Being a nice reviewer

Even though you feel obliged to reject the paper you are reviewing, you still can
1. Encourage the author to re-submit it as a poster and give them the chances to do so.
2. Say it is a novel and interesting idea although there remain serious flaws in the paper.
3. Extend an invitation of redirecting the submission to a parallel workshop if you find value content in the paper.
4. Insightfully tell the authors where the specific problems are and how to improve the paper like an expert.
5. Don't reject paper for tiny flaws, marginal issues. You can always find fault somewhere.

On the positive side

It always lets us feel so good when the paper is accepted for publication somewhere. However, reject does not always have to be bad.

Oftentimes, we receive insightful and high quality comments from anonymous reviewers.
Has it come to you what you can do in return to improve the paper and more importantly improve your academic accomplishments at large?

This is something you may want to do after your did a hard work writing a paper and received response of it.

You try your best to be careful and comprehensive in making out something
academic. In academia, you are evaluated by what you think and what
you write. Whether you will stay academic after you get the master
degree, enjoy or at least try to experience the academic lifestyle. I
encourage you to act more like a young scholar; it may be a chance of
your lifetime no matter what.

We all need to stop the habit of writing casually. Improve our
thinking a little bit every time from quality feedback of internationally established scholars.

The following quote applies to us. It's not whether you get knocked down. It's whether you get up again.

An inspiring talk by tom reeves

I was in a talk by Tom Reeves yesterday which I found inspiring and interesting. In essence, we need to care more about our students who are born in a net age. If we know little about their profiles, we will not be successful teachers. When the rewards only go to excellence in research and completely ignore teaching, we, as teachers, are faced with tough situations but the dichotomy is not necessary to be the only choice.

Some of the references given out during his talk.

• Me generation by Jean Twenge.
• Strapped by Tamara Draut. Excerpts from Introduction of the book.
• Authentic learning (research project of Dr Jan Herrington, University of Wollongong, Professor Ron Oliver, Edith Cowan University)
• Declining by Degrees (DVD)
• DBR at UGA
• Tom Reeves Personal Website
  

Difference between a loser and a winner

When you work for a company, it's a bad attitude to tell people you did nothing there. It is perfectly OK that sometimes we could not make progress on our tasks. You could just tell people your plan to catch it up, and most importantly show you do care. If you don't care your responsibility, people will not care you, either.

The real difference between a loser and a winner is not who is smarter or nobler. It's your attitude that makes the difference.

So it's the attitude that keeps winners winning and losers losing.

Self Motto

Be careful what you write. It is a shadow of the real you.

Web 2.0 for NPO (Nonprofit organization)

Web 2.0 is absolutely a trend that NPO should pursue.

I have a study as posted in the following.

http://minstral.blogspot.com/2006/10/web-20.html

Web 2.0 also has some problems that people start to notice. First of all, sharing is limited and diverse.
Various tools exist: Blogs, Flickr, BT, …. It is not uncommon

that one has to combine several services in order to make things done.

For example, save the documents in Google Docs, store the photos on Clickr,

and write blogs on SixApart.
Second, existing Web 2.0 service providers give limited storage and functions.

There is no roadmap about the new features people

are looking for. Change of the platform is not straightforward, either. For example,

people better not decide to move from Blogger to Xuite, because there is no import

function.

Nonetheless, I think one can still leverage the existing nice services such as Flickr, Google Docs, and Blogger that

are already popular. These services seem generic and have uses in many ways.

As to the mission critical applications that NPO want to build, Web 2.0 essentials can be built into these systems

from scratch. For example, we can do AJAX programming to make the GUI more usable and friendly.

We can also let users contribute and share their data, and even enable them to mash services up, just to name a few.

A far dream may be a Web 2.0 platform that NPO can host their mission critical applications.

In that case, all they need is learn how to use the systems without the bothering IT maintenance problems.

How blogs are Changing the Way Teachers talk with their Students

One of the teaching challenges in computer-based laboratory is tracking student progress and giving assistance on an individual basis in the lab classroom. Designing specific systems to serve this purpose can be tedious and take great efforts. In addition, traditional web-based tools that help administer a course often store student works in a class-centric fashion. Once the class is closed, student materials may not be accessible to the students themselves any more.

Blogs have been used on campus for vastly diverse purposes. They are often seen as web publishing tools and social networking vehicles. Postings, tracebacks, and comments in the blog computing model usually happen without timelines in mind. Blogs interact with each other in a loosely coupled fashion as relations among blogs are usually nothing more than URL links or RSS subscriptions.

As a solution to the teaching challenge that the author has been wrestling with for years, blogs have been used in a novel fashion for three consecutive semesters at two hands-on computer lab classes, namely Java and Internet Applications, respectively. Our approach sees blogs from a more responsive point of view, and has them serve as catalysts for in-classroom student-instructor interactions.

First of all, the instructor creates a blog for the lab class at the outset. Every student of the class is required to create a blog for the lab when the semester begins. Instructor blogs are for posting lab materials in the curriculum and making announcements to the class. So they deliver lab sheets and hand-outs in electronic version. When finishing a lab, students are asked to submit their results at their own blogs and make a notice by placing a link at the instructor's blog right under the lab. Pursuing the links and checking out students' blogs, the instructor can grasp better immediate understanding of student progress such as how many have finished labs, how good the quality of the results is and what problems may have occurred. The blog is so responsive that instructors can make quick judgments on which students to walk by and initiate further interactions with. Through blogs, this can be done without students leaving their seats or even raising their hands, reducing interferences to others who may be still busy working on the lab. Reading the student blogs, the instructor has better chances to get better prepared before approaching them.

In this study, student feedback is collected and behavior patterns analyzed. Using blogs is found to simplify the tasks of reducing piracy. The tactics to prevent students from pirating in our study is by time stamping the lab works and making them public on the web as soon as possible. Blogs by design serve such a purpose. Anyone that pirates risks being caught by the instructor as well as virtually every other student in the class. We also have success with seeing students learning from peers through blogs. Traditionally, students turn in their works to instructors and have no easy way to learn how their peers achieve on the same assignments. By browsing the comments made by instructors on students’ blogs and the selected peer works, students have better chances to stimulate new ideas to be different from each other. The study shows students who took the lab courses are satisfied with turning in lab results through blog posting, getting instructor's walk-by interactions, piracy reduction, and learning from peers.

Keywords: Teaching with Technology, Blog.