these changes should have been announced (i) in the study catalogue and (ii) at the first day of class if any extraordinary events occurred which warrant changes to the course description. While my course does indeed use problem sets, they're not presently mandatory in that students don't have to hand them in and have them graded. Of course; if they want to actually pass the course, solving and understanding the problem sets is mandatory, but that's another can of worms. Being that this is March, we've already gone through three problem sets, and we've also gone through the solutions. As an added bonus, I don't have a TA in this course, owing to administration missing (their own) deadline for approval, leaving me high&dry also in this regard.

My choices are the following: 1) Skip midterm and let the "portfolio" consist only of the final exam, thus breaking the rules. 2) Change the portfolio assessment from midterm to mandatory problem sets, thereby breaking the rules and causing myself tons of hours of extra work. 3) Find a way to comply with the new rules for midterm and keep the system approximately as it stands.

Option 3) is the only one that technically is legal, and also the one which is the hardest to implement. Partly because the midterm is going to take place between 5 and 7 PM, a time frame where no administrators and thus official inspectors are at work. Also because this alternative requires me to bring student information I'm not privy to.

I'm really not a fan of the central university administration.

Time to play The Game

Being that I'm on 50% paternity leave, and that apart from research, the other tasks have not been reduced accordingly, I told myself that I'd cruise through the teaching of my main subject. In the sense that I would rely on last year's slides, that is, not in ay other sense. Normally I spend a lot of time revamping the slides material each semester the course is taught, because one always discovers ways to make it better (like Presentation Zen), and because each set of new students helps highlight areas where I need to work on my lectures.

It's called progress.

As it often does, however, reality struck in a big way when the supposedly parent-friendly administration dealt me a bum hand with respect to lecture hours.

Thursdays from 5-7 PM and Fridays from 3-4 PM. Snake eyes.

What this entails, is that I have to work a lot harder to retain the same percentage of students in the lecture hall. Consequently, I'm spending at least as much time as before updating slides and coming up with all kinds of things to make the course appealing to the (thankfully large) percentage of students who opt to be there for my lectures.

I might as well start bringing my own intro music and a video entrance package.

They sure saw me comin'...

At the moment, I'm on 50% paternity leave, which in theory means that my expected workload is cut in half. However, on Friday I finally realized that this is not true at all. A quick&dirty breakdown of my overall duties would look something like this: 50% teaching, 50% research.

Right. Back from fairytale-land. A more accurate description would have to include various administrative duties, very few of which are easily boxed into either category. In theory, the 50% reduction of duties should be spread equally across all categories. Let's see if it does:

• Teaching: During the Spring semester, I am the course responsible for one 4th year topic. I also teach 1/3 of another 4th year course, plus perhaps one or two PhD specialization topics. Out of these, I am only relieved of the 1/3 - which rules, as my first and only choice as replacement accepted the position - which makes my teaching load for the semester significantly larger than 50%.
• Administration: No reduction in workload at all.
• Research: ...pretty much where my "workload" is reduced.

In other words; the only area where I feel a reduction in my workload is the area that I actually get credit for in the dept. annual reports.

They sure saw me coming.....

Slidescapes and slideoramas

So I attempted some of the animation techniques I found in Slide:ology by Nancy Duarte. Specifically, I experimented with animating slide transitions to create the illusion of the slides being part of a panoramic view, or what Duarte calls slidescapes or slideoramas. I battle-tested it in my "sales pitch", first lecture of the semester, to show some connections and big-picture things, and let me tell you; I thought it was really cool. It beat the ever-loving crap of my old way of presenting timelines and connections.

Yes; Slide:ology is worth the samoleans you have to plunk down to get your grubby hands on the book.

Deja vu all over again aftermath

Still stuck with the undesirable time frames for my lectures this semester despite a few more attempts to improve the odds of filling the seats. What's new however, is that the administration asshat never updated the course info on the central university web pages, resulting in quite a few emails from students that showed up to an empty classroom, wondering why I didn't show up. Now; it should be mentioned that had these students checked out the course page on it's learning, they'd have seen the message I posted a while ago with the new updated schedule, but the admin guy still absolutely sucks.

Amateur crap like that really should be beneath the institution of higher learning I'm a tenured faculty member of.

