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.