Another busy day keeping up with the management issues of the BCRC and intro labs. I updated the MacOS in the BCRC because 10.2.8 came out -- security fixes and a few updates. I updated mozilla while I was at it. I poked at the two marginal computers in the BCRC -- the ones that seem haunted by random kernel panics and core dumps. I worked on a machine in the intro labs which (I think) was actually working OK, but was exhibiting symptoms that had one of the technical staff edgy. This is the one who tries to keep telling himself that "Macs are different, not worse". He was also the one who thought the Department was mostly PC, because most of the computers he had to work on were PCs. He was surprised, and somewhat bemused, to learn that the department is more than 2/3 Macintosh. He never sees the Macs, because they just work.
Buzz and I tried to finish off the 
syllabus for the on-line course we're developing for the science education on-line grant. There is a meeting tomorrow morning. Soon I'm going to have to start learning Prometheus.
Today Randy ran a session for faculty to discuss PRS questions. It's interesting to hear two themes that run through faculty attitudes toward teaching and learning: transmissionism and seeing students as "lazy point-sucking weasels" (as Randy put it in the TA workshop). In this, the first meeting, our goal was to get people to talk and lay the groundwork to begin working toward fundamental issues. Its hard to hear people say things like that and not have a knee jerk response, though. Randy and I discussed how we might try to get faculty to recognize why students might seem lazy. At BioQUEST, they do it by putting faculty in the position of being a student again: they give them a task with an unrealistic deadline and then exercise some kind of arbitrary authority over the faculty (by imposing simplistic evaluative criteria, for example). Within two days, faculty are feeling and thinking like students again. I tried to think of an analogy we might use with the faculty in the PRS workshops. The one I had was to set them the task of walking from one end to the other of Morrill 5 times as practice for "stepping across this line". Randy went one step further and suggested that you make them hold your hand and direct their practice all through the hallways.
A corolary to all of this is the last question I asked in this week's Duck Quiz in my biol597f course. I asked for a brief essay answering the question "How do you respond, when given an abstract thought-question which you are convinced can't be something that will be covered by an exam?"