Diners were Ken Bube, John Sullivan, Yu Yuan, Selim Tuncel, Tom Duchamp and
Ginger Warfield (faculty) and Davis Doherty, Ilgar Eroglu, Juliet Anderson,
Qiuying Lin (graduate students).
This was a thoroughly pleasant evening and mellow conversation. No burning
issues frizzled the edges of the pud thai or the kom kha ga, but a lot of
information flowed gently back and forth, and I was reminded that the initial
idea of these dinners was simply to increase the communications between faculty
and students. In the process we unearthed a number of rough patches and worked
over the years on smoothing them. Perhaps there currently really aren't major
rough patches, in which case our (quite attractive!) mandate is simply to keep
the lines of communication open so that there continue not to be.
One issue did occupy us for quite a while and will probably reappear in various
guises. Davis brought up the fact that there exists a computer program which
will generate calculus problems for students and then give them instant feedback
on their answers. This has been used for a number of years at the University of
Rochester, and apparently has been receiving rave reviews all round. A key
element, at least as far as I was concerned, is that it makes no pretense of
replacing all homework grading. What it does is take care of the relatively
mechanical problems and free up grader time for the non-routine ones. Given that
the current shortage of grader time around here is resulting in those problems
never being corrected at all (well, almost never) I did a fairly rapid
turnaround about the program. I think a number of us wound up feeling it was
well worth exploring.
Along the way, this brought up various high-tech propositions, fictional or
otherwise. Tom and Selim described something that would certainly have sounded
fictional not all that long ago, but apparently isn't -- a proposed computer
"notebook" on which one can scribble "pages" of notes which will look just like
the pages of notes one scribbles on paper, except that they will all live in the
computer itself. Meanwhile Ken and I contemplated the trend towards a holograph
professor delivering a spirited lecture to a classroom of holograph students --
or perhaps merely to computers, sitting there taking notes on their own. We
fondly hope that particular image was a fictional one.