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RSS FeedApril 8th, 2009
Teachers are not fair
As I teach my Introduction to Programming class, at least a few times in the semester I hear – “You are not being fair!”. My usual response is – well, thank God – at least I know I am partially being able to administer individualized education! A teacher’s worst nightmare only is that of casting all students in the same net. If one student has already done all their class assignments and is sitting twirling her thumbs while others are about 40% of the way there, then by all means, I will be giving more advanced assignments to that student – to keep them busy, and to give them the attention that they deserve.
We teachers call this – “Filling the bucket that you brought” phenomenon. The goal of the teacher is to fill the bucket of curiosity that the students bring on a particular day. Each student can bring a different bucket each day, by being prepared to different extent, though of course there are patterns.
All that aside, there is still the fallback of “course objectives” – the bare minimum that all students have to know in order to pass the class, and that is where the testing comes in.
April 8th, 2009
More confluence pains
I had a pretty happy March – it was warm in DC, the Cherry Blossoms were on the way, and I was looking forward to visiting Vegas!! Well, now, it is April – it is cold, Cherry Blossoms are already here (almost gone), and my Vegas trip has not made me significantly richer.
Further, one of my business partners has started using Confluence back and has been putting some new documents there for everyone else to review. I am usually happy to review docs if I can find them! Confluence just doesn’t make it any easy for people to do things. For a while, the general consensus has been that Confluence is technically solid, with a stupid user interface. Most of the people from Atlassian have repeatedly said that that upcoming releases will relieve that.
Well, the latest version of Confluence seems to have no better UI than previous versions. The so called “2.10? version is either an eye wash or a change on the internals. The user interface is hardly any easier, or even much different from previous versions.
Sometimes, I think that the problem is with Atlassian at a more general level. As a stupid example – note that even the “Screenshot Tour” on Confluence’s own website isn’t really a tour – just a group of 6 pictures and you cannot even go from 1 picture to the next.
Now that’s just bad.
April 2nd, 2009
Grammar Check Anywhere?
As I evaluated a trial copy of Grammar Check Anywhere, the following screen showed up.
This really makes me wonder – can it find grammatical errors *anywhere*?
April 1st, 2009
Microsoft – Google merger imminent
[Breaking News..] Finally, it has dawned on the world’s two largest software companies that their technologies are mostly complimentary to each other. The news about Microsoft and Google merger set the blogosphere alight today as the details began to unravel about this previously unmentionable tie-up. More details can be found here, here and here.