Steve At the risk of starting a tangent to the irritation of those who prefer to stick to the topic in hand, an embedded comment or two[1]:
[1] I'll probably be told off for not having a verb in the sentence.<g> Chris Mason ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Comstock" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main To: <[email protected]> Sent: Monday, 04 December, 2006 3:13 PM Subject: Re: z/OS 1.8 Features > ... > I spend a lot of time polishing my course materials, even if the vast majority of students won't even notice the nuances. For lectures that involve dates, I usually update the materials to use dates near to when the course is being taught, hoping that the students relate more easily to the details being covered. Maybe I shouldn't do all that, but I can't seem to help myself from trying to create quality materials. While a lot of instructors just lecture from some book they buy off the shelf (or require the students buy off the shelf).[2] This is pretty much what I used to do while still teaching. As many iterations went by, the notes associated with each visual grew and grew but they became a useful record of the evolution of the individual topic. Colleagues thought these notes were somewhat "over the top" and generally they stuck purely to visuals. The reason I liked to "dig deep" was that, as a presenter of the topic, I could feel confident about addressing comments to the visual and, for me, the visual was a reminder of where to start those comments. I hoped to leave the students not with a memory of everything I said but with a memory that something about that topic was said which was detailed in the notes for that lecture: "It's not what you know, it's if you know where to look." Furthermore, I didn't like having to deal with a smart student who also knew a thing or two about individual items who might be able to catch me out. Nevertheless a comment might emerge which indicated I had provided some food for thought and an original thought was bounced back[3]. On one occasion a student did catch me out on something which probably hadn't featured in a "changes this release" list. I was presenting some complex logic concerning how VTAM "negotiated" with the program in the communication controller (NCP or CLDP) over whether or not the NCP needed to be loaded. The comment was "It's more complicated than that ...". I asked the students to chat among themselves while I consulted the manual. I then looked up with a quizzical expression. Noticing their amusement, I explained that I could see what was missing but was having difficulties seeing how the additional logic could be added to my already busy logic diagram[4]. Thankfully that's the only incident of its type I can remember. > There's probably other features there that I don't even use, but this is how I use Acrobat. Since grammar is to the fore at the moment, I can imagine that what happened here is that the original thought was "There's probably other stuff that I don't even use ..." but, by the end of "probably", "other stuff" had been transformed to a more precise "other features". [2] Sometimes the instructor wrote the book. I was reminded of this recently reading of the obituary of my first year Organic Chemistry lecturer in the magazine produced by the department each term and sent to all alumni. The cover of his famous book featured in the obituary. Both book and lectures were excellent. [3] The best example of this I had was the student who appreciated during my SNI Alias presentation that there should be a universal mode table for each SNI-bounded network, a point which hadn't occurred to me, since I had, from the dawn of SNA, created individual mode tables per type of secondary LU device, sometimes with common entry names. [4] APAFOIL, based on SCRIPT/GML, wasn't quite as flexible as the tools you use. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