Deja vu all over again

Well now; it wouldn't be January if I wasn't struggling with the powers that be at the administration trying to wrangle up decent lecture facilities for the Spring semester. See e.g. my post from last year. Every freakin' year since I started here, I've gone through the same process:

1. Submit a list of requirements for teaching facilities the preceding semester, including expected number of students and if there are any timeframes that absolutely and legitimately don't work.
2. Check timetables for the course and realize that I've been given ungodly hours in a room with room for like 6 students, no projector, no blackboard and probably no electricity.
3. Contact the central admin in charge and point out that I've been given insufficient facilities, both with respect to seating capacity and amenities - like blackboard, projector and - I don't know; walls?
4. Get a reply saying that they have not registered any such requirements; they've still operating with the 1995 (or so) numbers, and the problem must obviously be on my end. Still, the dude in charge graciously agrees to look into the situation, however I must be warned that the time tables have been all but set in stone at this point.
5. After a few rounds back and forth and a lot of diplomacy on my part, I end up with adequate teaching facilities.
6. Repeat ad infinitum

This year - or rather before Christmas -I started the process early, hoping to get a smoother ride duringthe whole administrative debacle. As an added complication, I have just started my paternity leave, which leaves some days of the week inaccessible to teaching in order for my wife and I both to get the work-week puzzle to work out.

As I pleaded with the commaf*cking bastard in charge of room allocation, I argued that I was on partial paternity leave throughout the semester.

End result after going through a few cycles of non-usable facilities: I now teach Thursdays from 5-7 PM and Fridays from 3-4 PM.

That's gonna put lots of asses in the seats. Prime time, babee.

No bully-register?

Lately, there's been a lot of fuss about the campaign "Stopp Mobbingen" (Stop the Bullying) which has assembled a register of schools where serious bullying occurs more frequently than what's to be expected. This weekend, VG reported that two "high-ranking politicians" demand that this register should be removed. Arguments ensue.

Who are these "high-level politicians", one might ask. Why, it's the Patron Saint of Mediocrity, Trine Skei Grande (Venstre), and the Crown Princess of Unsubstantiated Media Hype, Hadia Tajik (Arbeiderpartiet). Skei Grande is of course the second-in-command and presumed leader-elect of Venstre, which in and of itself should give some pause for Venstre-voters, considering that Skei Grande couldn't win a debate if she was the only participant, and that in the same contest, the lectern would be voted "Most Charismatic Participant". Talk about contrast in leadership change if she takes over after Lars Sponheim. Hadia Tajik is a political advisor rumored to be behind such wildly successful proposals as hijab in the Norwegian police force, and she was also one of the most visible proponents of the epitome of lameness campaign slogan in "Jens vi kæn", not at all a weak attempt to piggyback on a very successful slogan recently employed in international politics.. Both of these "high-level politicians" decry the campaign and their register, and offer instead their own solutions to the very real problem of bullying. Both are also very visible in media - in the case of Tajik, she's been very adept at getting face time in media ever since she got into national politics, whereas Skei Grande obviously has started to take the advice of a media consultant.

Skei Grande vehemently states that bullying cannot be stopped by blacklisting schools where bullying is a disproportionate problem compared to the mean. Rather, she wants to allocate resources towards reinstating the respect for teachers in the classroom. On the vagueness scale, this ranks right up there with her brilliant file-sharing proposal, where she suggests that somebody somehow should find alterantive revenue streams for musicians etc. to make money without limiting filesharing.

Brilliant. I'm sure the red-headed kid with the freckles and daily trips face-first into the toilet takes great comfort in this.

Tajik states that the bully-register has no constructive effect, and that concrete proposals and strategies are missing. According to her, bullying can be stopped by other means entirely. For example, the government will present a new, holistic approach to learning environment before Christmas. They also want to strengthen the victimization-sensitivity training among teachers and principals. But wait - there's more: The coalition government also want to allocate more funds to attitude campaigns in the schools.

Again, I'm sure that li'l Per is better able to hold on to his moral while on the receiving end of wedgies and beatings when he knows that the government is thinking about putting down a committee to investigate the problem and possibly allocate funds towards a future campaign no doubt featuring children of all colors rapping about how bullying is whack, yo.

These lame-ass attempts to make political hay of a very real (to the children involved) problem by launching some vague, non-committal nonsense that they never have to be held to is very low - even for beta politicians like Skei Grande and Tajik.

As far as I can tell, the register in question only lists schools where the bullying has been so severe as to necessitate students to change schools despite attempts from parents to enter a constructive dialogue with the school in question. Seeing as how the register doesn't even begin to list the majority of schools, we're talking about schools where bullying is a much greater problem than the norm. Isn't this information valuable in and of itself? Unless you're gonna claim that the students at these schools are more evil or more prone to bullying than other students, there is a need to realize that the problems are disproportionally present in some schools. And thus a general solution encompassing all schools nationwide probably won't do much. While I don't think the teachers and principals at these schools should be put in the pillory of constant media attention, I also don't think that they deserve a medal for either not being aware of the situation or not doing enough to fix the problem. Ducking responsibility is a poor trait in educators.

