Category Archives: Academic

To Remember a Lecture Better, Take Notes by Hand

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This year I stopped using Powerpoint slides in my lectures. Well, not completely. It can deliver some content better. Many student remarked to me that it was a better experience. No doubt the students who felt differently would be less likely to tell me that.

According to this article in the Atlantic students retain more information if notes are taken by hand than typed. Interesting. If I ditch powerpoint and ban laptops in class that would waste the expensive infrastructure the university has installed. Surely, the university conducted a study on the efficacy of this teaching methodology before investing such large sums in projectors and classroom wireless. So this study must be bogus.

Getting What Students Pay For In College

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From this, we learn of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) has a report out evaluating the best public universities in the States. Among other problems the report looks into the following: watering down curriculum, grade inflation, and cost control. Unsurprising (to us at least) it gives failing grades in all areas to most schools and some areas to all schools. That is not a single public university in the States maintained academic standards and grade value while controlling costs.

An example of the depths to which some have fallen is Indiana University actually offers a course titled “The Cultural Politics of Lady Gaga” in which the most common grade is an “A+.” It is likely the course does more harm than good. But no doubt the grade is counterfeit, which adversely effects the whole grade ecosystem. It is akin to printing dollar bills in your basement.

The post cited above, concludes with the following dismal assessment.

But too many schools are still trapped in old mindsets, increasing tuition and competing for reputation. They fixate on the U.S. News rankings, which purport to tell the public which schools are “best.” But is the best school the one with the most prestige and highest incoming SAT scores? Or is it the one that fulfills its mission to taxpayers by providing a high-quality education without breaking their budgets?

The End of Higher Education’s Golden Age

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Clay Shirky, a writer and professor at NYU, has a thought-provoking article on Higher Education. He points out a critical, but often ignored, problem.

The biggest threat those of us working in colleges and universities face isn’t video lectures or online tests. It’s the fact that we live in institutions perfectly adapted to an environment that no longer exists.

He notes that the academy is itself a big part of the problem.

[The Golden Age] been gone ten years more than it lasted, in fact, and in the time since it ended, we’ve done more damage to our institutions, and our students, and our junior colleagues, by trying to preserve it than we would have by trying to adapt.

Read the whole article.

Hello, World!

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I have noticed that I tend to say “I’m sorry about that” when someone tells me that they learned to program in Java. I really mean it when it is a student in our department (which, unfortunately, teaches Java as an introductory language). To understand why Java is such a rotten first language, let’s consider a typical instance of “Hello, World!” in Java.

class hello
{  
        public static void main(String args[])
        {
           System.out.println("Hello World!");
        }
}

It is only a handful of lines of code but how many concepts presented in this code? The following list is, sadly, not exhaustive. But in addition to the (1) language syntax you need to understand (2) classes, (3) class methods, (4) public, (5) static, (6) types (String and void), (7) arrays, (8) types libraries (i.e., System), and (9) namespaces. (Did I miss anything?) That is too much to learn up front. Therefore, students are told “do this; we’ll cover it later.”

Additionally, there are many other ways to trip up. For example, the method must be named main.  The type void must be all lowercase, whereas String must be mixedcase.

Compare this to “Hello, World!” in Python.

print "Hello, World!"

This is not just shorter, but it is clear and obvious.

But that is not all. Consider what is need to execute the program. In java, you have to compile the code first and Java is nasty to work with because of silly requirements such as a single source file can contain only one public class and its name must match with name of file. Therefore, if you didn’t name the above file “hello.java” it will cost you an hour of your life–well, that’s what I paid for this “knowledge.” The effort is so taxing that students (with instructors’ encouragement) use an IDE so that students don’t have to learn (and instructors don’t have to teach) what is really going on.

On the other hand, we execute our Python program (assuming it is in the file named spam.py–why? because we can):

python spam.py

Java is a horrible instructional language.

QED.