Dave's Archives

As you might have realised, I work at Curtin University, formerly Curtin University of Technology (CUT), formerly - though conceivably somewhat apocryphally - Curtin University of New Technology (CU*T), formerly the Western Australian Institute of Technology (WAIT), formerly Perth Technical College, formerly Perth Technical School, formerly - and definitely more apocryphally - the New Holland Colonial Blacksmith and Breakfast Bar, formerly the East Gondwana School of Blunt Instruments.

We're not good at names.

One of the most frustrating aspects of this particular institutional blight is how it plays out in the University's ICT services. There are those who must spend long dark hours of their lives dreaming up grandiose names with which to inspire the huddled masses to come forth and be dazzled by yet another online service. The problem is that we have hundreds of such services, and it's an act of cognitive warfare to suggest that we should memorise that many bizarre acronyms and cute but hideously overly-generic terms and the circumstances in which they must be applied. Without wishing to blame anyone in particular, it's all getting a bit ridiculous.

You can see how and why it happens. The University's ICT infrastructure has grown organically, bits and pieces being added over time with no real coordination. This is probably inevitable in a large, diverse organisation. The plethora of different ICT services resemble a market, with each different product competing for mind share. However, it's not a market, and in theory we're supposed to use all of the relevant services. So, when a new service is added or updated, it suddenly becomes Very Important that everyone bow down before the mighty ingenuity involved, and recognise the sudden urgency with which the new technology must be adopted. The next service to be added or updated after that requires the same thing, and so on. To make it happen, each of these new services can't just be named - they must be branded. ICT services are not just provided at Curtin - they are, in the marketing sense, sold.

Several years ago, University management commissioned the "OASIS" website, with the aim of integrating all the disparate online services (and introducing our beloved Official Communication Channel). OASIS originally stood stands for "Online Access to Student Information Service" (a backronym, one presumes). Now, however, it doesn't seem to stand for anything. It's just a meaningless name, and thus is itself a perfect example of the problem at work.

OASIS was originally marketted as the "One Site to Rule Them All", which it sort of is, but only at a very superficial level. There's a lot of delegation involved, and the "ruling them all" bit only goes as far as logging in. Once you're logged in, you still need to navigate a maze of services that are still essentially separate niche applications. The fact that these are not fully integrated, functionally and stylistically, is not the first problem. The first problem is what they're all called.

Names of these services include "eVALUate", "StudentOne", "eStudent", and "eAcademic", among others. My point is perhaps more easily grasped by an outsider, for whom these names must seem rather useless as descriptions of what the systems actually do. Indeed they are - eVALUuate has nothing to do with grading or student results, StudentOne is inaccessible to students, eStudent provides nothing that students will find useful on a regular basis, and eAcademic is actually used to access student information. (The true functions of these systems are, of course, better understood by Curtin staff and students than by outsiders, but only by being forced to use them.)

Now, there are many ways in which these services might be better integrated, but a not-insignificant amount of confusion and cognitive waste could be alleviated simply by coming up with names that actually make sense. By this, I mean intuitively obvious, not requiring large-scale internal marketing programs. The ICT branding we have at the moment is a complete waste of resources at every level. In my ever-humble opinion, all these services should have purely functional names. They should not stand out. They should not be cute, or cool, or inspiring, or grandiose. They should be simple, accurate, no-nonsense descriptions of the services provided. For instance:

• OASIS should be called "Curtin online services"
• eVALUate should be called "Course/teaching feedback"
• StudentOne should be called "Student database"
• eStudent should be called "View/update your enrolment details"
• eAcademic should be called "View student details"

At least, that gives you some idea.

I don't know how the mind of a marketing person might react to this. I'd hope that a good marketing person might recognise the merits of functional naming as a means of encouraging the use of ICT services.

As you have doubtless deduced from my total failure to keep you entertained over the last month and a half, I have in fact been a little busy. Possible illusions to the contrary notwithstanding, my existence is not synonymous with that of my blog. (At least, not yet it isn't. This may change later in life when my consciousness is uploaded. I'll keep you posted.)

First, it may be worth noting that, after more than six years, my PhD thesis is about to be officially approved. I shall thus enter the PhD afterlife, my soul having been judged and marked, and corrections thereto proclaimed. I shall wander the Earth instilling great wisdom in anyone mildly curious about the nature and mechanics of comparisons between different software inspection strategies, for such has been the tiny sliver of human experience to which I have contributed.

Second, I have simultaneously rewritten and lectured a unit on C programming in UNIX, a feat probably not entirely without precedent, although this has been my first real lecturing experience. It is said that writing your own lecture notes gives you much better preparation for lecturing than reusing someone else's, and this was probably true. In hindsight I would recommend having all this done before the semester begins, though in any event I didn't have much choice. Over the course of 14 weeks, I developed 10 lectures, 9 tutorial worksheets and associated tutors' notes, 3 tests (including one exam) plus marking guides, 3 mock tests plus answer guides, and 1 assignment plus marking guide. That's 26-42 distinct documents (depending on how you count them), whose combined content would rival a PhD thesis (and I know). This was in addition to 24 hours/week of actual face-to-face teaching.

Third, (as any teacher or lecturer will be all too aware) after the teaching comes the marking. Exam marking is easy - there is no feedback to give, and a fairly constrained context for creative idiocy. You get to see what students do well, and what they do poorly, and what questions could be improved for next time. Prac report marking is also relatively easy, though collating them all at the end seems to lead to the conclusion among some students that they just weren't going to be marked at all.

Assignment marking is hard. In my case, this is partly because programming assignments do not really constrain creative idiocy. There are many ways to write a program correctly, but infinitely more ways to do it badly. It's not as mind numbing as (I imagine) essay marking must be. The very worst essays (such as the incoherent, smudged dribblings written in high school English Lit exams by none other than yours truly), must be positively soul destroying to read and mark. You can mark a programming assignment partly by running it, but nevertheless, like an essay, it must also be read.

Reading said programming assignments was made at the same time more entertaining and more frustrating by a discovery I made towards the end. Imagine, if you will, twelve student essays (essays being an analogy here for programs) that are identical except for the substitution of synonyms, punctuation, fonts and paragraph breaks. Then imagine the students involved swearing blind that they merely discussed the topic and certainly never copied anything, and that of course they were the same because the question could only be answered one way.  Then imagine - and this is what really annoys me and my good colleague who was roped into conducting the investigation - that a large proportion of these students are, for want of a better term, good students and will easily pass the unit. (At least, they will if my suspicions about the severity of their punishments turns out to be correct.)

Now that's all behind me, I come to my last (and continuing) major task for the year: trying to find a job. Then, absurdly, I might have some free time.