The Becker Blog

Some time ago I did a bit on the differences (or some of them) between colleges and universities. I also did a comparison between them and high school. Somehow it disappeared, so here it is again.

What are some of the cultural differences between a college and a university? Here is a *very* preliminary comparison of high school, college, and university. I had always thought there was little difference between colleges and universities, but I am discovering that this is not necessarily the case, and that there are many similarities between high school and college.

Feel free to comment, argue, or suggest additions….

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I am teaching a first year communications course for engineers. Most of the students seem to be making some real progress. As always, a few need very little guidance from me and others won’t listen to what I say no matter what.

I keep hearing about how tech-savvy today’s students are, and I have to say, I’m REALLY not seeing it. Many, if not MOST of the kids in my classes really don’t know very much about modern technology, and they FOR SURE don’t understand how most of it works. I am accustomed to working with Computer Science students who are, of course, at the extreme end of the geek-pool when it comes to tech so perhaps I’ve been lulled into a false sense of complacency.

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Perhaps I should be more forgiving of people who really don’t know how to use “technology” yet. I try very hard to do that – when it is someone like my mother who’s never really had any need or use for it besides being able to surf the web and communicate with family.

BUT, we are rapidly getting to the point where NOT having access to the web and not having an email account is equivalent to living in North America in the 60’s and not having a telephone. Come ON.

I can also understand when someone who doesn’t really have any need to use the system in ways other than the ones described for my mom doesn’t know how to create and publish stuff online. Why should they? (Although I could also argue that this being the modern world and all, being able to do that is roughly equivalent to being able to write a traditional letter 40 years ago. So, get with it!)

These are mere annoyances. The ones that REALLY burn my toast are academics and administrative assistants who work in universities and colleges. I mean really. This isn’t rocket science. It’s been decades now since we started to be able to scan things, create and edit e-documents, and send emails (it’s been possible to do email at universities way longer than it’s been possible for the general public).

Here are a few items that top my list of bugs:

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Students failing because of Twitter, texting – Canada – Canoe.ca

“Thirty per cent of students who are admitted are not able to pass at a minimum level,” says Ann Barrett, managing director of the English language proficiency exam at Waterloo University.

“What has happened in high school that they cannot pass our simple test of written English, at a minimum?” she asks.

Even those with good marks out of Grade 12, so-called elite students, “still can’t pass our simple test,” she says.

via Students failing because of Twitter, texting – Canada – Canoe.ca.

I’m not really surprised. I’ve been teaching a technical writing course to 1st year engineers and many of them have poorer writing skills than my son did when he was 10. To be fair, some are quite good, but many (more than half, I’d say) are careless with their writing and proofreading.

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OK, this is just too much fun.

It’s thoroughly disgusting when a University fires someone who has worked for them for more than 35 years. Their ‘crime’? Getting sick as a result of being abused at work. Despicable! (note: I am NOT talking about Mount Royal).

What will be done about it? Probably NOTHING. This is not new for this institution.

I quit a job there that I loved because the place is no longer safe for someone who is not willing to

1. lie
2. look the other way
3. be abused
4. admire the Emperor’s suit

I am teaching a course there this term as a favour. I really like the course. The students look like they will be interesting, and fun. The PLACE still makes me sick. Literally.

Why do they continue to do what they do? Because people let them. It REALLY is as simple as that.

The U of C is going through another round of DEEP cuts.

The primary reason for the cuts, says Weingarten, is poor market performance caused by the economic downturn which has adversely affected return on endowment funds used to support various programs and the Universities Academic Pension Fund.

The endowment fund has shrunk by $40.4 million, since hitting a high last year of $411 million.

Thanks Mark for once again posting something that makes me think (and that gives me an opportunity to tough on a favorite topic: the importance of teaching quality in higher ed).

Boredom vs. Failure Part 2: The New Demographic

From Mark’s post: “What’s striking about these four results is the huge difference for students with low knowledge.  Doing it right matters a lot for these students.  What’s also striking is how it doesn’t make much difference for the high knowledge students.  In fact, in the first experiment, the low-knowledge students even did better than the high knowledge students when given integrated text plus illustrations.”

I’ve always assumed that the good students don’t really need us – they will do fine no matter what. They possess good & varied adaption & learning skills so it doesn’t matter if the instructor is boring, selfish, stuck in the 19th century, or just plain stupid. The good students will learn what they need to. That’s why it’s not much of an accomplishment when a school only lets in the best and they all succeed (well, duh). Student success in those schools says very little about the teaching quality of the faculty.

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Apparently it is in China – if you get caught.

Chinese academia ghost-writing ‘widespread’

This BBC article claims that “More than $100m (£63m) changes hands in China every year for ghost-written academic papers, according to research by a Chinese university.”

As I see it, the only thing that really distinguishes this crime from the all too common practice of claiming authorship for everything one’s own grad students do is that the grad students weren’t yours.