A lesson in sucktitude

Two days ago, we got an email from the Department Head strongly encouraging us to register for a two-lecture deal on ergonomics and stress management. The first lecture - ergonomics at computer workstations, took place yesterday, scheduled for 90 minutes.

Two minutes after I entered the lecture hall is when I started sensing that something was wrong. First of all, I was the only academic staff member from the department present. The Department Head, although present in the very same building, was nowhere to be seen. When the lecture started, I really sensed some serious suctual overtones happening. The physiotherapist in charge started by stating that she was very happy to have the opportunity to give this lecture in English, seeing as how she really needed the practice.

No freakin' kiddin'

She then went on to say that this course was really supposed to have happened earlier, but she was on sick leave due to - you guessed it - back problems and repetitive stress injuries to her shoulders and wrist. Despite her claim of having 20 years of experience as a physiotherapist, she also needed a cheat sheet to give the definition of physiotherapy. So right off the bat this was like taking "how to win friends and influence people" lessons from the two douchebags currently incarcerated in Kongo. Or taking ethics lessons from Sudbø.

In what appeared to be four months but which turned out to be only 95 minutes we then were equipped with shocking new revelations such as "Adjust your chair to a position that's right for you", "take frequent breaks to avoid repetitive strain", "don't have reflections from lighting coming off of your computer screen" and so on.

The maximum sucktitude was saved for last, however, when the physiotherapist had all the participants partake in an impromptu (for us at least) aerobic exercise session to the elevator and supermarket classic "Vem Vet" by the introspective Swedish diary-reciter Lisa Ekdahl. Following this, the instructor even had the nerve to plug her upcoming set of recommended exercises accompanied by a CD comprised of her own selection of what she referred to as "modern music".

That's a cool 95 minutes of my life I'll never get back.

School politics according to me - part 4

Sponsored lunch
On papyrus, it's a good idea that all the students get a "free lunch" (financed via tax money anyways) so as to provide them with the nutrition to stay focused during the day and to bypass any inequalities as far as parent income and dietary awareness. This would ensure that the kids get at least one balanced meal during the day, right?

Sure...if you trust the government to actually provide a nutritionally sound diet. If we look to countries like Great Britain where school lunches are implemented and take a look at what menus are available, it's a lot of sausages, chicken nuggets and other "foods" which are nothing but industrial byproducts with some preservatives and coloring added. Bottom line: I wouldn't trust such a system to provide adequate nutrition, and for sure we can provide our kid with a better packed lunch than that. I've often said that the best way to get rid of industrial waste is to put a little bit of it into food products and have people eat it. The difference is that I'm joking.

Public disclosure of national tests and ranking of schools
Absolutely - where do I sign up? I've never seen any logical argument against either of these. Starting with public disclosure of national tests, which are often presented as organized bullying of school districts who don't do well. I strongly disagree - this would offer distinct advantages both to the "customer", i.e., the population, and the "seller", i.e., the school districts. The benefit to the "customer" is obvious; if you've the choice of sending your children to one out of two schools in the area, you obviously want to know which provides the best education. If your family relocates to another area and you're looking for housing in a region spanning several school districts, you also want to take into consideration the quality of the schools nearby. Public disclosure of national tests is one way of accomplishing this.

In case of the school districts, every argument against public disclosure I've heard basically boils down to "Well, if a school district gets a bad rating, feelings are gonna be hurt". So?

If a school scores significantly below average - what are the possible reasons? For the sake of simplicity, we can limit the discussion to schools outside of the Oslo area, so as to eliminate any just or unjust focus on cultural issues. The variables are 1) students, 2) teachers and 3) economy. Out of these, only two are valid, because if you think that some schools score lower because they've got bad students, then odds are that you think phrenology and physiognomy are branches of science and good indicators of intelligence. So; if the bad scores can be attributed to either insufficient budgets or incompetent/lacking teaching staff (or most likely a linear combination of the two), that's good news in that it can be remedied. However, you can't solve a problem unless you put focus on it. In the case of an insufficient budget, this needs to be pointed out if anything's to be done about it. Is the municipality flat out broke or didn't get enough ear-marked money from the national government? Here are the numbers to prove it, now hook us up with some chedda'. The municipality prioritized building a new city hall instead of hiring more teachers? Heads are gonna roll and changes can be implemented.

What if the problem is an incompetent teaching staff? Well; if the results of national tests are not disclosed and nobody knows that the other schools in the district score twice as high in almost every subject, what possible incentive do the teachers have to improve? Am I to believe that the same teachers who sucked at their job to begin with are spontaneously going to get their act together unless acted upon by an outside force? Never gonna happen. You don't need to take my word for it though - the second law of thermodynamics also says so.

