I knew that one of the first adjustments I had to make this Ramadhan was my sleeping hours. It seemed counter-productive to wake up at circa 5 and go back to bed for an hour or so after half past; you compromise on the quality of sleep for that one hour, leaving you sluggish without coffee as an antidote. I stayed in bed until about midday last weekend, which in retrospect was a crap idea: I was so tired and sluggish the rest of the day, it wasn’t funny. So it is now bed by ten, up by half four. A cup of coffee and a bowl of goatfeed later, and I have, thus far, managed two very long days at work. Three more till the weekend.
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if i should buy jellybeans.. have to eat them all in just one sitting
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One of the reasons why I am already stood at the bus stand at 7.45 in the morning these past few days, is that I have had to attend a teaching and learning course. This is compulsory for new academics, and as everyone groggily filed in at 9am, you could tell that like me, perhaps half of the participants were not there by choice. (Okay, it takes about 12 minutes to get to uni from town, really, so I get in at about 8, but I need to get in at about 8 so that I have approximately an hour of Idlan time so that I am presentable to the world). Not that the course is that bad; au contraire, it is rather good – but with a paper to write and other things at the back of my mind, educational pedagogy isn’t quite first and foremost in my to-do list. Having said that, if I was not ‘made’ to attend such a course, I would probably not get round to it: ever!
One of the things that was introduced to us this afternoon was the Personal Response System (PRS – no not Pemimpin Rakan Sebaya). In a popular culture context, a PRS is used on the tv series Who Wants to Be a Millionaire in the ‘Ask the Audience’ component. What they’ve done with this technology (or did WWTBAM utilise PRS? I have no idea which is the chicken and which the egg) in classrooms is to use it as an assessment technique where students input answers to questions through a handset, which is then transmitted straight to the instructor’s computer. Using proper software, the students responses can be instantly tabulated and graphed, if needs be; the software can also store responses for later analysis.
This is one example of adapting technology to teaching and assessment, which is refreshing in light of reports that students are getting more and more sophisticated in their ways of cheating. Cheats are always one step ahead because the way we take exams – sat at a table, writing answers in booklets for a pre-set time – has not changed since time immemorial. One could argue: what isn’t broken should not be fixed, but perhaps the advances in technology will begin to force exam taking and assessment processes to embrace the future. You know… how, in a very real way, we can bring the Mesozoic era, into the 21st century…
