Friday 9 May 2008

Making my work easier- more efficient

As Mark is fond of saying - Work Smarter, not harder.

Since your passing comments last night I have been thinking about it a lot, but what I come down to is the fact that over the years I have been working on making the teaching of technical subjects like Advanced Network Systems easier. You might remember that a year or two ago there was a big fuss from the students when I didn't do lectures, but just posted the slides appropriate to the lab.

Over the years I have reduced the number of lectures that I do from weekly to bi-weekly, But of course I have been bringing in guest lecturers, typically about 6/year. This means that the lectures dropped from 20 to 10, and are back up to about 16. In order to add value to this I extend the invitation to attend these to academics in the Business School and DEC. That has been a non-starter, in that I have only seen perhaps half a dozen academics in total over the years at these guest lectures.

At the last away day CB agreed to assign a specific time each week for academics to talk about their work or bring in guest lecturers. This never happened. What a good way of spreading knowledge that would have been.

Also the labs have been reduced from 2 hours/week to 2 hours/fortnight, with better documentation of the procedure to help make them easier. It still needs someone to assist in talking through the work and the configuration of the equipment, which has now fallen on to the academic as the demonstrators have been eliminated.

I have been thinking how I could apply the academic version of IT guru as a simulation tool before the labs, but that is an extra level of complexity, not a quick win. I think that if the simulation were to replace the actual lab, the student experience and learning would be reduced.

Having taught on a similar course in DEC, and seen how the labs have been reduced to a trivial task, and the loss of interest from the students, I do not want to go that route.

Ideally I suppose, it would be to give them access to IT Guru, create a bunch of exercises, and post some questions to be answered and a discussion forum on Blackboard, and never see them. Of course, In the networks environment this is not a static exercise as the rate of change of technology would require the reworking of some of the work every year. Are you aware of how far ANS has come in the years that I have been teaching it? How much work actually goes in to staying current so that our students are leaving with insights in to the current state of business technology and not a a snapshot of 10 years ago?

I think that Advanced Database Systems also needs the actual technical work to stimulate and seal the learning. As far as I know there isn't a database simulator, though each student could have their own environment. Here there are copies of DB2, Oracle, MySQL that the students could obtain for free to work with, but it still needs an Academic to guide the learning and advise of efficient methods of use.

I would appreciate a discussion to help me generate ideas of how to do it. I'll even buy the coffee.

advice to a young man contemplating university

from my Facebook conversations with MM.

When you guys are considering universities, you should ask the question about how much 'contact time' you will have with your tutors. All universities in the UK are reducing this, so you do much more of your work on-line and on your own. A better university will have more contact time and smaller classes. BU is now aiming to have classes of up to 100 students and then on-line assessments and tutorials, so you will hardly ever get one-to-one help.

Is Uvic like UBC was - first year general science, second year general engineering, later years specialising?

Lot of EE's in the family - Me, Michael, Ben, AJ(?) - petroleum engineers - Rona's other son and husband.

I found that the structure of the course at UBC so many years ago where it was as I said above gave me a good insight into other types of engineering. EE is not just about electronics/electricity, but how you convert it into mechanical work - or light (ref Vivian). I suppose it could be argued that Mechanical Engineering in some cases is about how you turn mechanical stuff into electricity ( Madeleines previous boyfriend Simon was a mechy and worked with wind turbines. )

Just don't become a Civil - Could we bear it!!,

Just joking - because of course a lot of your fathers work is applied civil engineering. If you are good at maths I suppose it is OK.

I remember in second year we did a lot of stuff with trusses and compression/extension forces, and tensile strengths, that come into both mechanical and Civil engineering. I enjoyed it, but it wasn't my main interest.


Have you thought about looking at a Rhodes scholarship?

Friday 2 May 2008

About the car

Yes, like I was broken up last year when my Volvo, which I had driven from new because it was the company car that I had with Telxon, finally was not worth repairing. Volvos go on forever, but why did mine only mange 143,000 miles. When I was made redundant it had done 120k, and I bought it for 1400£ from the company. A year or so before that I could have traded it in as the company usually traded in cars at anywhere between 60k and 80K, but because it ran well and didn't cost anything in repairs I asked to keep it. Carl I remember had a big bill for replacement cars that year so was pleased when I offered to keep it.

But the cost of repairs to keep it legal on the road was more than the value of the car, so the garage scrapped it for me. It was an old friend, very comfortable, even if the air conditioning didn't work, one of the headlampp washers had been ripped off by vandals, many of the dashboard lights were dead, and the rear wheel well was rusting out. Poke the pedal and it jumped. It had taken me all over the country and had done so many trips to universities carting Madeleine's and Michael's goods back and forth.

Well, the replacement Toyota Yaris is also automatic, has a CD player, no boot to speak of, and is also silver. The air conditioning works. I won't need it if I get made redundant.

I actually look forward to getting back on the bicycle. The Yaris can stay in the garage except for important occasions.

Peter

________________________________________
From: V.E. Merchant
Sent: 01 May 2008 22:05
Subject: Fw: thoughts

The Deed is done! For the first time in forty-two years I don’t have a car. Wives and girlfriends and lovers will come and go, and we get a hurt a bit and we recover, but a man forms a true sentimental attachment to his car. The car that I just sold took me to Virginia where I worked for four months, it took me twice to Charleston South Carolina to visit my daughter, and twice to Jacksonville Florida for exciting technical conferences. Then we traveled together over the rugged Appalachian mountains to Dayton, and a while later westward again through St. Louis, past all the poor dust farms in Oklahoma and Northern Texas, over the Mojave desert to Southern California. From our California home, there were numerous trips to the Anza Borrega Desert State Park, the rarefied atmosphere of Mount San Jacinto, and the Santa Anna Ecological Preserve. Then we went together, the car and I, northward through California, up the windswept Oregon coastline, and through the Orchards of Washington and the Okanagan valley to Vernon.

The trip to Kamloops where the car was sold gave me time to reflect about other cars that I’ve owned. The very first one was when I was one of three University students that contributed thirty dollars each to buy a ninety dollar 1956 Pontiac. I had a blow-out near Hedley while driving over the mountains to Vancouver; getting the tire replaced more than doubled my investment in the car. I had that car when I overcame my teenage shyness and actually went out with girls, with sweet Cathy and sensible Glenys and sensitive Leslie. Then while in Graduate school, I bought the Ford Cortina in which we went on many camping trips to Lake Huron, and a vacation to Cape Breton island. We crossed the country in that sturdy machine, but then the faithless car left me along with my first wife. It was replaced by a zippy Ford Fiesta, and an unreliable Honda Lemon - my young daughter asked, it that’s a toe truck, where are its toes? There was a short term fling with a $300 red Dodge Dart with rusted out floor boards. After more adventures, I bought the bright red jeep that my wife called the "second childhood car", taken from me in a devastating accident. The car that I just sold was bought from the resulting insurance money, seven years ago. And now it is gone.

Not just gone, but sold for a few lousy dollars. I feel degraded, like a pimp, selling off my companions for a little bit of money.

Like goes on. My wife will have to use her great and wonderful powers of tenderness, comfort, and affection to help me get over the loss of my companion for these last years.


Vivian