On to school ranking. What would be wrong with establishing some high schools for exceptionally good students? For lower year-studies the students still live at home, but it's not at all uncommon to move out in order to go to high school. Same with universities; why can't we have a ranking that's tied up to entrance requirements?

Here's where all kinds of egalitarian, social democracy nonsense usually sets in, despite the fact that this exact system is implemented in many countries we'd very much like to compare ourselves to when it comes to academics. Also, my main issue with this pseudo-egalitarian approach is that it resides somewhere between selectiveness and epic hypocrisy. The thing is; when it comes to sports, there are no such limitations - behold the completely legitimate institutions known as "toppidrettsgymnas" (elite athletic high school), with stringent entrance exams. Also, kids are separated into scrub and varsity teams in pretty much every sport from an early age. Apparently this has nothing to do with discrimination and "sorteringssamfunn", but follows the simple rule that some people are better at something. But for some reason this does not hold true in academia. Unless someone can prove that everyone holds the same academic potential, this is brutal hypocrisy.

Alright - enough.

School politics according to me - part 3

Private schools
I've got some reservations about this subject. First of all, I think it's great that the option of sending your kid to a private school exists if the local public school is unable to provide your kid with an adequate education. Then again I think the tax money should be spent where it can do the most good, and being that the number of students in public schools vastly exceeds that of the private institutions, that's a no-brainer for me. Letting the funding follow each and every student appears to me like an exceptionally stupid idea which will only exclude any kind of long-term planning and investments for the schools, as well as make it close to impossible to execute any budget control beyond the current semester or school year.

The main source of my reservations stems from the vague criteria which must be fulfilled, in that the private school to be must offer an alternative pedagogical approach or be based on religious belief. Neither criterion does anything to enable exertion of quality control, which must be the primary focus. Moreover, I'm not particularly keen on using tax money to fund some glorified indoctrination institutions run by the Church of the Mothership behind the Comet or some other fear-monger cult. I'm also not in favor of offering up tax money just because someone offers an "alternative pedagogic approach". If you want to dance the alphabet and claim to be able to analyze someone's personality solely by their looks, fine. Just fund the bongs, drums and absinth out of your own pocket.

Grades
Should grades be implemented in the elementary school? I don't really have an opinion of that, despite the frequent appearance of this very question in media recently. What I do have a strong opinion on, however, is the need for a universal evaluation system. Right now, grades are still where it's at. Sure, grades as a system has its flaws, but it works insofar as providing a universal platform for ranking of students, which is absolutely necessary in order to evaluate performance. What really irks me is when some pressure groups try to make political hay by claiming that we should abandon grades in favor of "alternative evaluation systems", yet never seem to suggest or substantiate any such thing. They might as well suggest that we try "something else". Until a new evaluation system has been run in parallel with the current on a statistically significant population over a prolonged period of time and has proven to outperform the existing paradigm, such a suggestion is logically flawed. If you don't at least provide a definite alternative to the existing system, yet keep whining about it, what you need to do is know your role and STFU.

The most egregious example of total logic disconnect I have had the misfortune of witnessing on this topic came courtesy of my mandatory pedagogic training. During one assembly on alternative evaluation forms, one participant from the medical faculty was strongly advocating abandoning grades in favor of a Pass/Fail system. According to him, their experience indicated that there was no need for grading medical students beyond that, and so the grading should be abolished in favor of the binary Pass/Fail. One other participant asked how the MD would rank applicants to a position based on "his" system, and he hemmed and hawed his way to explaining that such a selection would have to be done based on the interview. The other participant pressed on, asking how he'd go through with this considering the very realistic scenario of 50+ applicants for said position. Before Dr. Douchebag, M.D. could answer, I chimed in and asked him what criteria are applied for selecting students to medical school. "Uhhhh..grades, but.." I interrupted again to ask if he expected us to take him seriously when his faculty had already used grades exclusively for pre-screening the students, accepting only - one assumes - the cream of the crop? ...and he actually shut up, but he probably clasped his squash racket extra hard later that afternoon, cursing "those damn scientists with their logic and their math".

Yet another wall of text, so more to come

School politics according to me - part 2

Here's the second part of my current views on school politics. They are not permanent in any way, as I am susceptible to persuasion by facts and logic.

Teacher competence
There's no denying that a depressingly high fraction of teachers are not competent. While providing schools with training budgets for their staff can remedy part of this problem, the basic issue is that the shortage of teachers a while back led to schools accepting teacher students who'd failed basic high school math and other subjects. Worse still, some of the students who'd failed math now teach that very same subject despite being unqualified. Something which ought to be painfully obvious, is that you need to have mastered the subject you teach, at the level you're teaching. No wonder children perceive math as difficult and non-intuitive.

