A Couple Montreal Moments

1. The “Wile E. Coyote” Moment.

Although Slavoj Zizek apparently prefers those moments when Wile E. Coyote has gone over a cliff but not yet discovered he is about to fall, I prefer moments of sheer, deliberate denial. In the climactic moment of his run-in with Bugs Bunny, he is inside a train car, praising himself “‘Wile E. Coyote, SUPER-genius.’ I like the way that rolls out,” as he fills a series of fake carrots with nitro-glycerine. At that very moment, Bugs Bunny is pulling his train car onto a track where there is an oncoming locomotive. Wile E. hears the distant whistle and his ears pick up for a moment, but only just a moment, before going back to filling the carrots and chuckling to himself as the locomotive comes ever closer.

So it was on Saturday. Carrie called her mom. She later said to me, “they’re getting tons of snow in Minnesota. You know we always get their weather.” Sunday, we take the car out to run errands. On our return from the grocery store, we park on the street. Keep in mind that we bought a place with a garage, something that’s hard to find. Monday morning we wake up the same way everyone else does — to the shock of the year’s first real snowstorm. Monday night, we run into our upstairs neighbor. Turns out his car’s stuck in the garage because they “never concluded the negotiations with the plow guy.” Still, I’d rather have my car stuck in the garage right now than on the street.

2. The “I can never fully assimilate into Francophone culture” moment.

On tonight’s metro ride home, we noticed a man in a tight-fitting sweater with alternating black and white stripes and a bright red scarf. He didn’t have the hat or the makeup and seemed a little old and plump to be a working mime.[a] But either he was a mime, or he just thought that was a cool way to dress.

P.S.: Special thanks to Cathy Davidson for the nod in Inside Higher Ed.

[a] Of course, I could be totally wrong. Since all of the mimes I’ve seen have been on TV, it could be skewed. After all, if everything I knew about doctors came from TV, I’d probably see a doctor on the metro and say “that person’s not young and sexy enough to be a doctor.”

Photo by Carrie.

Why I Hate WebCT, Part I

This may or may not become a series depending on how much bile I have left over after the term ends. If you’re lucky, it won’t be a series.

I do really hate WebCT.

It being 2007 and everything, I figured there must be an easier way to manage multiple choice exams than to put all the questions in a word processor document, go through and make sure there’s enough variation in the answers, and then copy and paste into a final exam. There must be a database out there that would allow you to compile questions by category, edit and format them, randomize the answer order, and maybe even randomly select from each category for different forms of the test.

I called McGill’s support people and was informed that such capability existed inside WebCT, the “courseware” we use. However, to create a paper test I’d need the companion product, Respondus, which only runs on PCs. Luckily, there was a educational tech designer willing to work with me, and so, I was assured, at the end I’d have a nice, powerful database of questions. That may in fact be the case, but I can tell you that for the “convenience” of software to “save labor” in constructing exams, my TAs, the kind staff person and I spent many more hours than if we’d just written up questions and copied and pasted.

1. The interface for entering questions on WebCT is needlessly complex and surprisingly slow. It does not play well with text from word processors, which means you need to sit online to write your questions or deal with formatting headaches, and simple options cannot be set to defaults (or, if they can, there is no obvious way to do it), meaning that you must be vigilant to make sure answers are randomized, that the answers use letters instead of numbers, etc.

2. The interface for transferring questions from WebCT to Respondus is also painfully slow. Once transferred, they need to be reorganized AGAIN in order to be arranged into an exam. Also, new errors showed up in the questions. All this took so long that the kindly person with whom I was working realized that there was no way a professor and dept chair had time to sit around messing with this thing and so she spent her time doing it for me. I imagine it added up to about a day of her time, give or take.

3. For the initial output of my exams, most questions for all 4 forms had an answer of “A.” Although you can randomize the order of answers online, Respondus intially wouldn’t do for paper exams. Because, on paper exams, OF COURSE you’d want all the answers to be “A’. Someone at McGill had to write a script in order for the exam creation software to create an exam that would be worthwhile.

4. After all that, the final result is poorly formatted and hard to read, so I can either go in and reformat it myself, or give the students a test that’s difficult to read because answers aren’t properly indented from questions.

