Is Philips brilliant or just creepy?

I saw this commercial a few weeks ago and automatically thought that it was just too weird for my taste. After making my own judgement I researched a bit to find some other opinions on the female cyborg electric razor idea. On AdFreak, I found that there was some talk and opposition to the decision of making the cyborg Asian instead of keeping the facial features neutral. It turns out some believe that although it may seem creepy to women, for men it could very well be sexy. Anyways, not for me at least. What's your opinion?

Of course it could be worse. You could be watching Orville Redenbacher back from the dead.

Video Game appropriateness: an endless issue

In light of Professor Geoffrey Rockwell's blog post on the 2007 Video Game Report Card, I had to touch on this subject. I have been working for a company promoting and demonstrating Nintendo Wii and the console's newest games for the past 2 weeks. I can tell you we have had our share of problems concerning the appropriateness of games.

The Wii Interactive set-up displays 6 TV screens in total with 6 different games - 3 with teen rated games and 3 with more child-friendly games (facing away from each other). "Rayman: Raving Rabbids" - a quirky/funny/grotesque game aimed at teens is displayed, yep, you guessed it, on the teen rated side. Even still, we have had a number of parents complain about this game. The majority of comments typically had something to do with the burping contest mini-game players can take part in. I realize that burping is not necessarily an example of good etiquette, but it's fairly innocent when timing is taken into consideration - after all, this is just a game we are talking about. Rayman also features a number of other mini-games that are not in any way harmful. For example, in one you can find yourself competing in a clothes washing competition. So what.

The irony is that this game Interactive is situated next to "Link's Crossbow Training"; a far more violent game in which players use the Wii Zapper controller (shaped like a gun) in gameplay. A player literally shoots Zombies and other monsters until they explode. Guess how many complaints I heard about this game? Zero - explain that one to me.

Toyota: Back in Time...

I just realized, I post about Toyota a lot. Now, I don't really think - in fact I'm certain it's not because I like the brand in terms of what cars they pump out of the assembly line (I can't see myself ever owning a Celica or Camry for that matter). Maybe I'm just bitter that the Tundra is absolutely dominating the Nascar Craftsman Truck Series points standings and manufacturers chase. Whatever it may be, I sure hear myself and many others constantly gossiping about Toyota. Questions like, "did you see their new commercial?" or, "did you know Toyota is the number one manufacturer?" I either hear from friends and family or see on the Blogosphere everyday. How about, "Mike Skinner and the Toyota boys are sure killing it this year on the track." Whatever you may think of 'Toyota talk', one must argue that for the most part any news is good news in the world of not just consumerism, but the entirety of popular culture. Toyota is big news! So despite my bias toward other big name auto corporations in the industry, I take my hat off to Toyota. They sure learned how to market their goods.

Oh, and here's a link to what I think is one of the best car commercials in recent history.

Mac ad

I just found a Mac ad I hadn't seen before and thought it was pretty clever.

PS. It's exam period at the moment, please don't give up on me! I should be back to my regular posts in a few weeks.

Anyhow, here it is.



Brad

Chrysler's own initiate for saving our planet

When it comes to cars, and really any technology, I have found that people often have false pretenses based on rumours or what they heard through the grapevine. For me, one has been that turning off my car engine only to turn it back on again minutes later results in more fuel consumption than leaving the engine running for that period. This is essentially just not true.

I know this because Chrysler has just announced that will be equipping a select number of its models with an engine start/stop option. What this feature will do is turn your car's engine off when the vehicle is in a stopped position, and once the brake is released the engine will automatically turn back on. This option is expected to increase fuel economy by up to 5%.

No wonder America is broke...

I apologize for not updating for a few days, but I have been really busy with schoolwork and whatnot. In the meantime, just to give you a laugh I thought I'd post an interesting statistic I found while studying for a paper. Enjoy.

"Birdwatching is estimated by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to generate spending of about $18 billion per year by over 24 million birders" (EPA, 1996).

