Assignments @ MindSay 
school
To Teach or Not to Teach...
Here's a question: what are people thinking?
Let's consider the facts. I am a librarian at a university. At the university level, students should have basic research skills. Most do not. And it gets worse every single year. Instead of trying to fix the underlying problem and just teaching basic research skills, we've left it in the hands of individual professors to combat the problem.
Here is where we run into a bit of trouble.
Most professors handle the problem fine, but you get the occasional professor who "is really gonna show 'em" how it's done. Like they won't be satisfied until the students are lying in a ball on the floor, in a pool of their own tears, whimpering and swearing a blood oath to never use Wikipedia.
{Disclaimer: I LOVE Wikipedia. LOVE it. I think it is brilliant and wonderful and I wish I'd thought of it. It is not without its problems, but used properly it is an excellent tool. I just wish I could make others understand that}
This is what happened today. A professor assigned a research project to her class. Now, the project itself is poorly designed but that isn't the problem today. The assignment is to learn and present a basic overview of a Latin American country. Each student is assigned a different country and then given a list of questions that MUST be answered. There are 8 questions on the list. They are simple, basic questions. Literally, I could do this assignment in 30 seconds by using the CIA Worldfactbook (an amazing resource, btw). If that is as in-depth as she wants them to go (and from what I read in the assignment description, it is) then I don't know why she doesn't let them use the internet. But no. In this case, she REQUIRES that the students use 2 books and 3 academic, scholarly articles to answer the questions.
Obviously, when designing this lesson, she didn't think to get input from anyone. If she had asked ANY librarian, anywhere on the planet, she would have been told that this is terrible. Using books is fine, there are tons of great reference books out there, but to use scholarly articles to answer what amounts to a fact sheet is ridiculous and a waste of everyone's time.
This is bad enough, but, as I explained to this poor girl who was so upset she was practically in tears because she had been doing this from home for 5 hours with no luck and then drove in to the library to get help after she called her professor and was given terrible advice, the only way to make this feasible is to look up one question at a time and use one resource per question.
(BTW, the advice was "if you're having trouble finding articles, use Academic Search Premier"- which is exactly the opposite of what I would tell them. Terrible. Advice. The answer should have been "if you're having trouble finding articles, call the librarian" OR "if you're having trouble finding articles, it is probably because I made up the worst assignment in history" but that might be hoping for too much)
Fine, so you get the gist of why this is so awful. I helped the girl find in depth research articles that she will essentially be quoting one sentence from and citing it as a source. Absurd waste of resources. Busy work. Idiocy.
Now, we come to the kicker. When you're doing research there are tons of great reference books available that serve as an excellent starting point. For an assignment this brief, using one of them could do the whole thing. But this idiot professor has decided that since using a reference book would be too simple, she will BAN the use of reference books. Sort of. You see, if she had simply said, "no reference books" then I would have at least respected her a little bit. She wants them to learn to research and how to look up books and articles. That's good, she's just going about it in a terrible way. Well, instead of banning them all, she actually made up a printed list of reference books and banned the use of those specific books. Seriously, she sent out a list and told them they are not allowed to use (and therefore cite) those books. Well, that's just stupid. Because now it becomes a case of "who knows more about the library?" And in that contest, I am going to beat a professor every day of the week.
This professor has made this simple assignment so difficult that all day long students are coming in to ask for help in finding resources that barely relate to their topics. Which makes research frustrating and makes students learn to hate it.
So this girl needs books and she shows me how she already looked in the catalog (and she knew what she was doing...it wasn't her fault, there just aren't a lot of books for this sort of thing) and she is upset and frustrated because she can't find anything. Taking pity on her I tell her there are some great reference books we can use. She showed me the stupid list and tells me she can't use any of those. Ha! Like that deters me. I took her over to that reference area and found her two great reference books to answer her questions. Actually, either one of them would have answered all of her questions. And neither of these two books is on that list.
Stupid, stupid professor.
Can anyone tell me what this girl learned from all this? I am going with the following: librarians are awesome. Professor is an idiot.
Well, the girl left happy and with her assignment completed. But she didn't learn anything good about research here. Now she knows that I can do it, but I am a professional, and while I will help her with anything I can it would be better for all of us if this professor weren't so determined to make up bad lessons that teach nothing to the students.
I'd like to drop an anvil on the head of said professor and then speed away saying, "meep meep".
[Blog #269] --- Neutral --- [Thursday] - Living For The Weekend?
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In order to get me through these dreary first college weeks, I'm having to bear something in mind that I can look forward to at the weekend, or when I get home. This week, I'm looking forward to having Shelly sleeping over tomorrow night - and since yesterday, I've got the first three PS2-exclusive Guitar Hero games and a massive stack of unplayed games that I can dig into. :)
English was a pretty simple lesson - sort of self-studying if you will - making tables and taking notes.
We all did this while Angela called us up individually to talk about our AS grades. I now don't feel as bad as I did previously about my shitty C. I was only 4 marks away from a B - and Angela's told me that I can re-work a bit of my coursework to get those marks, thus bringing my coursework to an A, leaving my exam grade as is - A + C = B. :D
During my break afterwards I was proper ravenous, so I got some oriental ribs flavour McCoys and a BLT sandwich. Shelly came and met me and we sat on the tables by the transporter entrance.
When I'd finished my sandwich, I stuck the label on her arm. BLT became a new abbreviation - for Shelly, it stands for BIG LESBIAN TWAT. :D
Photography was basically just a big meeting held as a group.
