Posted on: March 10th, 2011 by Famous Phil

It seems like its been a while since I last posted to my blog.  As usual, the mid semester grind is hitting my time hard, so I don’t have the resources to write here as often.  Thankfully this is my last semester as a Masters student, *yay*.   So coming up soon, I will be writing a blog on regular expressions, I’m still in the process of making it, so it might take a while.  I’ve also got a great blog for April fools day, so stay tuned for that!

Now onto the topic of this blog.  This is a video blog (go figure, right?).  Actually, I was asked by the IEEE student club at UB (http://wings.buffalo.edu/sa/ieee) to redo my lecture series on developing websites.  I know that my website isn’t the best visually designed website in the world (and I’m actively looking for talent that can help me fix this in exchange for my programming skills), but I do know a lot about how to code websites well.

Being the kind of person who likes to share knowledge, I agreed to give the lecture series with updated information.  John suggested that I video tape the lectures and post them to my blog, which I thought was a great suggestion.  So in the next 5 to 6 weeks, I will be posting youtube 720p HD recordings of the lecture series to here.  Feel free to watch it and make comments about my presentation skills.  I know that I’m not perfect, so I’m always open to suggestions!

As always, thanks for reading!

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Tags: adobe, development, education, Google, hosting, html, ieee, mysql, php, putty, student club, university at buffalo, vim, Web, website
Posted in Hosting / Server Administration, My Site, Programming, Student Life, Technology
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Posted on: May 7th, 2009 by Famous Phil

I just finished up my last final for this semester of college and it feels good to be done.  That is why I haven’t really been blogging much for the past few days, and it might be a few days more until I get my next blog out.  Now its basically wait for a few weeks for my professors to be not-so-lazy and post my grades and grade the finals.  I am confident that my courses will come back as high marks (none below B).  In past semesters, I haven’t been able to say the same, so that’s a good sign.

Anyways, I have a short rant about the bookstore on campus.  As you probably know, most bookstores for colleges are a huge ripoff operation focused at making maximum profit because they know they can do that and get away with it.  Anyways, I thought I’d just talk a little bit about my experience every semester and what I started doing this semester to fix the problems that I’ve noticed.

The first semester I came here, I wasn’t sure about what books I needed until the final week, so I figured that I would get them from the bookstore.  That semester, I know I spent close to 500 dollars.  That is just outrageous for a mere 4 books.  Pretty sad, isn’t it?

After that semester, I began planning ahead and finding my book titles / isbn numbers out ahead of time.  The bookstore isn’t very helpful with this either.  The bookstore hates to post the book picture on their online store, so I end up always going to the bookstore about a week before class with a pen and paper to write down everything I need.  This works fine unless the professor hasn’t yet decided on the book they wish to use.  I’ve found that the bookstore also hates ordering books early, so they rarely have all of the books until the first day of class  (even when the professor ordered them ahead of time).

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: amazon, bookstore, ebay, edition, education, grades, higher education, international edition, isbn, online, rip off, ripoff, school, us edition
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Posted on: April 16th, 2009 by Famous Phil

I suppose a good place to introduce this topic is that I am a computer science student at the University at Buffalo going onto my 4th year of studies.  I have formed many opinions of professors which are both good and bad, and I have an idea of who the good professors are and who are bad, but I have rarely asked myself why the professors fall into good / bad on my list… that is until a lecture yesterday by a possible future UB professor.

This person was well dressed and came in to lecture about Graham’s scan algorithm for solving the Convex Hull problem.  Our normal professor went over this algorithm the prior class and this made perfect sense.  Unfortunately, the candidate didn’t make much sense.  Unfortunately, if I didn’t already know the algorithm, and his power point slides would be a start to understanding the algorithm, nothing more.  This candidate had an Asian accent, although I understood what he was saying, I was still clueless, so I don’t blame the accent.

