I had an off-line discussion with a collaborator about student supervision and how frustrating it can be. As a professor, you have, from time to time, to supervise students. It could be a graduate student you are supervising as part of their studies, it could be an undergraduate project, it could an assistant you’ve hired.

You know you have a bad student if the student

• cannot keep track of tasks assigned to him and be responsible for such tasks;
• lies to you about what has been done and what hasn’t been done;
• repeatedly ignores some of your phone calls or emails.

In my experience, a bad student is a drain on your resources and a professor simply has to drop such a student as soon as possible. Even if you have funding or need of a student, you are better off with no student than a bad student.

So, what about my title? The art of supervising students?

My experience has been that there is no need to be tough or strict with the students. There is nothing magical you can do: forcefully organizing many meetings with the student often won’t help. If you have a bad student (see above), cut your losses as early as possible. Otherwise, trust the student.

Here are a few rules based on my experience:

• Be clear about the tasks you expect the student to perform and the time it should take.
• Be available to the student in a personalized way: some students benefit from frequent meetings, others do not.
• Get to know and leverage the student strengths and know his weaknesses: you are better off doing some of the tasks yourself.
• Trust the student: most students have tremendous potential and will deliver greatness given a chance.

Important post today by Yuhong, on her experience with e-Learning. She recalls a few facts:

• a decent videoconference setup for a classroom is less than $5000;
• MIT is setting itself up to become the major competitor in the future education market through e-Learning: webLab and open sourceware;
• we know of some tremendously succesful endeavours like MusicGrid lead by Martin Brooks.

I think that Yuhong misses the most important example of all: the U.K. Open University. An entire university based on e-Learning and distance education, and yet, it is one of the best schools in U.K.

I think Downes once wrote that while physical classrooms won’t go away, they will increasingly become a lifestyle choice. In the near future, when my son will attend college (if he does so), he will find a very different landscape. There will much high quality learning opportunities outside classrooms, to the extend that he may avoid entirely classrooms and actually get an even better education. On the other hand, the remaining classrooms will be high-tech classrooms with remote instructors, remote laboratories and so on.

You don’t believe me? About a quarter of current students [in U.K.] are now doing all or part of their courses online.

I stumbled on an interesting SQL article on the Misuse of the FROM Clause. The author argues that FROM clauses should refer to only two types of tables:

• those from which you want values returned
• those allowing to join two or more tables in the above category

In other words, if your select is on tables A and B, then you can select from tables A and B, and any table that can be joined with A and B, but no others.

The argument he offers is based on performance concerns. It does seem to me that any query not fulfilling this requirement would have to be relatively complex.

Tall, Dark, and Mysterious wrote about this student she has in her class who is actually a fairly typical student:

“I memorized how to do the problem you did in class, but then on the test you put a DIFFERENT problem, and you never showed us how to do THAT one, and it’s not fair! My method of doing math by memorizing formulas and then blindly applying them to problems that are identical to the ones I’ve seen has gotten me A’s until now, so what gives?”

Repeat after me: memorization is not learning. Learning has to be a higher level task.

I just received a call for papers for ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC’05).

Since 1999 the ACM Special Interest Group on Electronic Commerce (SIGECOM) has sponsored the leading scientific conference on advances in theory, systems, and applications for electronic commerce. The sixth ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC’05) will feature paper presentations, workshops, and tutorials covering all areas of electronic commerce. The natural focus of the conference is on computer science issues, but the conference is interdisciplinary in nature, addressing a wide range of topics relating to Electronic Commerce.

The conference will be held from Sunday June 5th through Wednesday June 8th 2005 in beautiful Vancouver, Canada at the Vancouver Marriott Pinnacle. June 5th will be devoted to tutorials and workshops. From the morning of June 6th through noon on June 8th will be paper presentations. There will be an evening reception on Monday, June 5th, and an evening poster session with hors d’oeuvres on Tuesday, June 6th.

I’ve written on this blog about the recent drop in enrollment for Computer Science degrees in North America: I gave an estimate of a drop by 25%. Looks like it is worse:

The number of new undergraduate majors in U.S. computer science programs has fallen 28 percent since 2000, reports the Computing Research Association, a group of more than 200 North American computer science, computer engineering and related academic departments.

The explanation would be that students do not want a Dilbertesque life:

One reason, say those in the field, is that technology jobs appear less lucrative than they did during the dot-com boom. Then, students thought a computer science degree would lead to riches and a quick retirement. Many took on the major.

Another reason might be that Business Schools are now competing with Computer Science departments for students:

Colleges have also begun to integrate computer instruction into other majors such as e-commerce programs in business schools. A computer science degree, therefore, can be unnecessary.

I’ve recently upgraded to Xorg X server on my Gentoo machine. Compared to my installation of XFree, the fonts were bad looking, but happily, someone else noticed it to and he wrote a nice guide on how to fix these font issues.

Update: It takes a bit of work, but now, my fonts look very sharp indeed.