They’ve got another article from some fuddy-duddy prof who doesn’t like the 21^st century. It seems to be nothing but a long whine about modern teaching technologies — it’s rather pathetic, actually, but the Chronicle seems to have a fondness for running occasional articles from defensive, confused Luddites. Here’s an example:

Besides using the computer more in my classroom, the experts tell me that another way to transform my teaching persona is to put more of my course materials online. I can create a course that’s more user-friendly and appealing to today’s students by incorporating more Web-based elements. That could be as simple as placing my syllabi, lecture notes, and other course materials on my Web site — which would mean that I first have to get a Web site.

I’d say the best way to improve his teaching persona would be to have the snide ignorance extirpated from his brain. That’s not what teaching technology is about, and I’d agree that if you substitute a computer for good pedagogy you lose. But with the right perspective — specifically, that technology is a tool that when used appropriately and with moderation can improve your ability to deliver information and can provide resources to help students get that information — it can help you teach. A fellow who’s stymied at the thought of getting a website probably should not mess with it, though; he’s kind of hopeless. He’s at a university, so he’s probably already got one and doesn’t know it, and the university probably also provides software to simplify putting up simple web pages that, for instance, could archive reading assignments or help him maintain a gradebook.

It’s no sin to not understand modern instructional technology, and lots of teachers can do a great job without it; it is damned stupid to mock teaching technology, though, when you’re ignorant of what it is.

I’ll let New Kid rip up the rest of the article, though. Some days the Chronicle just depresses me — it’s like reading some blue-lettered broadsheet from the 1950s. Hey, maybe they ought to stop publishing it on the web and instead distribute it with a network of hand-cranked presses and stapled mimeo sheets!

The Nevada System of Higher Education wants to arm their faculty. That’s insane. We have rare instances of students going on a shooting spree; I don’t see how turning the classroom into a firefight is going to stop that, and I also have a suspicion that any homicidal maniacs will henceforth simply put “shoot the professor” first on their to-do list. The other concern: how often has this happened at your university?

• Dishevelled, out-of-breath student bursts into the room in the middle of class — he overslept.
• Angry student storms into your office, red in the face and furious about his exam.
• Walking across the campus late at night, a dark figure steps out from behind a building and raises his hand … to say hello.

Those kinds of events are routine, and don’t bother me at all. But let’s foster a climate of fear of our murderous students, slip a firearm into our pockets, and wait. It won’t happen often, but all it will take is one jittery professor and one deadly incident, and try to imagine your university dealing with the parents. And that kind of hasty stupidity is going to be more common than the “vicious gunman foiled by hail of professorial bullets” story, I’m sure. It’s trading one unlikely danger for a more common one, and it isn’t even going to stop the problem — lone gunmen violating a school must expect to end up dead, and if it’s in a gunfight, all the greater the glory.

At the very least, it’s going to send the message to our students that they’d better not make any sudden moves around their lethal professors. It’s a violation of the trust they should have in us, so no, rather than arming myself, I think I’d rather call the police if there is a violent threat … that’s better than becoming a klutzy threat all on my own. My job is to teach, not play Bruce Willis.

Apparently, you shouldn’t name your daughter “Barbie” unless you want her to grow up to be an airhead. A study, reported in the Guardian, claims that names have a powerful influence on social expectations — they report a significant effect in lowering exam scores based on whether the student’s name is classifiable as coming from a distinct ethnic/socioeconomic class, and further claim that the femininity of a name has a negative correlation with performance in math and science.

It’s somewhat odd. For one thing, they calculated a femininity score for various names based on letter and sound combinations—”Isabella” is the most feminine name, while “Abigail” comes out near the bottom. I don’t know any male Abigails, and Grace and Ashley, two other names in the list with low femininity scores, don’t sound particularly macho to me.

On the whole, people judged to have more traditional names such as Rachel and Robert did extremely well. More alternative names scored badly. Breeze, for example, was given 16 out of 100, while Christopher received full marks. ‘A name is part of an impression package,’ said Mehrabian. ‘Parents who make up bizarre names for their children are ignorant, arrogant or just foolish.’

Eh. It sounds like traditional conservative bigotry to me. If it holds up, though, it’s an interesting example of the way cultural biases can affect performance on supposedly bias-free examinations. I wouldn’t be too surprised if it’s valid, though: I know that when I grade exams and papers, I consciously avoid looking at the name on the exam until it’s time to record the scores in the gradebook, and I often grade from back to front to make that easier to do. That’s not to avoid bias from the femininity of the names, though, but because I know the students and want to avoid preconceptions.

I do have to note, though, that a) we named our daughter Skatje, and b) the author of the report is named “Anushka” (which sounds nice to me), and one of the teachers interviewed is named “Edyta” (an unfamiliar name, and now I suppose I’m going to imagine every Edyta I meet is a schoolteacher. Or not.)

(via Unhindered by talent)

This is not fair. Writing a doctoral thesis on a blog? How about doing your masters thesis on a wiki? Don’t these people know you’re supposed to suffer when writing a thesis?

I remember mine. There were months of tapping it out on an Apple II computer, and occasionally printing it out on the clumsy old dot-matrix printer so my advisor could rip into it and rearrange everything. Then, finally, I’d hook the computer up to the daisy wheel printer the department owned, and print out the good “final” copy for my committee—this had to be done late at night, because it took about 6 hours to print it all. Then the committee hacked it up, I revised it, then back to the daisy wheel for another late night. Then off to the dreaded grad school office, where the proofreader whipped out a ruler and told me one of the margins was off by a sixteenth of an inch…back to the daisy wheel. Then the defense, and “suggestions” for some additions…daisy wheel. Grad school office. Extra space between paragraphs on page 57. Back.

It was hellish. So now the whippersnappers are streamlining the instruments of torture? I don’t know that I approve.

(I’m sure someone is going to gasp, “You had a computer? We used a typewriter!” And then someone’s going to announce that they had to set hot type, and we’ll get the quill pen stories, and the real oldsters will whine about chiseling hieroglyphics. Save it. My pain and exasperation will always outweigh your minor inconveniences.)

Oh, there’s also some useful information in that article about what Nature considers the kind of prior publication that would preclude publishing a work in their journal.