Wednesday 28 February 2007 at 3:42 pm
Full Time Equivalent (FTE) is a nice, ambiguous method to measure how much a person works. An FTE of 1.0 is full time. This system tends to be used for people who are paid by salary instead of hourly. The other component is the rate the employee is paid. My Teaching Assistant position is an FTE of .3 with a rate of $28,000 per school year. The translation: I am expected to put out 30% of the work of someone who would be full time. Hence I will only be paid 30% of the $28,000. My job as a computer lab attendant, while hourly, still imposes an FTE value based off a 40 hour work week. I work 19 hours a week as an attendant hence my FTE score for that job is about .47.
I applied to be a Mentor for the University Studies program next term. This is the same program I participated in a year ago at a local high school. Yesterday I received an email from the mentor coordinator asking if I was interested in starting this upcoming Spring term. Of course I was beside myself with glee. On top of that I would be grossing almost $2000 a month, participate in a program I enjoy, and have a healthy balance of free time to boot.
In an exchange of emails with the coordinator I came to discover that all grad students are limited to a .49 FTE total when it comes to university employment. Apparently the justification is it prevents departments from outsourcing work that should be done by faculty to grad students which can be paid less. I had no idea there was this limit, hence why I am at .8 FTE this term between lab and teacher assistance. I also technically can't be a TA and a Mentor for that will put me over the .49 limit at .55 FTE. The coordinator is investigating ways to reduce my mentor FTE score. FTE scores are fuzzy numbers to begin with so she believes it is very possible I can both TA and Mentor. It is also dumbfounding how being a lab attendant would contribute to this penalty.
Regardless what happens, my hands are tied. I will only be able to have two jobs through the university and make just enough to cover the bills. I get old, move up in higher education further than many do and I am treated like a child. It is high school all over again. It just pisses me off.
Wednesday 21 February 2007 at 11:16 am
Derek last night: "I wonder if British people moan with an accent."
Today a bunch of people walked by my office saying how teachers don't like how they write. My silent response to them: "Maybe that is because you suck at it!"
Tuesday 20 February 2007 at 01:00 am
It is that time of the term where I must register for next term. I can take any two science classes and here are the ones I am interested in:
- Biology 526: Evolution; Exactly as it sounds; MWF 10:15 - 11:20
- Env Science 510: Roadside Ecology; How roadways affect local ecologies; TR 12:00 - 13:50
- Geology 556: Astrogeology; Study of the geologic evolution of the planet with summer observations (in an observatory?) or lab work during the school year; MWF 10:15 - 11:20
- Geology 558: Astrobiology; Study of origin of life on Earth and possibility of life elsewhere; TR 12:00 - 13:50
- Geology 538: Scanning Electron Microscopy for the Biogeosciences; I get to learn how to and use an electron microscope; TR 14:00 - 15:50
The drawbacks? I can't take Evolution and Astrobiology due to time conflicts and I would like to be able to have all my classes on MWF or TR. They all sound like fun except the Roadside Ecology. I should take some environmental science courses. My plan is to be a middle school science teacher and environmental science is one of the major subjects taught in that age bracket. Env Sci is actually excellent because it can tie all the different realms of science (geology, chemistry, biology, climatology) together into one superstructure of knowledge. Such unification is something I totally dig dude. I'll figure something out.
Tuesday 13 February 2007 at 8:55 pm
Source
The war in Iraq is costing US taxpayers $145 billion dollars this year. How else can we spend this kind of money?
- Give every American about $500
- Free health insurance for every uninsured family: $124 billion
- Free gas every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday all year long: $116 billion
- Free tuition, room and board for every student enrolled in a public university or college: $115 billion
- Free laptop for every student from Kindergarten to Graduate school: $86 billion
- Convert every registered car to run on ethanol: $68 billion
- Primary education for every child on Earth: $30 billion
- Universal access to clean water and sanitation for everyone on Earth: $21 billion
- End hunger in America: $7 billion
Budget of the Department of Defense: $481 billion
God bless America.
Tuesday 13 February 2007 at 12:45 pm
Happy (belated) Birthday Charles Darwin!
Monday 12 February 2007 at 8:36 pm
I realized a big mistake in my grading method right when I am about halfway through a pile of pop quizzes for the Astronomy class I am TA ing for. I created a quick little rubric. Mark a point of for the wrong answer, a point for the wrong conversion, a point for not labeling their units. Yet if they got the right answer I automatically gave them the full 10 points even if they didn't label their units. Oops.