In my limited understanding of how this came to be, it started as a shortage of teachers, during which period the teacher academies accepted pretty much any applicants, irrespective of whether or not they were qualified. Following this, the situation was that a shortage of teachers still existed, but that the schools did not have the necessary budget to hire permanent staff. Hence, many schools depended heavily on temps (not part of the permanent budget), which isn't exactly ideal from the students' point of view, in that there is no stable situation. It ain't exactly the kind of situation which favors optimal quality of teaching either, as temps - knowing full and well that the odds of being hired permanently are abysmally low - had no incentive for going above and beyond and laying down maximum effort.

So what to do about this? One obvious step is to implement minimum criteria for being accepted into teaching academies. Another step is to lose the temps (if that's still relevant) and go for hiring of permanent staffers. A training budget for further education of teachers is also a must, something a lot of politicians appear to be talking about these days. For me, increasing teacher salary beyond its current level doesn't really make sense. Last time I checked those numbers, high school teachers can make more money that Associate Professors, while working less. There are probably teachers out there who claim to be underpaid and overworked, all of whom I'd be happy to compare workloads with. Also, in my experience, there's a very high percentage of local politicians who are also teachers, compared to other professions, which doesn't seem to go with the claim of having a much higher workload than said other professions.

Funding structure
Should schools be funded via national or local budgets? There are some very persuasive arguments to be made for school budgets being run across municipal budgets, most of which deal with flexibility and a closer proximity between decisionmakers and the issues to be dealt with. On papyrus it's a great idea to let the municipalities distribute the budgets as they please.

On the other hand, there's a saying that a small town with lots of money is like a donkey with a wristwatch. Nobody knows how it got it, and damn if it knows how to use it. Every argument that can be made in favor of increased local budget control can be countered with three little words: "The Terra Municipalities" Come to think of it, Trondheim is another example of why increased local control is a really bad idea: Trondheim sold it's power plant to private enterprises with a hyooge profit, which was not distributed or invested locally to stimulate the Trondheim area, but - wait for it - invested in all kinds of stocks and bonds in order to maximize profit fast. Enter the global financial crisis, and Trondheim went from a wealthy municipality/city to being three taxpayers away from having to sell Nidarosdomen to a Saudi Arabian amusement park.

Ironically, the brilliant architects behind this sale were the usually fiscally responsible conservatives in Høyre. Kudos on a job well done, and for demonstrating that municipalities from what I've seen either don't have robust eough economies or don't have the know-how to manage their finances. Clearly, municipalities cannot be trusted to distribute their funding according to what's best for common goods like education. Thus I am in favor of having school funding regulated by the national government.

Another wall of text. More to come.

School politics according to me - part 1

Some time this Spring I predicted that school politics would become really important in the upcoming election. Or rather, that it would be important enough to warrant debates on the topic beyond the usual glossing over and subsequent backhanded dismissal like what's typically done with topics like science and research: everyone agrees that it's important, but none can seem to substantiate any plan whatsoever beyond cheap catchphrases often including words like "change".

I'm lookin' like freakin' Nostradamus up in here Far be it from me to gloat, but it appears that I have been moderately successful in my predictions this time.

There are several reasons why I think education is important not just in and of itself, but also with respect to what political party gets my vote. Some of the reasons are tied in with parenthood and the fact that I want Viktor to get a good education within our school system. I don't want him to feel bored or left behind in a school system which at times appears to be little more than a storage facility for children and adolescents. Another reason is that being an academic staff member at a university, the level at which we can teach and thus the threshold level of knowledge we can impart on the students is limited by the baggage they bring with them from high school and earlier. We only have so much time with the students, and there is a definite limit to how steep the learning curve can get. Students entering universities with severe deficiencies in math, for example, is a serious problem. Moreover, if universities and university colleges are to adjust their levels according to lower levels of education, it's a brutal case of the tail wagging the dog. After all, degrees earned at our institutions of higher learning must comply with or ideally exceed international standards. Thus, it makes sense that the academic branches of the educational system work to prepare students for universities and university colleges. The converse does not make any sense.

However, this does not in any way, shape or form mean that I'm considering the worth of the educational system based on its ability to prepare students for university studies. Far from it. If anything, the current system puts too much emphasis on academics, which is manifested in the way trade school students are being forced to take a number of courses with the sole purpose of qualifying them for university acceptance - a low-budget version of the GED. Not only are trade school students forced to take the "academic route" courses, but their studies are also prolonged because of them. And lo and behold, trade school students are much more likely to drop out of school than their academic counterparts. Might that be because the system pulled a bait-and-switch on them? Maybe they don't see the relevance of adding such subjects as poetry analysis to their curriculum, and don't appreciate that these courses extend the duration of their education by 50% without them learning anymore of their desired trade.