Car audio frustration

Because I am in a Multimedia program I am taught to criticize site design, link placement, colours, typefaces and all that stuff only to finally learn from and apply this knowledge to my own work. I like to think I know what a good interface looks like and what it means for a site to be user-friendly. Everyday I see both good and bad sites, but today my design criticism went beyond the web and into my own car.

I just bought a 2004 Ford Focus. Before this car, I never listened to the radio; always to CDs. I also never realized why until this afternoon. My first car had an after market deck installed from Pioneer with tiny little buttons as most after market decks have. My new car's stereo has big, chunky buttons. It is so easy to preset radio stations to an allocated number and change stations whenever I want - I absolutely love it. In at least 3 years of having my first car I had never learned how to do this.

My question is this: why does every after market stereo deck manufacturer come up with a different version of the same complex faceplate with terrible button design year after year? I am 6'1'' with big, fat finger. Before my Focus I could easily press two, three, or even four buttons with one finger. I mean, I wouldn't want to put that much concentration into pressing a button even if I wasn't supposed to be focusing on the road ahead of me.

That's it. I'm quitting school and starting my own car audio business.

Does anybody in California have a real job?

Tree-hugging Escalade

Aside from the Hummer, everyone has criticized it since its beginning for essentially starting the SUV revolution. It has been held solely accountable for global warming much like Marilyn Manson is responsible for youth violence. Well to all you environmentalists out there, feast your eyes on the Cadillac Escalade Hybrid. Due out early this Spring, the Escalade Hybrid will allegedly increase fuel economy by 50% and milage from 12 mpg to 18. That may seem marginal compared to a Civic Hybrid (which can achieve somewhere in the neighborhood of 60-62 mpg), but consider the differences, both engine and size. Also, think about how many of these trucks are on the road and how many people you know who want one.

FLY Fusion Virtual Pen

I saw a commercial for this really cool device called the FLY Fusion the other day. This link will send you to the website, but YouTube also has a pretty cool demo of what it's capable of here. Essentially what it does is digitally captures anything you write inside the pen (as long as you write on the FLY paper) and allows you to upload it to your computer in seconds. Of course there are a whole slew of other cool things you can do with the FLY Fusion but that is the basic idea. I could waste more time explaining it to you, but its much easier to understand if you just check out the clip.

Once you grasp how the device works, you can really see how useful it can be in terms of education. All that time spent scanning hand-written documents and screwing around with Adobe Reader is gone. It has its own text conversion software that will turn your handwriting into digital text. The only concern I have is with how easily it recognizes the handwriting. I know I have fairly messy handwriting, so the program would have to be really smart to differentiate between not just my "U's" and my "V's" but even my "R's" and my "M's". One interesting note about the FLY Fusion is that it is aimed primarily toward kids (I saw the commercial on YTV). I wonder how it would make standard lecture note-taking more efficient?

Disasterous London Olympic campaign

This is the Official London Olympic logo. Wow. I know many of you have probably already seen it, but for those of you who have not heard all the controversy surrounding the London Olympic website, its Flash video, television commercials, and essentially the whole campaign, I will give you a brief overview.

The logo itself is a complete nightmare. It looks like something a 3 year old created in MS Paint. I'll let you make up your own comparison, but people have said it looks like a "toileting monkey" or even a "broken swastika". There are thousands of online petitioners with hopes of changing the campaign. And to think this logo is the result of over 400,000 pounds and a full year of research and testing. The company who is responsible for the design has even removed it from their website.

That's not all. The Official website launched for the 2012 Olympics (which if you haven't yet, you should definitely take a look at) featured an animated video promoting the games before it was removed. The video features a diver diving into a pool with bright lights and quick flashes ultimately triggering upwards of eight documented cases of seizures! You'll find a clip of the ads here.