Thursday 08 February 2007 at 6:35 pm
As some of you may know, I am perusing my Masters Degree in Science Education. I want to investigate the effectiveness of games in science education. I feel that at this point I am ready to start writing about my Thesis.
Individuals, many from the gaming industry, are making claims that games can be educational. There are arguments which are theoretically convincing. I do not trust theories in social science that are not based on empirical data. So far all of the studies involving games do not use a control group. It is not good science to claim that the improvement can be attributed to the games themselves until it can be proven that the improvement was not from students simply having additional instruction. For the past few months I have been struggling on what I should do for my research project.
On Wednesday when we were discussing our first research proposal drafts in class Bill, the department head, suggested that I frame the question in terms of the claims being made by proponents of games in education. This subtle suggestion was exactly what I needed to start development. Science is largely moved forward by proving knowledge claims false. The next step will be to find various claims about what games can do in education and design a test that will attempt to prove it false. How to test this became my next problem. Lucky for me I have an idea on how to go about this.
When I am driving or standing on the MAX I often have internal conversations. Sometimes with myself, sometimes with other people. I suppose this indicates a certain level of insanity that may keep me from the military if needed. In this case I think it resulted from the fact that I only slept for about 90 minutes last night. Today is one of my 13 hour days and I am sure I am quite delusional at this point. I digress. This morning as I was standing on the crowded MAX I was having an internal conversation with Will Wright. From this imaginary conversation I figured out a possible method to test how effective games are and/or if some of these knowledge claims do in fact hold.
Teachers, or a group of them, from a middle to undergraduate group, will select a good number of students who are under-performing in a specific content area based upon some specific criteria. These students will either randomly or random-proportionally be divided into three groups. All groups will be pretested and protested. Group 1 will be the control group. They will not receive any additional instruction. Group 2 will receive some kind of established traditional method of instruction and tutoring. Group 3 will participate in a game centric method of learning.
Because the pretest and posttest will be the same there is some risk of a testing effect. What is important is not total score, but the ratio of change between the three groups. I think it will be important that the treatment for group 2 will be constructivist based so that it is a similar type of instruction. There are three elements I could intentionally measure: student attitudes about science, knowledge, and performance. What will be tested will depend on what claim I am testing. This is all I have at this point.
Friday 02 February 2007 at 12:56 am
The installation of Windows on my old computer was at the end of its lifespan. It was time to reinstall windows anyways, I just did it on something a bit newer. There really isn't anything wrong with my old system. It still plays most the games I want to play. My Dad will enjoy it very much when I give it to him. I took photos of the hardware installation which I talked about in a previous post. Now I am going to talk about the software I installed.
Here is the selection of free (as in beer) software for Windows that I am using to make my new computer more comfortable.
- Wallpaper: Desktop Earth - A wallpaper generation software that uses NASA's Blue Marble images and recent cloud cover data to create real time wallpaper.
- Antivirus: AVG Free
- Browser: Firefox with Blue Ice theme and a slew of extensions
- Email Client: Thunderbird with YPop to download my yahoo email
- IM: Trillian, X-Chat, Xfire - Everything, IRC chat network, and in game instant messaging, in that order.
- Video: VLC - Very versatile and powerful video player. It can even function as a streaming server.
- Music: Songbird - The Firefox of music players. Literally; Songbird is based on Firefox code. While this product is in "Developer Preview" stages, I am liking it far more than iTunes. The interface is even more intuitive than Apple's product. When this becomes closer to a more public version, the number of extensions will probably erace any need I have for the versatility of Winamp's plugins.
- 3D Work: Blender - Another versatile and powerful 3D modeler, animation, rendering, game engine, even a video editor. Unlike many other combination projects this one does most of them well.
- PDF Reader: Foxit - A lightweight pdf document reader. In consumes a fraction of the resources that Adobe's reader does and boots up in fraction of the time as well.
- Office:
- OpenOffice - An alternative to Microsoft Office. It can read and write MS Office documents. Contains spreadsheet, document, presentation, vector graphics, formula editor, and database management. While not as robust as MS product, it has the features which most people use 90% of the time. It does consume a bit of computing power so I may look at AbiWord as a possible writing software.
- MikTeX - A Windows implementation of LaTeX which I will be using to write my thesis.
- Helper: Launchy - A nifty little program which can launch programs and documents with just a few keystrokes.
Once I get my Windows environment how I like I will then set up my Linux work environment where I will work on my Thesis and research.