So, in the end, it took a bunch of extra hours (and a delay of a week) to “save” me the “effort” of using a word processor to design the multiple choice section of my final exam. And my students received an inferior product as a result because I didn’t have the time to manually reformat four exams at the last minute.

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I would like to say that this surprised me, and I guess it did but I should have known better. Every interaction I’ve had with WebCT has been counterintuitive, to use a word from interface-design, and the application is an incredible time suck, even just to enter grades online. The course websites are ugly to look at and their organizational jargon only makes sense if you teach in exactly the way they’d llke you to. Students have trouble finding things for the course, and it takes waayyy too long to do simple course management tasks. Did I mention that it commits the design sin of using popups? Lots of popups. If it weren’t such a hassle for the students, I would seriously consider going offsite.

Ahhh. I feel better now. I feel like there’s more to say, but I had to get this off my chest since I finally got the exams in today, a week late (you have to submit them to a central office for copying and invigilation), and had a last minute scramble when I discovered even more messed up formatting.

3 Trips in November = Quiet Blog

Looking ahead, I see that I have no academic travel scheduled for winter term until mid-April when I embark on the first of two speaking tours in 2008 (UK/Netherlands and Australia). There is the small matter of a trip to Mexico over McGill’s “Study Break” (you can’t call it “spring break” since it’s in February) but that doesn’t count.

This may seem like a small matter, but the last time I spent 3 months of a semester without academic travel was apparently spring term of 2002. I’m really looking forward to actually being in Montreal for (almost) a full academic term and seeing what it’s like. I often say that travel is a perk of the job, but it also makes it gruelling, since I lose my weekends and compound my workload. It’s always been my choice, but it will be interesting to see what the alternative is like.

To celebrate yesterday’s arrival home from my final trip for fall 2007, I have contracted a nasty stomach virus. Which, poetically, meant that I couldn’t leave home today.

Flashback — the Bad Kind

My first year teaching — ever — was in the Department of Speech Communication at the University of Illinois. The course was SpCom 111-112, a year long speaking and writing course. One of those “skills” courses with no official content, though students had to read a minimal amount of stuff. I still remember the first day of my first class, where the students were as nervous as I was (they were all first term undergrads). We all walked into the room together (why they waited for me, I don’t know) and I began by verbally walking them through the syllabus while sitting at my desk. My throat was very dry, and I am certain that it was not a particularly inspiring first day. What I had chosen to forget, however, was my office environs.

Like all Speech Comm TAs, I was assigned an office in “Room 8,” which was in the bowels of Lincoln Hall. Greg Wise has linked to a video documenting our old environs (he taught there longer than I did). If anything, the place looks a little better than I remember it. Maybe that’s just how memory works, but it sure doesn’t look good in the video. The horror movie staging isn’t that original in the sense that pretty much all of us (whether TAs or students), at one time or another, probably wondered if we might die down there. Also, I need to emphasize that you’re looking at the FRONT entrance in the video, not some backwards route. That is how I got in and out.

File Under Banal: Pittsburgh Shopping List

My trip to Pittsburgh will be a whirlwind affair — about 48 hours in all, with two defenses and a lot of catching up to do. Given the short trip, I’m prioritizing time with friends over places to go, but one can’t help thinking about it. I won’t have a real chance to take advantage of that strong Canadian dollar (I dyyying to go buy a looper pedal or something at Pianos ‘n Stuff — yes, that’s “‘n” and not “and” — or to troll the gear graveyard at Hollowood Music but won’t get the chance), but there are a few essentials that I’ll get at the grocery store along the way:

–Safeguard Soap (same product name, different product in Canada)

–Sugar Free Nestle Quik

–Dryclean-in-your-dryer sheets (haven’t ever seen them in Quebec or I wouldn’t bother in the U.S.)

Carrie would normally demand Heinz Ketchup as well, as the Quebec version is considerably sweeter but we are still stocked from a friend’s border run last summer. And we’re also still stocked on Vegetarian Oyster Sauce (don’t ask). It’s all flavors and smells. Funny to think that after 3.5 years, these are the essentials to bring back from the U.S., and most of them we figured out right away.

Along with Pianos ‘n Stuff, I miss Paul’s CDs, but I probably won’t make it there, either.