The Big Meeting

There's a big meeting on now about the state of affairs at CIT. Government cutbacks mean that the Institute of is few million short. Rumours have been circulating for two weeks now about what drastic measures will be taken. We shall see.

I'm not going to bother going. I'll wait for the bad news to arrive by e-mail.

ITS1 CMOD6001 11 & 12

There was one project group present in the class. I spoke with them about their project.

COM1-CMOD6001 31A & 32A

I got students to sign up to turnitin.com and submnit their recent essays.

I'd apprectiate if all students could do this. It will save me a good bit of hassle later on. The class ID is 2506113. The password was givin out in the Group A lab.

TurnItIn is designed to detect segments of student work that have been copied from websites and other sources. I will run each eassy through this process before correcting. If you do not submit your essay using this process it will be a lot of hassle for me. If you have copied large chucks of your paper from the web, annoying me will only compound the problem.

Some students allowed me to use their submissions to illustrate how TurnItIn works. I showed students the 2-window display with student submissions in one window and the source material on the other.

COM1-CMOD6001 31B & 32B

I met with students and discussed their projects.

COM1-CMOD6001 30

Less than half the students in the class were present. Students met in project groups. A few groups moved their meetings to the canteen.

I don't believe that many groups are at the stage they need to be at in order to complete the assignment well and on time. But hopefully it will start to come together soon.

COM1 Presentation Videos

I recorded video and audio of the in-class presentations in order to have a record to help me with assessment. However I have received a number of requests from students for copies of the audio and video. The audio recordings are of very high quality but I am in the middle of some jobs at home and the cables I need are in a mystery box somewhere in the house. I do not have the kit I need to digitize the audio at CIT. The quality of the video is very poor, but I have it handy. So I can provide the video very easily.

I believe that audio and video recordings of individuals constitute personal data that are covered by the Data Protection Act. Consequently I am not prepared to make the recordings widely available without the permission of those who appear in them.

If you would like to see the video recording of your group's presentation please e-mail me the names and ID numbers of all the members of the group. Since student's ID numbers are not generally known to anyone other than the student, I will accept the provision of a student's ID number as permission to release the video to all members of the group. I will e-mail the URL to one of the members of the group. If the members of the group choose to distribute the URL widely after that, that is their choice, not mine.

Each group will be provided with a single video clip. I am not prepared to chop the video into student-specific segments.

I will be happy to delete any group's presentation at the request of any member of the group (please supply ID number), but students should be aware that in the digital world it is very difficult to put the genie back in the bottle once it has been released. So students should think carefully before giving permission to post the clip in which they appear.

Web Publishing 34

We had a lab instead of a lecture.

The sites seem to be taking shape. Although I've really only see three.

Students seem to be under a bit of pressure, but I expect they'll get there.

COM1-CMOD6001 29

I was delighted to see today that some students are finally taking the murder mystery assignment seriously.

Some students discussed with me the firing of members from their group who are not pulling their weight. I've no problem with that. The number of members in the group will be considered when assigning a mark. However it is vital that I be advised of group membership. The latest information I have is at www.com2008blogs.tk. I should be informed of changes by e-mail.

The project is due on Friday 28 November at 0930.

Web Publishing 32 & 33

I announced today that we will be having the exam soon as per the course schedule. We decided to put it off until Wednesday of next week because of conferrings on Friday.

The exam will conver everything we have done in class so far and the material covered in the NewsU course that students took.

All the powerpoint presentations used in class are available by following the links off this blog.

Correcting

Today is my day for correcting essays. I find the library is a nice place to work than my office. But unfortunately I feel the need for a computer a lot. I find I very often have a need to google a sentence or a passage to check for plagiarism.


My tolerance threshold for copy & pasting is set very low. But I am actually surprised at the very low level of sophistication of the copying I encounter. So far today I have seen spelling mistakes on a website reproduced in a paper. A simple spell check would have caught that. The laziest thing I see every year is the copy and paste from wikipedia that leaves the hyperlinks in tact. That is just so lazy.

Students who copied and pasted any text should expect to get zero for the paper. But I expect that I won't catch everyone. Some students are a bit cuter than others, mostly because they have more experience of cheating.

Web Publishing 31

We continued our look at intellectual property. We discussed Trademarks and Trade Secrets.

We also looked briefly at the ICANN Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy and quickly passed summary judgment on a few pending cases.

Slides

COM1-CMOD6001 Essays

Coming Friday is the last day that essays will be worth any marks. Essays submitted after that will not earn any marks.

Students who have not yet submitted should get the finger out. Students who do not yet have an essay topic should e-mail Colin for one.

Students who get no marks for their essay will find it very difficult to pass this module.

ITS1 CMOD6001 09 &10

There were only a handful of students in class and they didn't seem to be doing anything very productive. Because students have been moved to different lab groups the time slot can't now be used for project meetings.

I gave the students some ideas for the structure of the game.

I met with students and asked them about the games and what they had done so far. There didn't seem to be much creativity, innovation, not teamwork in evidence. I expect that I will be disappointed by the results.

I reminded students that it was very important to document their project work in the group blog.

COM1-CMOD6001 27AB & 28AB

Presentations were this morning. We used the programming time slot too. That will have to be paid back at some stage before the end of the semester.

I was disappointed with the quality of the presentations in general. With a few exceptions, it didn't seem like a lot of preparation had gone in to them. I was also disappointed by the lack of respect students showed for their colleagues. Maybe that makes me old fashioned.

In general I expect that few people will get less than a pass mark for the presnetation assessment component. But few will get very good marks either.

If it is practical I will make the video and audio files available.

This leaves only the murder mystery assessment. I have not seem much evidence so far that students are taking this very seriously. But hopefully in the next few weeks the situation will improve.

COM1-CMOD6001 26

{Friday}
Deidre Dunlea took this class

Web Publishing 30

{Thursday}
Gary took this class

Media Data Formats

Next semester I am offering Media Data Formats COMP6021 in the free module time slot. This modules explains how bits end up being sound and images.

What's the difference between a GIF, and JPEG, and a PNG? What's MPEG? How does digital audio work? How does digital TV work? All this and more! :-)

If you are interested please send me an e-mail and I will add you to my list.

If you previoulsy took (and passed) COM2 Internet Studies & Web Design you can't take this module.

Web Publishing 28 & 29

I met with each group and they walked me though what had been done so far. Most sites still only exist on paper and few groups have got the structure of their site properly sorted out.

We decided collectively to wait one more week before pinning down a delivery date. But obvioulsy the semester is only so long.

Thursday's class will be delivered by guest lecturer Gary Couse and will be in C123 as become our custom.

Colin

Web Publishing 27

We looked at Intellectual Property. Just Copyright & Patent today. Trademarks and Trade Secrets next time.

I left the handout on copyright in B219. Go pick that up if you'd like to learn more.

COM1-CMOD6001 Project groups

Students are expected to advise Colin of any changes to the composition of the groups. The most up to date information Colin has is that shown on the list of blogs.

The normal size of the groups is four members. Groups of five may be allowed in exceptional circumstances.