Adrants Portfolio Showcase

After creating my own site and portfolio, I went shopping around online to see what this kind of thing would cost if I was to hire someone to do it for me. I found Adrants; a company that will do all this work for you, and hook you up with buyers. They have 3 stages of portfolios you can pay for depending on what extras you would like - you can check them out here. If you want Adrants to create and maintain a portfolio for you it will cost you anywhere between $9.95-$49.00 a month. What caught my eye was that they claim to have thousands of qualified buyers who frequent their site looking for graphic designers, photographers, and illustrators on a regular basis. If you're looking for an easy way to kick-start your design career, check out this site and let me know how it works out.

www.BradleyKarelson.com

My website is now up and running! It will be constantly updated, but it is complete for the time being. Check it out:

www.BradleyKarelson.com

McMaster Centre for Leadership and Learning

Today for Computers and Education class Prof. Rockwell took us on a tour of the variety of different learning spaces that can be found on McMaster's campus. One of our last stops was to the Centre for Leadership and Learning.

The idea of this space and the people who work there is to provide services to professors (new and experienced) who are willing to learn how to teach, or how to teach better. They do this through a variety of different methods including e-mails informing faculty of teaching workshops and other services this organization provides.

One of the issues that came up in the discussion on this topic was how to get professors to want to learn how to teach. This made me think back to the camp I spend most of the summers of my life at; Camp Ponacka. The owners of the camp did something I had never heard of being done before with respect to welcoming new campers. They made home visits to every single new camper before their camp session that summer, no matter the city (or sometimes even country). I feel like this could be an effective way to make new faculty feel more welcome entering the McMaster community and even perhaps more willing to attend the teaching workshops they provide. This in turn would lead to more 'technology confident' professors willing to apply computers to their teaching! I know trying to turn the professor-University relationship into a loving family is unrealistic but I think this is something that could potentially make a difference.

SEMA 2007

Another SEMA show has passed which means there are a number of pictures of both really cool and ridiculous looking cars circulating the internet. I've been through quite a few of them and have found a lot that fall in both categories. One trend I noticed with trucks is still gigantic wheels but new this year was a growing interest in American Force big rig style rims like you see on this Ford F-350. I think it really works! It's slammed to the ground, which consequently deems it useless as a traditional workhorse truck, but it really does look badass.



On the same domestic car theme is the Richard Petty paint theme on this Dodge Charger. What I like about this car is the door handles are shaved which makes it look like a two door (what it should have been in the first place). Although, chances are it is still an automatic...

On the other hand, I discovered pictures of this Trans Am. It really just speaks for itself...

Second Life rant

I recently caught a few minutes of a BBC special on Second Life and other virtual environments and felt compelled to write a post. The episode featured interviews from experts on the subject, including Second Life's CEO, Philip Rosedale. The bit that caught my attention was concerning virtual sex. I was initially shocked to hear that people actually pay REAL money converted into Second Life currency (Linden dollars) for virtual intercourse. Apparently this is one of the biggest industries within Second Life. I started to wonder how people get pleasure out of making their avatar have intercourse with another. Not long after, Philip Rosedale told me that avatars can now skydive in Second Life. Assuming this costs money as well, oddly enough I began to develop a relationship between these two examples.

Both intercourse and skydiving are things that not everybody gets to enjoy in real life as much as they'd like to. It is possible that someone who skydives everyday in Second Life will never in their lifetime skydive in real life. These two things people can do on command within this world. Without laws, without restrictions, without any training, and without anybody telling them otherwise. To many people, this is the beauty of this virtual space. They are absolutely free to do (almost) whatever they please whenever they like...and it's really quite harmless. We already know that people glorify themselves in the physical characteristics of their personal avatar. With virtual sex, we now know that people express themselves and interact differently within the space. In theory, this has a sort of Big Brother type reflection on what real life is like. We are so accustomed to the laws and cultural expectations that surround our world that people turn to Second Life for some breathing room.

Personally, I don't take pleasure in interacting within a virtual world like Second Life, but I fully and completely understand why others might. Although if i was to interact in Second Life, I'm confident I wouldn't be spending my money on virtual intercourse...maybe something more like skydiving...

Google Phone: Interface Issues

Well here it is folks: the Google phone. Looks cool! It could be the first phone to manage internet access in a much more user-friendly fashion - at least compared to the one's that exist today. There is no question that Google is one of the leaders in Internet communications, so why wouldn't their phone be a great product? It is even being predicted as a potential iPhone killer.

