I have rediscovered the joys of nethack thanks to nethack-el, a package that allows me to play that insanely addictive RPG from within Emacs buffers. I hear there are even Dvorak bindings for it, which is a very good thing.

I had a wimpy wizard who quite luckily and through no fault of her own acquired a master mind flayer as a pet (tame kitten discovered a polymorph trap). Did Really Well until I died due to some impatient attacks on a queen bee. And it was going so well... <sniff>

Probably shouldn't play until I can afford several seconds per move.

Having Elbereth on a keyboard macro is really, really good.

I'm halfway done checking the second long test in operating systems, and I have a few thoughts about it. As a teacher, I suspect I'm supposed to go along with the official line, but somehow, I feel that something's wrong here.

The test was easy. It was just memorization and regurgitation. Because the different sections covered the same material and the same questions were asked in several ways, you can actually figure out most of the answers based on the questions in other sections.

The hardest part was the modified multiple choice. I don't think that was because of any inherent difficulty in the subject matter, although the analogies were pretty nice. Rather, modified multiple choice was a pain because it devolved into a set of true or false questions where scores were given only for particular combinations.

I believe that tests shouldn't just measure students' test-taking skills. I don't feel comfortable with this particular kind of modified multiple-choice test, although I realize that it forces the students to think about what statements really are true and which ones aren't.

We missed an opportunity to reinforce process simulation, too. My bad. Maybe I should have volunteered for that section of the test.

I don't really know why I'm reflecting on this. Maybe it's because I don't want to just make my students memorize things that aren't personally meaningful to them. I don't want to take points off because it's the bakery algorithm and not the banker's algorithm or things like that. I don't want to just fill their heads with facts that they'll forget or half-remember during standardized examinations like employers' tests or the JITSE.

But I have to teach it that way... <sigh>

<blockquote> The beta of ELIP, the Emacs Learning Instruction Program, is now stable enough for wide release.

ELIP is "flashcards on steroids" and provides learning via

- spaced interval recall (like <nop>SuperMemo) - Leitner "box" method - plain old flashcards

Modes are present for questions and answers in

- simple form - ellipsis form, generated from chosen text material - passage memorization form (i.e., memorize the Gettysburg address).

ELIP installation requires some EMACS 'smarts' and had EDB, the EMACS Database, as a prerequisite. This is all explained in the documentation.

The distribution comes with a small Hawaiian language database, a large Spanish vocabulary database, a large Esperanto vocabulary database, an Esperanto grammar database, and the "I Have a Dream" speech for learning by memorization.

There is a small, low volume mailing list available.

ELIP is found at

http://www.chungkuo.org/elisp/elip.zip

and comments, bug reports, ideas and suggestions are welcome. </blockquote>

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