So what do I blame, the excellent slide show, the professor, or the overall teaching style?  I believe that I can blame none of the above, and rather blame the teaching techniques.  I have had many professors here at UB, and the professors that I have always understood use a chalk board and / or overhead projector (for writing).  These professors often set goals for each lecture and end up following through on every goal.  They prepare practical examples and work through them step by step in class.   This is a research university, so theory is a necessary evil in class.  I am the type of person that can understand the theory behind the answer only AFTER I see a practical example specifying a specific case of the theory.  Professors who tend to be good for me always go through an example, then provide the theory and background into why the example worked.

The professors that I rarely (in some cases never) have understood use a PowerPoint slideshow, premade lecture notes, and/or read directly off from a sheet of paper.   I also should add that these professors seem to rely on their notes and just end up reading off the slide, which makes class seem pointless and useless.   I now understand why many students end up not going to class (something that I still do, although it is normally useless).   These professors often forget to include practical examples, and prefer to refer their students to homework assignments that are nearly impossible to complete without first learning a lot of background information on their own.  At first, I didn’t go and learn the background information that these types of professors seem to expect, and this is what I blame many of my first year bad grades on.

There is one professor that has used both of these above methods. This professor has a slight egyptian accent, and this proves to me that accent does not hurt understanding the material.   The professor for the first 5 weeks of class used a projector and a writing tablet to give a lecture with PowerPoint / pdf slides.  He would often write over these slides with his tablet.  Unfortunately, the tablet wasn’t very good at allowing him to write, and this is why his written notes on the tablet were nearly impossible to understand.  I would end up following exactly what he said as he wrote on the slides to get decent notes.   He would also end up reading directly off from the solved example slides (Most of the time, this was the case and he’d never write on these slides).  His slides mostly focused on theory, there may have been a few practical examples.  For this part of the tested class, I did very poorly.  Then he switched to a chalk board (at the suggestion of the class).    The following lectures had many more examples and were much easier to follow.  He always made his thoughts known on each part that he wrote and went from step A to step B … to the final step instead of skipping steps.  I ended up doing much better on the test that focused on this material.

Another similarity that I have noticed (although not as noticable) is that the good professors don’t use the microphone that is provided to them.   I have found that the microphone (even for big 400 person lecture halls) often cancels and turns into white noise, especially in the middle of the lecture hall.   The students who attend lecture halls to learn typically sit in the front row and the people who sit in the back often are there just to be present and end up surfing the internet when they could easily sit in the front of the lecture hall if they wanted to learn (there ARE ALWAYS open seats in the front).  I prefer professors who don’t use a microphone and just speak up a little bit (or keep the same level like many professors that speak up AND have the microphone on).  I do understand that there are a few professors who cannot raise their voice (these are very soft spoken), and for these professors, I have found that the mic does help somewhat but they have to speak very quietly with the mic on.

So, you might ask, what made me write a blog like this, I must be mad at someone who can’t teach (*laughs*).   Well, that isn’t the case at all.  A few weeks ago, I was asked to give a 10 minute lecture on what a Java Constructor is.  I knew a little bit about what I said above (I am a certified peer tutor through the CRLA), but I didn’t give it any thought.  I thought that I would do a practical demonstration directly in a Java environment and play with the code until I ran out of time.  I figured that I would have a lot of thoughts to say during the 10 minute lecture.  I also had sample code written because I was afraid that I couldn’t squeeze enough material into that 10 minutes.  I have to admit that I was very wrong at doing this approach!  I should have either taken a piece of chalk or an empty compiler and worked with that.  I now know for the future to do that if ever asked to again.  I also know that I’m very nervous when I get in front of a group of people who I believe are much smarter than I am, and therefore, I’m sure that nervousness also aided in making me not state what exactly was on my mind.

Although I doubt many of my professors and teachers will see this blog, I really hope that someone who educates reads this blog and picks up some tips that I have found can make or break a good lecture on a good topic!

Tags: comprehension, computer, cons, education, lecture, professor, pros, science, teaching, understanding, university
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