This all sounds great, but there is one COLOSSAL problem. It is built off the LG Chocolate platform. I know this is a problem and not an advantage because I happen to own a Chocolate. I have not spoken to one person who owns a Chocolate and claims to be happy with their phone. The Telus interface is bad. The Rogers interface is worse. The touch buttons don't respond to cold fingers or hands covered by gloves necessary in this Canadian climate. I could go on all night. So why would Google be so silly when choosing a cellular phone platform? I really don't see it coming close to competing with the iPhone. Please post your thoughts.

Gaming = Learning

While I was reading Henry Jenkins' paper, "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century", in particular the example he uses of SimLife, I started thinking about why the series of Sim games are so attractive to young people even though they are highly educational. Typically speaking, for the most part kids don't enjoy schooling as much as, say, playing basketball with their friends. I am no expert on parenting or teaching, but I would say it's hard to get younger kids enthused about learning.

I remember when I was younger I wanted to be like my hero, my Dad. I would always try to do whatever I could to be like him; buy candy cell phones and pretend to be on conference calls, fix my bike with Fisher Price toolkits, and so on. In sort of the same way, my sister loved to play dress up and Barbies. My point is, kids want to be part of the real "grown-up" life; SimLife and other similar strategy games allow them to do this on their computers. The cool part is, its really educational.

Although I never really got into this particular game series, I was for a period a fan of Roller Coaster Tycoon. Now it's a little bit different from SimCity or SimLife, but it still provides many valuable lessons for kids that can be applied to the real world later on in life. For example, financial management. Before you buy any new roller coasters, you need to know that you have enough funds to make this purchase and still manage the rest of the park. Who knew an Amusement Park themed computer game could help teach the basics of personal finance?

Toyota...you thought that's all they had? Think again.

Although they have recently fallen to second in sales behind GM, Toyota is still undeniably one of the fastest growing car manufacturers in the world. I had never viewed this company as one that excelled in the marketing of their product, though. Well, all this has changed. Three of my favourite commercials right now have come from the automotive giant. The campaign to sell their truck, the Tacoma is brilliant and hilarious! Enjoy.

Uncovering the first wiki?

In class today we looked at an early pedagogical website called "The Victorian Web". This site explores Victorian literature, history and culture in a web-based setting. The version that exists today was developed in 1987 and was used in courses at Brown University, but the initial site was in fact quite different and in some ways much more interactive. The original design allowed students to edit and save the pages freely as they discovered further information on a sub-topic. Sound like a tool you might have used yourself on the web? Maybe a little something like Wikipedia? To me, this site was unknowingly an early prototype of a wiki. As early as 1987, when the first web pages were being launched, we saw one of the first versions of what we now commonly know to be wiki's. So why did it take until at least 1994 for wiki's to finally catch on with mainstream users?

If you think about it, computer-based pedagogy is fairly new. Heck, personal computers are fairly new. There is still so much to learn when we look at computing and using it as a tool for education. Like this particular example shows, maybe if we look to the past we can uncover a future for computers and education.

Brilliant Lego ad

I hate to take up a whole lot of space but this is worth posting for. This recent Lego ad really caught my attention and made me think back on my childhood, which I expect is exactly what the company wanted from mine and older generations. Not to mention, I can't see kids not loving them too.
Once again, an example of print ads using blank real estate very effectively.

Buy the new Radiohead album!...for free?

The band Radiohead has undergone some major changes fairly recently. Their record contract with EMI Records expired in 2004 and since have been working independently without rules and restraints of any sort but their own. Their last record release was with EMI, called "Hail to the Thief", and just released their newest entitled "In Rainbows".

There are a number of cool things that came along with this album. For one, the band's site design is entirely based around the album. The background is this sort of psychedelic moving tie-dye design with a sans-serif block text outlining (very few) details about the album. Really neat; grabs and keeps the users attention quickly.

Secondly, and most importantly (...and shockingly), the album has no set price tag. You choose what you want to pay for it. You can download it or order a CD copy on the spot for whatever price you like. I wanted to discover if there was a catch, so I chose to pay 0 pounds for the download.

