Soliciting Fameby Eric W. Warnke

The University of Alberta is supposed to be a great school of business in Canada. However I’m slowly losing faith in it. This post is a continuation of my previous posts on my poorly run Management Information Systems class.

Since the last post we have had to create a continuation of our project websites as well as contribute to a group collaboration wiki. The website was easy enough to do, however we were still instructed to use FrontPage (discontinued in 2006). This time we needed to insert some Access databases into our websites and make them editable. To do this our instructors provided us with a nifty little template that does all the work for you, but you had to attend the labs to get it. I did not. So I did it the more realistic way, manually… and by manually I ran a database wizard in FrontPage, not terribly tricky.

A couple other stupid and unrealistic things we were required to do included adding a scrolling marquee and password protecting a page by making the password the name of the page. First of all a scrolling marquee is something no self-respecting web designer would ever implement and I seriously doubt any company would ask you do use it. Secondly, security through obscurity is probably the worst thing you could do. You might as well not bother to link the page.

For our wiki project the entire course of approximately 450 students needed to contribute significant work to a class wiki about MIS. There were 64 topics on various technology issues and about 15-20 students assigned to each topic.

Now, before I get started, this is an interesting idea but it was the worst executed project I’ve ever participated in. One of my profs, Ofer Arazi has spent a great deal of time researching and working with online social collaboration like wikis. He’s a great prof and he has done a good job teaching the class. Unfortunately this assignment was not properly thought through by the entire department, it was not any one persons fault.

I was assigned to edit Application Architecture, Peer-to-Peer Networking, and Software Application Generation Tools. Joy.

Our assignment was to contribute meaningful, useful entries that required “effort”. There was a short list describing what “effort” was and it includes everything from original content to reformatting for readability.

When I started my work the pages I was assigned to were pretty well fleshed out, albeit blatantly plagiarized. So I decided to contribute my “effort” through deleting irrelevant and useless content as well as reformatting the articles and properly referencing sources. The hitch with all the types of contributions is that if you’re moderately competent you can argue 100% at the end of the day if you’ve done even a little bit of work.

There were two major flaws with this project:
1. The wiki couldn’t handle everyone at once.
2. It’s peer marked, each student is responsible for grading two articles (40 different students).

1. Poorly designed wiki

The following bit of dialogue between myself and the course coordinator further reinforces my feelings of being robbed of precious tuition dollars. I posted this in our open discussion board accessible by students and faculty.

Me:

I’ve noticed the server hosting the wiki is excrutiationly slow. So slow that my session likes to time out when viewing pages.

Also, having to compete against 15 other students to edit one page is extremely unfair. I’ve found that by the time I’m done editing a section my lock has expired and someone else is editing it, now I basically have to sit here and hit edit and hope I get to it before the next person, AND then I have to try to incorporate the last student’s changes.

What are the odds of looking at the speed issue before this thing is due?

Response:

Eric,

It sounds to me like you left this assignment until the very last minute. This is fine, as it is your choice when you want to do it. However, thsi assignment has been available to work on for 3 months now. It is not our fault you left thje assignment to the last minute. the onus is on you to make sure you can get your contributions in on time. The entire purpose of giving you the assignment so early was to make sure everyone had a fair chance to get on and edit the page. Of course the server is going to be extremely slow and busy the night it is due. We gave all students every possible tool to complete this assignment.

N.J.

Course Manager

Me:

Actually I’d say the onus is on the department to properly design and execute relevant and working assignments. So far it’s failed pretty miserably. When I complete an assignment should not matter. Next year I suggest a warning be given to all students that the current server architecture in place can’t handle everyone at once. In fact it looks like it’s more of a software issue and not the server (poorly designed wiki) because ulearn was speedy.

By the way, you were not available during your office hours as we arranged to meet so I had to go talk to Ofer.

I look forward to the grading.

