Simon Hammond Blog

The BBC reports a Bradford university lecturer making his lectures available as podcasts. I’ve been thinking this would be a good idea for a while. The idea that having a lecturer repeatedly plough through their slides in a big room at a set time is an effective way of transmitting understanding doesn’t bear much weight.

You could argue that a lecture allows feedback but in too many lectures the feedback is the frequency of hypnic jerks in the back row. Students rarely ask questions, and the ones that do don’t need to be asked. Pretty much the sole reason for the university lecture is tradition. It was invented when the only way of transmitting information was to have someone actually listen and perhaps copy it down (if they were literate). We are a little past that now.

I ought to point out I’m distinguishing lecturing from tutoring here. The difference being that a tutorial is, or should be, structured so that the session can only move with the understanding of the tutees. They are driving the thing along, not the tutor. Seminars, where the audience is critical and highly-motivated are also useful.

So, with a podcast you could listen to the lecturer read from his slides in your own time. Hmmm, we can probably do better than this. We need feedback for a start. The blog, with a commenting system, seems to be a good place to start. Except a chronological list of comments is not a good format for a discussion. Maybe a bulletin-board then? Each lecture can be represented by a forum and each thread is one line of discussion.

The big advantage of this is that you end up with not just a persistent, reusuable dollop of lecture-material but also a bunch of persitent feedback which can be used to lick it into shape. Perhaps when the content has matured then it can even be wikified by the lecturer but

Here’s the kicker: if you don’t need lectures halls to give lectures, in fact if you don’t need to be anywhere need the lecturer at any time, then what do you need teaching universities for again? You can replace a lot of ‘facilities’ with an off-the-shelf website.  The only things that you can’t replace are teaching experts and certification.

Tags: rant, unfiled by si
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In my previous PhD post I may have come across as a bit disparaging about paper. In fact, I think it’s wonderful stuff! You can write on it, draw on it, fold it. It’s cheap and it doesn’t need batteries. The problem is that it’s a poor way of storing any quantity of information that you need to refer back to in the future. Searching and copying are painfully slow and it takes up a relatively vast amount of space. A pile of paper(s) is not an efficient data structure.

On the other hand, a pad of paper is an excellent input device. Totally freeform, you can take it out into the sunshine, or wherever, and look like you are writing poetry or a novel. Your mental state changes when you are away from the computer. Your thinking becomes deeper as you break out of the stimulus-response reflex. This also gets you away from the PC and the many distractions therein.

Also, editing a documentfeels (and probably is) much more productive when you print out your draft and then attack it with red ink. Tip: print 2 pages per page if you know how, and leave the backs for additions. When it gets dark (or you get kicked out the pub) you can transcribe all your stuff into the computer which forces you find you to filter it again. As I take the changes I run them through with blue ink. Colours seem to make things more fun anyway.

At the end of the day I feel like I’ve taken a definite step forward rather than just tinkering with a file. Writing and editing on a PC is not as nice anyway. Scrolling up and down is slow compared to flipping to the next page and you know it’s not good for your eyes…

This blog entry started life on a pad.

Tags: PhD by si
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I don’t want to keep rattling on about spam but I got hit but a bunch of ugly trackback spam today so I’ll quickly report how I dealt with it in case it’s useful.

I have trackback switched off now (I don’t see the point) but I didn’t used to. This means that a whole bunch of old posts were vulnerable. I could go back, edit each one individually to disable trackback - or I could just run: update wp_posts set ping_status = “closed” (thanks to dasspunk for pointing this out).
The custom spambot IQ test seems to be working a treat but if you want a neat readymade plugin for WordPress you could try the SpamQuiz plugin.

Tags: self-referential by si
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I noticed a week or two back that I started getting ‘reflected’ spam e-mails. These have been sent with spoofed random addresses from my domains and bounced back. Either the address is not valid or, more annoyingly, with a curt message from an anti-spam program asking me to verify myself. This is very smart except that it creates more damn spam. The hassle is just shifted onto my doorstep.

I guess I could install my own spam reflector asking their spam-relector to verify itself but I worry it could laser out of control as mail servers collapse under the weight of a million scripts checking each others credentials.

I’ll just disable the catch-all e-mail and hope for the best for now.

Tags: rant, techie, web by si
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