While I am waiting for my free download, I get a message telling me "We value your custom. You are currently in a queue." This message was up for about 2 minutes, and really made me think about things. I started asking myself a number of questions. For one, how hard did these guys work to produce something for me to listen to and hopefully enjoy? To answer this question, I did what a large number of people do when they seek information about something they don't know a lot about; I turned to Wikipedia to see what they had on the subject. I discovered it took them just over two years to produce. That's a lot of sweat and blood for some music. In between songwriting and recording, they contributed a song to the official War Child charity album: Help - A Day in the Life. I started to wonder, am I a bad person for paying nothing even if the band clearly gave me the option? This message seemed like an obvious guilt trip at the time, but in a good way.

This post is by no means meant to preach to you in any way, but if you've ever listened to any Radiohead and like what you hear, I encourage you to check out their site. Download or order a copy of the album. Decide for yourself what to pay for it. While you do this, think about the massive decline in album sales in the past decade. What I believe Radiohead is trying to do with this is almost like their own form of quantitative and qualitative research. Everybody in the music world is talking about In Rainbows in blogs, comment posts, newspapers and more. There's your basis for qualitative analysis. The band also has the records of how much people have paid for it. Here we have the quantitative.

Before you go ahead and buy the album, think about these things. Ask yourself what you think a reasonable price for any full-length album would be. What would you like to see as a standard sticker price on CD shelves in HMV?

Is there a need for VLE standardization?

Without any research, I can confidently say that most professors at McMaster University put course material online. The problem is, there are a whole slew of options they have for doing this. For example, Virtual Learning Environments. There are at least 4 that are actively used at Mac: WebCT, Moodle, Blackboard, LearnLink. If profs either don't like any of these options, or don't know about them, they can just use ordinary webspace.

Is there a way to standardize the way prof's post online course material? Would it even be completely necessary?

There is one obvious issue. It's a pain in the ass to manage all of these different sources of information, but is it worth spending so much time/effort/money on this problem that can potentially never be solved?

Prof. Rockwell discusses the issue of tenure status. In the simplest of terms, the University can't tell prof's what to do. Maybe what we need is to come up with a form of incentive to get prof's to use one standardized VLE.

Any ideas?

CEO or X5?

I was reading the Globe Auto section from Thursday and came across a really interesting article. A few random car manufacturers from China (even I have never heard of) have stirred up some controversy in Europe lately concerning models that look identical to the likes of BMW's, Toyota's, Mercedes-Benz's and more. The image above compares a BMW X5 (right) to a Shuanghuan "CEO" (left). Look similar? Despite accusations of "blatant copying", only one car, the Shuanghuan Noble, was kicked out of the Frankfurt Motor Show for looking identical to the Smart car.

But the fun doesn't stop there. They're also cheaper...WAY cheaper. A BMW X5 starts at somewhere in the neighborhood of $50,000-$60,000. The Shuanghuan won't even ask for half that for their CEO. Sounds great, right? Wrong! Wanna know why? Cheaper materials! Check out the Chery Amulet crash-test on YouTube (Another Chinese American/European replica). The thing practically disintegrates. I would never be caught dead in one of these things.

This new trend of knock-off cars has already hit Europe, and will soon be introduced in Canada. Watch out...

Online quizzing and claims of 'instant feedback'

I was reading another course article for my Computers and Education class this week entitled Emerging Technologies by a professor at Viginia Commonwealth University called Bob Godwin-Jones. At one point he talks about a U of Victoria based online quiz editor called Hot Potatoes. It allows users to construct short quizzes in the form of multiple-choice, fill-in-the-gap and even short answers and in class I actually went in and explored this tool a little bit. The idea is really neat, simple and completely user-friendly (as setting up a quiz doesn't require knowledge of HTML code, JavaScript, etc.).

With that said, I still had one concern. In his article, Godwin-Jones explains how one of the most valuable features of these types of online testing systems is that the student gets instant feedback after answers are entered in. This was somewhat misleading to me. Aren't short answer questions often times subjective? If this is the case, then how could there possibly be programmed instant feedback? I decided that the short answer questions are limited to a certain type of question, like, for instance:

"What two provinces border Ontario?"