Thanks,
Eric

Response:

Eric,

AS you probably know, when many people try to work on something at the same time, the speed becomes very slow. We could take a lot of time and money top design a wiki that can handle mor epeople at the same time, but the problem will still remain. Only one person can ever edit a document or wiki page at any given time, no matter how fast the wiki is. Even if we had a state of the art, superfast wiki, it would still lock out everyone but one person for editing. So, very close to the due date, everyone will still have the same problem. This is why we gave everyone 3 months to work on this assignment, so that trying to find time to edit the wiki page woudl not be a problem. many students took advantage of this and began their work early. Unfortunately, those students who left it unitl the last minute will experience the issue of being locked out. I hope you understand the real reason as to why there were problems with the wiki. Hopefully this clearly explains all of the issues, and any amibiguities.

Cheers,

N.J.

Me:

N.J.,

MediaWiki (which powers Wikipedia) is both free and scalable. It also allows multiple users to edit and has built in edit conflict resolution management.

Here’s a few links to reference for next year:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Edit_conflict

Eric

After this he stopped responding completely. This was over a week ago and I’ll consider that conversation closed. I later had my professor tell me in class that I would make a very good consultant because I “always had suggestions for improving things”. Obviously he’d been reading.

I’ll admit I was a bit curt with our course manager but realistically someone needs to hold the school responsible for their ineptitude.

2. Peer marked assignment

Rumour has it that last year there were so many complaints about the peer marked wiki projects that the course managers had to give everyone 100% on the assignment. I could technically give everyone a 0 and they couldn’t do anything about it. My mark isn’t dependent of how I grade someone else. A few of us challenged our prof and verified that we could put in the bare minimum effort for this grading without penalties. For the record I did mine properly. I did give out a fair share of failing grades for blatant plagiarism without quotes or citations to back it up. Technically those students should fail the course… technically.

Yesterday I received a pleasant email from the course coordinator:

Hi Eric,
your URL’s to your webpages you submitted do not work. We have   tried every one and even multiple alterations, and still did not   get them to work. Did you check to make sure the URL’s you   submitted work? It looks as though we can not access your  webpages,  and we need to in order to actually grade your  assignment.

N.J.

Me:

Hi N.J.,

I just opened part 4B from my assignment page and clicked on every
single link and they all worked fine for me. I also went directly to
the site at http://students.bus.ualberta.ca/warnke/ from two different
computers and it worked fine, both in IE and Firefox.

I’m not sure what is wrong.

Eric

Response:

Hi eric,

Your link you gave me in this email works, but the uRL’s in your  submission do not. We will grade you rassignment based on this  working URL, but there will be a penal;ty for a submission that  does not work.

N.J.

Me:

Hi N.J.,

This can’t be correct. My friend (who is also in this course) is
standing beside me right now as we download and click on each link and
they all work.

I would like to come to your office and go over the submission before
you deduct any marks.

Please let me know when is best to drop by.

Please attach the document you saved from uLearn so I may see for myself.

Regards,
Eric

Response:

Hi eric,

It turns out that there was another student whom had a very similar name, but did not put his full name, so we thought it was you. I have found your submitted file, and graded you thusly. You will receive no penalty for URL’s not working. Sorry for this confusion. I have attatched the excel file as you requested for you to look at.

Thank you,
N.J.

I don’t know what you’re thinking but it definitely felt like I was the first Eric to pop into his mind when something went wrong. The funny thing is each assignment also had a unique student ID attached to it, 3 times actually. Also, the only other Eric’s in the course had last names of Leong and Mah, nowhere near Warnke.

All in all I can’t say I’m terribly impressed with this course. I wrote on both my student evaluations that I felt this was a complete waste of time and that I intend to write a formal complaint to our assistant-dean.

By the way, any spelling or grammatical errors by N.J. are complete his, I didn’t edit any of his stuff except to change his full name to his initials for his peace of mind.

Any comments on what you’ve read would be appreciated. If I’m completely out to lunch or if you think I’m demanding way too much from my university I’d be glad to hear your thoughts.

I’m off to the Project Hope benefit dinner tonight, I  hope it’s good