Stuff I learned today (a lecturer's first day of semester)

Here's some stuff I found out today which would have been useful to know at 10.15 this morning. Yes, dear reader, I did have a bad day.

• Second Life checks IP addresses when you create an account. You can only create 8 accounts from the same IP address, and then it tells you too many people in your household have signed up. This confuses students no end because from their point of view, this is the first time they have tried to do it. Get a grip, Linden Labs! If you're flogging your virtual land to educators, think through educational use cases.
• Windows Vista was going to install 20 (20! Count them!) updates and configure them at length first thing this morning, right in front of my class, thus delaying it for 15 minutes or so.
• 118 students is a lot.
• Slides which include e-voting slides need to be run from Turning Point rather than Powerpoint if you want them to work.
• Students apparently don't know how to distribute handouts in the class. "Take one and pass it on" doesn't seem to work. Go figure.
• Students seem to like e-voting systems. So much so, in fact, that 5 handsets are now missing. Do they want to play with them at home? What use are they outside classes, one wonders? (Don't worry, Nicole, you shall have a full set returned to you)
• This one is potentially very useful: 75% of our first and second years have a laptop they can bring to class.
• If you offer free coffee and biccies to first years on a Wednesday afternoon, on the same day as football trials, they will not turn up to drink it.
• Linden Labs take 15 working days to process orders for the outrageous money grubbing scam which is the Second Life Teen Grid, followed by another 10 days of background checks for instructors.
• On a brighter note: the Large Hadron Collider has not yet destroyed the earth. Nor is it likely to.

Comments

[Nicole Cargill-Kipar]

OUCH! And I should have known the TurningPoint one (but didn't) and did mention the IP sign-up one, but probably only to Irene. That could have saved you two problems. Sorry.

Not to worry about the handsets, hopefully they'll turn up. But if some of ours are missing - because they are all coded - we'd need to change the coding sheets?

As for the laptops: yes! It completely corroborates findings of a particular survey.

But are you *sure* that the fact the earth hasn't been swallowed by a black hole yet is a GOOD thing? :-D

[neil]

Mrs Judy seems some of your comments getting pretty hard feedback frm the students

http://www.hwusa.org/askquestion/view.asp?qid=7782

[MikeB]

I rather enjoyed the first lecture (and definitely returned my voting handset). It was a shame about the minor technology problems, but such must be the woes of working in the CS department, I suppose. Linux and OpenOffice are the way forward ;P

As for whether or not the LHC has ripped the fabric of the universe apart, there's this rather useful website: http://www.HasTheLHCDestroyedTheEarth.com/

Best,
Mike