This type of question would work because the program would be able to detect if the correct answers were typed into the text box, as there are only two. A question that would not work as well and would be impossible (in my eyes) to program appropriate feedback is something like:

"Using termonology and concepts you learned in class, name your favourite 17th Century painting, its artist, and why you like it."

There are an infinite number of possible answers to this question, so how could there be instant feedback? The teacher needs time to read this answer and assess it appropriately; this is where we can visibly see the limits that exist in terms of computer capabilities. My question is this; will computers ever be able to grade an entire essay, puncuation, sentence structure, content and all?

171 foot gap...in a rally car

You've got to be kidding me. I was speechless when I saw the first backflip in motocross in 2000 by Carey Hart, and then a double backflip last year by Travis Pastrana, but this is out of control. A 171 foot gap in a Subaru? What's next? Backflips in racecars?

VW commercials

Another fine example of why I love Volkswagen advertisements so much. Some of my other favourite VW commercials include: the "Vee-Dub" series with Peter Stormare, safety dance, and the "Safe Happens" series ("stuff doesn't, like, happen"). Check them out if you get the chance! No question, one of the best marketing teams in the industry.

Wikipedia: good source for information or not?

In our Computers and Education class this week we started a discussion on wikis, but more specifically we looked into the controversy over the most well known wiki on the net, Wikipedia. The biggest question we concocted was, 'why is this encyclopedia accepted as a reliable source by some professors and teachers, and not by others?' The problem lies with ambiguity surrounding the sources of the research that is gathered for the information writtin in the wiki entries themselves. In other words, who writes this stuff, and who gets to tell us its truth or fiction? Well, one of the issues is that people don't know if John Smith, the McMaster page head administer has a PhD in English or if he is in fact unemployed and living off KD. But on the contrary, maybe it doesn't matter! If you or I go in and edit Jesse Lumsden's profile in the McMaster wikipedia entry to say he is and always was a nobody instead of the best player to come out of the McMaster Football Program, within seconds this will be undone by somebody. But who is this person? Is he Lumsden's personal assistant? Probably not. Is it Lumsden himself? Just as unlikely.

The point is this: these editors have a passion for either the subject they supervise, and/or keeping the entries clean and accurate. The truth is, Wikipedia pages are more accurate than a lot of other encyclopedias. Prof. Geoffrey Rockwell stated it best when he said that although the information can at times be politically biased and not as well written as published encyclopedias, studies have shown that the information is slightly more up-to-date on Wikipedia.

So a conclusion can be drawn from this. Wikipedia has some solid information to use as a starting ground for your own research. My advice although is this: if you're looking into the subject of something like Mac computers as an example, poke around on the site and read up on what is posted. Get a general idea of what it is that you are trying to learn about, and then look for more resources that are academically accepted that will find you the information that you need. Look at Wikipedia as a slightly more accurate version of the newspaper, but with the same sort of purpose: to provide bare facts. Both can be biased and inaccurate, but often times hold pretty valuable information.

Nano saves Dj

Well here it is. My first blog post unrelated to Computers and Education.

Anyhow, I can't particularly remember how I came across this blog post but, nonetheless I found it really neat. This is the link, but if you don't want to read the whole story, I'll give you a brief summary right here.

Lupe Fiasco, a fairly well known rapper discovered by Jay-Z was playing a show in LA with a 300+ audience when his DJ messed up the set by playing a scratched CD. During his biggest single, Kick Push, the track skipped back to the beginning of the verse over and over again until a proclaimed fan saved the day.

The DJ discovered that someone carrying their iPod Nano happened to have the instrumental versions of not only this particular song, but the entire album (yes that's right, just the beats), to at which point it was brought up on stage, plugged into the system and played for the remainder of the set. I never would have thought an iPod could actually have such a profound effect on the outcome of an evening, but there you have it.

