Seen on my colleague’s office door:
I’m glad we’ve gone at least a few days without a robot attack, as the budget for responding to robot attacks has been slashed to the bone (and the paperwork you need to file after such attacks is terribly burdensome).
I don’t know how it is where you are, but my summer “break” (such as it is) is rapidly winding down. Among other things, it means that I spent a few hours today in front of my computer completing online training courses.
I find myself of two minds (at least) on these courses.
On the one hand, many of these courses do a reasonable (or even excellent) job of conveying important information — broken down into modules that convey reasonably sized bites of content, enhanced with videos, case studies, and links to further information which one might bookmark for future reference. Indeed, the online training courses themselves can be accessed as a source of information later on, when one needs it.
It’s hard to beat the convenience of the online delivery of these courses. You start them when you’re ready to take them, and you can do a few modules of a course at a time, or pound through them all in one sitting. You don’t need to show up to a particular place for a particular interval of time, you don’t need to find a parking space, you don’t even need to change out of your pajamas.
Plus, many of these online training courses simplify record-keeping for whomever is responsible for ensuring that the folks who are supposed to take the course have actually taken it (and performed to the specified level on the accompanying quizzes) by emailing the completion reports to the designated official.
On the other hand … if you’re pounding through a 26-module course in one sitting (as I did today), you have to wonder a little about retention. Passing a quiz on a module immediately after you’ve read through that module may be do-able, but I’m less certain that it would be as easy to pass a month later. Indeed, if there had been a single big quiz after the 26 modules (rather than a quiz on each module that you take immediately after the module), I’m not sure I would have scored as well.
I imagine, too, that this mode of training is not necessarily beloved by people who have not made their peace with multiple choice tests. As well, for people who need to discuss material in order to understand it, the online delivery of modules may be a lot less effective than a live training with other participants.
What have your experiences with online training courses been? To you find them an adequate tool for the job, a poor fit for your learning style, or a big old waste of time?
Today, The New York Times has an article about students and plagiarism that I could have sworn I’ve read at least a dozen times before, at least in its general gist.
As an exercise, before you click through to read the article, grab some paper and a pencil and jot down two or three reasons you think will be offered that the current generation of college students does not grasp the wrongness of using the words and ideas of others without attribution.
Is your list ready?
Continue reading
Recently, I traded up from my nowhere-near-smart phone to a slightly more advanced (but still nearly obsolete) phone — one maybe about a year newer (in terms of technological endowment) than the old one.
Practically, what this means is that I am now able not only to receive text messages, but also to send them. And, tremendous Luddite though I am, I have discovered contexts in which sending a text message actually seem reasonable (e.g., to contact a fellow conference-goer in the morning after a night of conference-carousing, when a phone call might interrupt sleep or networking or something else important).
However, I’ve run into an unforeseen complication:
It has come to my attention that a number of people are risking catastrophic seismic activity today by exposing n00bs.
This so-called “n00bquake” frightens me, and not just because I live in earthquake country.
Which has a larger carbon footprint:
An office that uses a photocopier or an office that uses carbon paper?
It’s true that I recently returned from a fairly geeky conference, but I just found out about one happening practically in my backyard. And, given that I don’t yet have any papers to grade, I figured I should check it out.
(Today is the last day to register without paying the late registration fee, in case that helps you make up your mind.)
From the web page:
Last night I arrived home safely from ScienceOnline2010. As expected, the conference was tremendously engaging and useful, as well as being a rollicking good time — so much so that the only blog post I managed to post while there was the Friday Sprog Blog. (Major props to the elder Free-Ride offspring for taking notes from our conversation and letting me bring them with me.)
However, as some others have noted (for example, drdrA), I did manage to maintain an online presence by “Tweeting” my real-time notes from the conference sessions I attended. And, as a step toward blogging something sensible about those sessions, I’m going to compile my Tweets for each and put them up as posts — sort of “open notebook” blog post writing.
Let me pause a moment for a few observations on the experience of Tweeting a conference session as opposed to taking notes in my trusty notebook (which is what I usually do).
And really, why wouldn’t you? What could have prepared you for the possibility that reading one would make the other vanish, as if there were some kind of blogular wavefunction collapse?
The ScienceBlogs powers that be have been alerted that there’s an issue with disappearing comments (if you’re reading a post) and disappearing posts (if you’re reading the comments). They are busy trying to get the squirrels out of the ductwork (or fix the javascript problem, whichever).
In the meantime, if you’re desperate to contribute a comment to a post, or to get the 411 on a post on this blog that has up and vanished, shoot me an email and I’ll do what I can to help.
I have a quick question for the hive-mind:
Where are good places with free wifi in Boston, Cambridge, and Wellesley?