Unless there's a huge influx of carpenters wanting to take a Master's degree in Nordic languages that I haven't heard anything about, I think it would be prudent to stop treating trade school and equivalents as the red-headed stepchild of the educational system. The country needs a whole lot more carpenters and electricians than it needs professors, and that's not an elitist way of thinking at all. Not all people are good at or interested in purely academic subjects, much like not everybody are practically oriented. For sure I'd be fried if I had to do anything with the electrical system myself. If our car breaks down on the highway, popping the hood would be a perfunctory exercise in which I'd only be looking for a giant switch that's dropped to the "off" position. I don't look down on any profession - except for lawyers, car salesweasels, real estate agents and "glamour models" - and I don't see how it's anything but condescending for the department of education to tell trade schools that "yeah; you teaching carpentry, electronics and other things requiring manual labor is all good and well, but in order for your school to qualify as part of the educational system, you need to add some proper subjects, like religion history and the ever-so-useful art of analysing poetry".

Wall of text - more to come.

....but WHY?

Along with the University in Stavanger, NTNU is the first Norwegian university to put lectures on iTunes.

Why in the name of E. Harrison Leslie and his thousand (horrible) gimmicks would NTNU and UiS want to spearhead this? Really - I'd like to know.

According to the piece, NTNU has put out some 90 videos with lectureson a wide range of topics. The NTNU representative, Julie Feilberg, explains that phase one is to communicate science to the general public. This makes sense to me, and is kind of cool.

The long-term plan is to incorporate this iTunes channel into regular teaching at NTNU. Feilberg refers to the fact that universities like Stanford, MIT and Yale were among the first ones to jump on the iTunes U bandwagon.

Lemme' get this straight; when trying to improve, it's always a good idea to get inspiration from those who are massively successful, and there's no denying that Yale, Stanford and MIT absolutely rock academically. And putting lectures on iTunes U isn't within a million light years of being the reason why these institutions are excellent. I can probably come up with a short list of some 50 reasons why the good US universities kick butt, and I can also come up with a laundry list of reasons why I think this would undermine teaching at Norwegian universities.

Can anyone think of a slew of good reasons why NTNU and UiS incorporating video'd lectures would improve teaching and learning?

..from Addræssa part 2

Adresseavisen from Wednesday July 22nd is just chock full of gems. Staying within the same theme as the previous post, the page 2 story deals yet again with the increased number of students at NTNU, and how this is perceived among theoretically qualified people. The header reads "Billige studenter finansierer dyre studier" ("Cheap students finance expensive studies"). In this piece, representatives for student organizations lament the fact that the increase occurs mostly within subjects like humaniora and social sciences, where the demand for expensive equipment is low or non-existent. By allowing more students into these disciplines, the increased cash flow is not used to improve conditions for these students, but rather funneled into more expensive subjects like engineering. According to the student representatives, this is not fair.

Welcome to the real world and the social democracy that is Norway. First, this is how pretty much everything works. Regardless of how much you pay in taxes, for example, you have absolutely no guarantee that your tax money is being spent on something that will benefit you directly. Your social security deductions are not being saved for when YOU retire, and so on. Moreover, the budget increase from the Department of Education was to be implemented immediately, and so it would be impossible to obtain the necessary facilities for, say, more students within natural sciences, where more lab space would be needed, etc. Compunding this is that the increased budget is not sufficient to be used for so-called "expensive" subjects.

This piece also contains a statement which betrays a complete lack of founding in reality among the student representatives: By accepting more students, the students are given false hope that they're gonna get a job following graduation.

Let's get one thing straight; the increased number of students is largely due to the fact that there is a financial crisis going on and concomitantly very difficult to get a job. Thus more people opt to go back to school. The extra budget is a direct consequence of the financial crisis. Am I to believe that the new, "extra" students are so howl-at-the-moon stupid that they believe that the government has also intervened to proportionally increase the number of jobs when they graduate?That the students fail to see the trend of more people going to school when jobs are scarce and thus that the very same students will have more competition for more or less the same number of jobs upon graduation?

Also; anyone who claims that entering a specific study guarantees a job five years down the road is blatantly lying to you. If that were true, there would hardly be a financial crisis now, would it? Nobody can predict what the job market looks like three to five years down the road. What CAN be stated, is that the most qualified students within a graduating class are likely to find a job.

...from Addræssa Part 1

We don't subscribe to the main newspaper in Trondheim - Adresseavisen - for several reasons. One such reason is experience from having tried a weekend subscription and found the distribution to published issue ratio not to be in our favor. As a matter of fact, we kept complaining and getting the subscription extended due to nondelivery enough times that I think we could've had a lifetime weekend subscription had we not actively cancelled the deal.