IT and teaching

Key Findings: The ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2007 (Caruso and Salaway, 2007)

What I found most interesting about this study was the correlation between the Seven Principles of Good Practice in Undergraduate Education and the five positive categories respondents identified about IT as an enabler of learning (p.13). For the most part, respondents agreed that:

- technology facilitates organization and control in the learning environment
- technology facilitates communication with faculty and classmates
- technology can make content more accessible, including class material and Internet resources
- technology in courses is valuable when directly linked to applications useful to future
employment
- technology is an enabler of learning when professors use it effectively

This list touches on most of the Seven Principles outlined in last weeks article.
With the exception of instructors who use IT poorly, who don’t gauge the diversity of technological literacy students have, and a few other barriers, the results of this study suggest that IT improves teaching and subsequent learning, to which for the most part I agree. Powerpoint is arguably an effective tool for presenting course material. This form of presentation typically utilizes a laptop, projector and Whiteboard. These are all beneficial means of presentation when used effectively. That being said, I think CMS applications make for a more organized and interactive course management system that benefits both instructors and students, but I feel that this particular technology is not significantly responsible for improvements concerning student’s attentiveness, engagement and desire to learn in the classroom.
This portion of the study also provides some insight on class discussion last week. The study’s findings stated that over 58% of students either agree or strongly agree that their instructors use IT well in their courses. I think students are comparing their responses for this question to their own knowledge on the particular IT used. If students know little about Moodle (only the basics: how to navigate through, download a syllabus, etc.), and see that their professor has used one or a few more applications than they know what is even for, they generally assume that their instructors are experts. It has become less frequent since my first year at Mac, but from time to time I also notice instructors having difficulties setting up the connecting cables and whatnot to get their presentation running. I think generally, instructors at Mac are really only adequate users of IT (with the exception of Multimedia profs, of course).
I feel that if instructors knew more about the tools they use to teach classes, we would see even greater effects from the use of IT in teaching.

Seven Principles

Good Practice in Undergraduate Education:
1. Encourages contact between students and faculty
2. Develops reciprocity and cooperation among students
3. Uses active learning techniques
4. Gives prompt feedback
5. Emphasizes time on task
6. Communicates high expectations
7. Respects diverse talents and ways of learning

The Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education stress the importance of all these principles, but only a few stand out as areas needing considerable improvement with respect to instructors at Mac. I have picked only two to look at for now. Firstly, professor’s need to give prompt feedback.
I have always had a problem with receiving timely, honest, and thorough feedback from teachers and professors, especially since I started University. I’m hoping I have just been unlucky, but I have found that most of the prof’s teaching the courses I have chosen are to a degree naïve to not only student’s desires, but also to the quality of instruction students require to excel at the Undergraduate level. It seems that close to every professor I have had since the beginning of my career at Mac is either teaching far too many courses a semester, and as a result their assignment/test grading load is unmanageable, or could care less about how long they take to mark. I can honestly say that more than twice have I sat down to write a test or paper not having seen the grade and/or comments from the test/paper written weeks before. A number of prof’s don’t understand how valuable prompt feedback is to students. We need time to read comments, address mistakes, and learn from them, all before the due date for the next assignment rolls around. This is really a critical part of the learning process. The professor is as much responsible for communicating to students what they don’t know or fully comprehend as they are for what they should know. If students don’t know what they don’t understand, the same mistakes will be made until they’re told what the correct way is.
The first principle – to encourage contact between students and faculty - also has potential room for improvement at Mac that could prove valuable to student’s desire to learn and not only interact with their professors, but with each other at a higher intellectual level. Prof’s at Mac are all across the board on this one. I’ve heard of instructors inviting students to visit them in their office, not in their specified office hours, to talk about issues not even relating to the course, while at the same time I’ve heard of prof’s not even showing up for their office hours. For many students this one-on-one time is really important. University is not supposed to be just about learning who Marshall McLuhan is and why his theories are important, but it is also supposed to prepare students for interacting with others in the real world. Meeting with prof’s and discussing current issues, an assignment, test grade, or whatever, will motivate students to study harder because they know their professors really do care.
Prof. Geoffrey Rockwell has said that most professors at Mac have at some point read the Seven Principles – but who really knows how long ago that was. I firmly believe that a refresher course taken by all professors at Mac, in which the Seven Principles were considered a guideline to good practice in undergraduate education, would enhance the quality of education at this school.