We all chipped in ideas about what assignments we wanted to do. Paul's made it so we can have a taste of each others' ideas, then choose the one we like best and run with it.
My contribution was Addictions. There's so much to branch off from it.
I was thinking drugs, alcohol, medicine, pornography, sex, video games, television, junk food - my list is endless, hence why I'll probably stick with my own idea.
I'm certainly not keen on Shelly and Michelle's ideas. They both want to do landscape-based shite, and I hate landscapes - I like still life macro stuff and portraits. I was pretty okay with Hayley's idea, Emotions - hers seems pretty portrait-orientated too. She seemed to be keen with my idea as well.
The 3 hour break that followed was spent with Shelly in the LRC.
We were that bored, we resorted to Wikipedia to entertain us. I decided it was time to educate Shelly about JAPANESE TOILETS. :)
(Among other things - we spent ages on the page, reading over it and sharing our opinions on it. Lmfao. I'd told her about them before, but she'd never fully comprhended it until she saw it for herself.)
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When I came home, I ate hot-dogs, followed by a chocolate spread pancake while dad and I watched a new episode of The Simpsons. Fairly amusing it was too. :)
I've spent the rest of tonight playing Guitar Hero II.
I'm alternating between the easy and medium careers to start off with - getting the easy shit done out of the way before we get onto the fun levels. :D
Oh, and my packages today were Amelie and PaRappa The Rapper 2. :D
Now I'm only waiting for Shelly's present and the CD from nana. Come on Play.com!
Dixie currently feels:
Neutral
Neutral -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Blog #269
Living For The Weekend?
Living For The Weekend?
In order to get me through these dreary first college weeks, I'm having to bear something in mind that I can look forward to at the weekend, or when I get home. This week, I'm looking forward to having Shelly sleeping over tomorrow night - and since yesterday, I've got the first three PS2-exclusive Guitar Hero games and a massive stack of unplayed games that I can dig into. :)
English was a pretty simple lesson - sort of self-studying if you will - making tables and taking notes.
We all did this while Angela called us up individually to talk about our AS grades. I now don't feel as bad as I did previously about my shitty C. I was only 4 marks away from a B - and Angela's told me that I can re-work a bit of my coursework to get those marks, thus bringing my coursework to an A, leaving my exam grade as is - A + C = B. :D
During my break afterwards I was proper ravenous, so I got some oriental ribs flavour McCoys and a BLT sandwich. Shelly came and met me and we sat on the tables by the transporter entrance.
When I'd finished my sandwich, I stuck the label on her arm. BLT became a new abbreviation - for Shelly, it stands for BIG LESBIAN TWAT. :D
Photography was basically just a big meeting held as a group.
We all chipped in ideas about what assignments we wanted to do. Paul's made it so we can have a taste of each others' ideas, then choose the one we like best and run with it.
My contribution was Addictions. There's so much to branch off from it.
I was thinking drugs, alcohol, medicine, pornography, sex, video games, television, junk food - my list is endless, hence why I'll probably stick with my own idea.
I'm certainly not keen on Shelly and Michelle's ideas. They both want to do landscape-based shite, and I hate landscapes - I like still life macro stuff and portraits. I was pretty okay with Hayley's idea, Emotions - hers seems pretty portrait-orientated too. She seemed to be keen with my idea as well.
The 3 hour break that followed was spent with Shelly in the LRC.
We were that bored, we resorted to Wikipedia to entertain us. I decided it was time to educate Shelly about JAPANESE TOILETS. :)
(Among other things - we spent ages on the page, reading over it and sharing our opinions on it. Lmfao. I'd told her about them before, but she'd never fully comprhended it until she saw it for herself.)
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When I came home, I ate hot-dogs, followed by a chocolate spread pancake while dad and I watched a new episode of The Simpsons. Fairly amusing it was too. :)
I've spent the rest of tonight playing Guitar Hero II.
I'm alternating between the easy and medium careers to start off with - getting the easy shit done out of the way before we get onto the fun levels. :D
Oh, and my packages today were Amelie and PaRappa The Rapper 2. :D
Now I'm only waiting for Shelly's present and the CD from nana. Come on Play.com!
TV Ad
I spent the last 3 days doing this;
Whatcha Think? IT's supposed to be a sort of cheap TV teaser for MIB 2. I had to cover requirments ofr two assignments, so thus why it's a touch on the short side as it is developed for TV ad positions.
And why the hell is my name a "suggested tag?????" I should investigate... I might be popular.
..... False alarm, it's just suggesting I tag myself :P
-- Lory
what kind of animal are you? let me see what you come up with..lol have fun
I would be a
nasty ass attitude having pitbull
with a snarl on my face that would make God blink
my neck would be decorated with a bike chain that has a human skull
dangling on the end of it
where ever I walked, people moved out the way as though I was a
mac truck speeding dangerously in their direction
I would'nt even be nice to my owner!
fuck him or her!
because
I'm too busy being bad to the bone
everybody in the whole wide world
would know
to
just leave me the Hell alone!
More 3D.
My most recent assignment was a shot compositing assignment, that is, camera work, animation, sound and music as opposed to modeling and graphic detail. Essential, replacing the basic models with high-end models and textures are all that should be needed to finish the production. So I've spent the last week and a half animating, adding special effects, applying sound and music tracks to this clip to produce a story. Whilst the script was given to us, the way we presented it was entirely up to us. So here it is, and it's also been added to my Wiki page. Keep in mind this entire clip is almost 2.5 minutes long.
-- Lory
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