Another reason is that Adresseavisen sucks more than the combined efforts of a White House intern festival during the Clinton administration.

Still, we get a copy for free every now and again, like yesterday. Among other things, Addræssa has a "comments from raging lunatics at adressa.no" section. One such gem follows here (regarding a more than 10% increase in student numbers at NTNU):

"Vil i denne omgangen heller foreslå at en sikrer kvaliteten på de tilbudene som finnes og gir de studentene som har fått plass det beste som kan fremskaffes av undervisning,veiledning og studiemiljø. (I'd like to propose that NTNU should prioritize securing the quality of the existing studies and make sure that the existing students have access to the best possible teaching, guidance and student environment.)" Signed Ce.

One problem with your suggestion there"Ce"; following the "Quality reform", the funding structure was altered so that themoney now follows the students, or rather the number of completed study points/credit hours at the various departments. Thus, your brilliant suggestion of putting a cap on the student number that's lower than full capacity would net NTNU a grand total of 0 NOK with which to improve the existing studies beyond their current budget status.

Iacta Alea Est

That's it; I'm done with the teaching for the semester, save for some office-hour questions. I've prepared the final exam, turned it over to the exam office, and even made a solution manual. Since I've also posted a survey about the course, I'm waiting for the fallout feedback.

...then there's just the matter of grading the exams.....

Something to consider

Finals are coming up

...and it's reflected in the types of questions I get

Cry me a river

..a river of blood. There's a story at adressa.no about how high school students in Sør-Trøndelag are outraged by a decision that the Fall break - also known as the "potato break" is going to be eliminated. Thanks to Sondre for the heads up. This vacation week, originally there so that the students could help with the potato harvest, is of less value now than when most students came from farms, according to the politicians in charge. It's hard to disagree. Moreover, the number of school days in the Fall semester remains unchanged; the days off will not be eliminated but rather distributed throughout the semester.

The student representatives, however, feel that the politicians know nothing of the trials and tribulations of high school students, and that they certainly need a week off in the middle of the Fall.

Brilliant logic from the student representatives. First of all, I don't think there are many politicians without a high school education. Granted, few have more than that, but they still went to high school. Second, many a "career politician" went more or less directly from high school to some "elected" position, meaning that quite a few of the politicians in question are still in their 20s and early 30s and thus not so far removed from the current high school system. Third, there is no such thing as Fall break at institutions of higher learning. Nor is there such a thing in the real world assuming they want a job. Are the student representatives insinuating that the work pressure and stres factors are higher at high school level than at the university? If so, enjoy your oceanfront condo on Denial Island. Unless you're a teacher (high school or below) you won't see a two month summer vacation on the far side of high school either, so welcome to the real world.

But wait; there's more fail. According to student council representative Ingrid Rodem, this would really be a problem for the students who don't live with mom and dad, but have to rent studio apartments. She even backs this up with hard numbers - this would constitute a huge problem for the 72 out of 1000 students at her school who are not locals.

So let's summarize: The number of school days and the duration of the semester remain constant. Contrary to what Ingrid Rodem seems to think, workloads are significantly higher if she plans on higher education where there is NO Fall break. If and when she enters the job market she'll also have to contend with the number of vacation days dwindling like nobody's business compared to what you have during high school. The argument that students might not have the opportunity to spend a continuous week with Mommy and Daddy during the shortest of the semesters affects a whopping 7.2% of the students according to her numbers - and that's assuming that all of these students share the same homesickness as Ingrid Radem, which is quite the leap of faith.

This is really how you want to utilize the resources available when you're a student representative? 'Cause I can think of a number of issues more worthy of your time and effort than this.......also much more relavant to the quality of your education and how well-informed you are of the opportunities after your high school graduation.

The Tao of Grad School part 8

Part 8: Talks and presentations

You'll have to give plenty of talks and presentations during your stay in grad school, and odds are that they're also going to be part of your job description once you've completed your journey on the yellow brick road. Thus it stands to reason that you should strive to become as good as possible within this subject.

From my experience, there are five elements you need to master in order to give an effective talk or presentation:

Public speaking
Getting up in front of a crowd is considered to be intimidating by a large fraction of the population, hence all the jokes on the subject. Like the wedding MC who pulls the time-tested joke about how he (or she) has the most dangerous job in the world, since more than 70% of the population fear public speaking more than death. There is also the Dilbert joke based on the same premise: If you kill someone scheduled to speak in public, then statistically you'd be doing said person a favor.