There are plenty of academics who routinely add their names to everything their grad students publish. I personally know a science department where a good number of the faculty get most of their publications without ever having to write a word. Yet THAT practice rarely gets questioned. WHY? They didn’t do the work. They merely paid to support the grad student. If I follow that same logic, does that mean any publication I get while being paid by the university must bear the name of the person who approves my paycheque?

I realize there is huge pressure to publish, but the truth is, if people stopped bowing to that pressure and actually claimed credit ONLY for the work they actually did, then the problem would sort itself out as most of the so-called “high fliers” do very little of their own work or writing.

Academia needs to get back to real, honest work. Honestly is supposed to be our most cherished value. Most academics these days are as corrupt as the students they claim to despise – you know those who cheat their way through school.

If Academics actually practiced what they preached, we’d be far better off.

Stanley Fish is really hit and miss for me: sometimes I agree with him, and other times really, really not. This is one of those times I agree:

I just read Mark Guzdial’s excellent post on some of what’s wrong with how we teach introductory programming courses.

Question Everything: How We Teach Intro CS is Wrong

The notion that we should be modeling expert behaviour when teaching programming is silly. Experts work quite differently from novices. We accept this as a given in sport – if you make a novice do things an expert does you could very well cause them to injure themselves.

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When I was writing my thesis I looked for examples of dissertations to get some ideas about how to formulate my own – you know general style, chapter organization, etc. It was suggested that I go to my school’s library and look at the theses that had been completed there in the last several years. It was a good idea. I did that. It didn’t help me even a little.

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Saw this on the New York Times (Opinion) today:

http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/education-degrees-and-teachers-pay/?8ty&emc=ty

Do Teachers Need Education Degrees?

By The Editors

Robert Stolarik for The New York Times

In a Room for Debate forum in June on the value of liberal arts master’s degrees, one group of readers — teachers and education administrators — generally agreed a higher degree was well worth the investment. They pointed out that pay and promotion in public schools were tied to the accumulation of such credentials and credits, specifically from colleges of education.

But current teacher training has a large chorus of critics, including prominent professors in education schools themselves. For example, the director of teacher education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Katherine Merseth, told a conference in March that of the nation’s 1,300 graduate teacher training programs, only about 100 were doing a competent job and “the others could be shut down tomorrow.” And Obama administration officials support a shift away from using master’s degrees for pay raises, and a shift toward compensating teachers based on children’s performance.

Should the public schools reduce the weight they give to education school credentials in pay and promotion decisions? Is this happening already, and, if so, what is replacing the traditional system for compensating teachers?

Here are my initial thoughts:

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Just heard on Mark Guzdial’s blog that “Georgia Tech’s College of Computing is now considering a proposal to remove Smalltalk from the required curriculum in favor of C++.”

This is another nail in the coffin of CS.

There is great value to learning many languages, not the least of which is that those who do come to understand the concept of ‘language’ and ‘programming’ better than anyone who only knows one language ever can. This makes them better programmers and better problem solvers.

There are those who feel CS is a dying discipline, and the more that CD departments contract in their view of what they should be doing, the more likely it is to come true.

Interesting and creative people are leaving CS departments, leaving behind …. can you guess? Theoreticians, mathematicians, and academic software engineers who haven’t written a real program, well, ever. These are the kind who say we shouldn’t be teaching about and with games, because “It gives the wrong impression.” (I actually heard these words from influential members of my former department). I can tell what impression it gives if you do things like games: THAT YOU ARE INTERESTING.

I once gave an assignment to a 3rd year CS class that involved building a client side search engine. The 1st step involved getting a complete list of file names and creating a format that would retain the names and directory structures in as small a space as possible.
They could use what ever language they wanted to. They had all learned C/C++ in 1st & second year.
Almost all chose to write a 2000+ line C++ program, over learning how to write the 20 lines of SED and Unix that would do the same thing, only better.

That’s what happens when they only learn one language.

CS at the university level is not about job training.

SHEESH!

I get a lot of papers to review in Game Studies; Serious Games; Educational Games., etc.

I used to learn a lot from reading these papers.

Not anymore.

Not only is much of what I read “old news” (i.e. it’s been done or discussed and mostly published before), but FAR too many of the papers I read now don’t even cite the other works. What’s going on?

I am finding more and more submissions (journals, conferences, etc.) from authors who have not done a thorough lit review. Many papers I’ve read appear to come from authors who are relatively new to the field, did a quicky lit. search (1st 2 screens in google scholar, or for many of the Education papers I see, it looks as though they simply went to 2 or 3 education websites (AERA, AACE, AECT) and searched a subset of the journals there. This leaves people with a fairly restricted view of what’s been done and what is known.

What’s the problem? Do people not know how to perform a lit. review anymore? Do they not care? Are they naive enough to believe they’re the first ones who thought of this?

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