Whatever. Fact is that to some, public speaking is so intimidating that they get physically ill prior to the event, which obviously is going to affect their performance. This reinforces the bad connotations to public speaking, since it didn't go so well last time, and the downward spiral continues. In which case this is a real problem, and quite frankly something you should consider. If you're going through grad school with the goal of entering academia, for example, then teaching is going to constitute about half of your job description. Teaching means public speaking, so if you get physical symptoms just thinking about standing in front of a crowd, you might want to think about other career paths. Not trying to demoralize anyone, but if half of your job is giving you physical symptoms of stress, then it's not good for you, and I can't see why you would want to expose yourself to that.

If you want to be a good public speaker and get your message across efficiently, you should be comfortable in front of a crowd. Simple (or not) as that. Watching someone who's shaking, sweating, mumbling, avoiding eye contact with the audience like the plague and is trying to will open a bottomless pit below the podium is excruciating. Moreover, if the speaker doesn't even have confidence in him- or herself, then why on earth should I? And why should I trust anything this person presents?

The good news is that for most people, the fear subsides and becomes more manageable with practice. The bad news is that I've never seen anyone go from being terrified of public speaking to loving it.

Scientific content
Unless the scientific basis for what you're presenting is sound, it generally doesn't matter how comfortable you are with public speaking. Sure; you can BS and handwave your way through a talk provided the audience is far below your level of expertise and/or they don't care about the topic. Of these two alternatives, the latter is by far the least desirable. However, there's only so much economy of content you can get away with in front of an audience of your peers. You can't polish a turd. If all you've got to show is a graph depicting the theoretical versus measured number of days since you accepted the invitation to give a talk, you're in for a rough Q&A session. The science is the reason you're giving the talk or presentation, so if it ain't there, you shouldn't be either.

PowerPoint
A few months back, I read a piece wherein some soft-science dude spent a considerable amount of words berating elaborate PowerPoint presentations, boldly stating that "Presentations with fancy graphics and animations were so 90's". If you for a moment think that there's an inverse correlation between the quality of the content and the packaging, you're probably one of the people who show up with a black text-on-white-background, 300 words per slide, default Excel graphics with too small fonts, borefest of a presentation. I've also got a real good deal on some oceanfront property in Nebraska - special price for you, my friend.

A well-designed presentation can only enhance the scientific content and the points you're trying to underscore. That doesn't mean that you can't go overboard, however. When you're thinking about what theme music to incorporate for each segment of slides, you've gone from a talk to a Broadway production. If so, take it down a couple of notches. But don't ever think that the packaging isn't important and that spending the necessary time to make your presentation look good is a waste of time. Learn what you can about design.

Presentation technique
Your presentation consists of more than the content of your slides and the cold hard facts. Meta-talk and how you present the material have tremenduous impact on the total package. Have you ever witnessed a talk where the presenter mumbled, did nothing but read directly off the slides, had his (or her) back to the crowd the entire time and kept uttering "idle - system processing" sounds ("Uhhhhhh", "aaaand.....", "So....like...")? If so, did you come away with an overall impression along the lines of "Damn; that was hands down the best talk I've ever been to. I gotta get me some more of that"?

I didn't think so. In the above example, the presenter displayed the academic equivalent of a radio face, wherein the added dimensions (compared to simply publishing a scientific paper) of a public forum were completely wasted, as the presenter did not use - or benefit from - the added possibilities. A complete waste, like using a symphony orchestra to back up Britney Spears. Timing is key, and the time frame of your talk is not the right moment to go into full introvert mode.

There are many ways to become a good presenter, and I'd recommend taking a course in presentation technique if it's available. One of the ways to make your talk shine is actually by being fluent in and comfortable with the English language. If the presenter before you is some slick dude from an Ivy league institution and your spoken English is reminiscent of Gro Harlem Brundtland or Borat, you'll feel like you're Vanilla Ice and Eminem just opened for you.

You can learn a lot about what works by watching good presenters, and you can "borrow" aspects that you particularly like or find to be effective. However, you should never, ever try to copy someone, no matter how good they are. For one thing, in so doing, your maximum achievement is to become a good clone - hardly alpha material. More importantly, you've got to be yourself - as cliché as that sounds. The style of presentation which is best for you is 100%, grade A, guaran-damn-teed based on your personality. What you should do, is absorb what is useful, discard what is useless, and add what is uniquely your own.

Yes; that was an academic quoting Bruce Lee (Tao of Jeet Kune Do) quoting Sun Tzu (The Art of War).

Know Thy Audience
Tailor the level of your talk to the audience as much as possible. If you're talking to high school students, don't be flauntin' the triple integrals and Kramers-Kronig and be all "As you all know from quantum physics 101"-guy. Conversely, you don't need to define "EM radiation" or explain in great detail why the sky is blue at noon if you're giving a talk at the "Dateless Wonders for More Quantum Mechanics and Nonlinear Programming in Physics Education" society's annual optics conference.