Communications

Some of the communications options that you have will open your discussion up to the entire class. Others will limit your discussion to the instructor or to your team on a group assignment.

In general, any conversation in which you discuss all or part of your solution to an individual assignment, even if you are only speculating on possible solutions, should be limited to you and the instructor. Sharing such information with other students is a violation of the course’s policy on Academic Honesty.

Use primarily email for those kinds of questions or to schedule office hours when needed.

Similarly, questions about your own grade on an assignment should be limited to a private communication with the instructor. In fact, if you were to try to ask such a question in a public forum, ODU privacy policies would prohibit the instructor from replying.

2.2 Etiquette in Email and Other Written Communications

Students using email or other online media are expected to conform to the norms for civility and respect for ones’ classmates and instructors that are expected to all on-campus speech and writing.

Students are also expected to conform to the norms of “netiquette”, for example, RFC 1855: Netiquette Guidelines . In particular:
- Emotions are often hard to convey and easy to misunderstand in written text. Smileys and other emoticons can help (but don’t assume that attaching a :-) to an insult will make everything OK with the people reading your post.).
  
  DON’T WRITE IN ALL CAPITALS or in all bold or, even worse, IN ALL BOLD CAPITALS. This is considered to be shouting, and most people don’t like to be shouted at, whether in real life or on-line.
- “Shooting the messenger” is seldom a good idea. In general, assume that people who take the time to reply to your posts are honestly trying to help. Getting mad at them and flaming back is counter-productive if you really want people to help you.
  
  Replies to posts will often be short and to the point simply because the responder has limited time. Don’t mistake terseness for rudeness.
  
  Many people who post questions and requests for help may have made very basic mistakes. If you omit the details of everything you thought of and checked before making your post, don’t be insulted if someone replies with a very basic suggestion or a link to something that you have already read.

3 Asking Good Questions

Whether posted in Teams or sent via email, a question is the beginning of a dialog. A well-prepared question will get you an informative answer quickly. A poorly-prepared one may get you irrelevant answers or may require several rounds of back-and-forth dialog, delaying your eventual answer by many hours or even days.

So it’s in your own self-interest to ask your question in a way that gets you the answer you need as quickly as possible.

3.1 Identification

Who are you? : If you are sending me email, make sure your course login name or your real name appears somewhere in the message. I hate getting mail from partyAnimal@hotmail.com saying “Why did I get such a low grade on question 5?” when I have no idea who this person is!

What course is this? : Again, if you are sending me a question via email, please remember to state which course you are asking about. I teach multiple courses most semesters, and having to go look up your name to see which of my courses you are talking about is annoying.

For email, please put the course number (CS361) in the subject line. I configure my email reader to flag such messages for priority handling, giving you less chance of being lost amid the daily flood of spam. But “CS361” should not be, by itself, the entirety of your subject line.

3.2 Use a Clear and Precise Subject Header.

Do put “CS361” in your subject line. Do not make “CS361” the entire subject line.

Empty and short subject lines are also more likely to get tossed by automatic spam filters.

Using the same subject line for every email in the entire semester makes it hard to refer back to previous messages.

Every semester, I get a handful of students who use one subject line for every email in the entire course. Then they get annoyed with me when I assume that their latest email is a followup to the previous one talking about, for example, assignment 4, when they have already moved on to assignment 5.

3.3 You Have to Give Information to Get Information

When you ask a question, you usually want an appropriate answer that will let you get past whatever difficulty you are having. So that answer needs to be relevant to your particular difficulty and tailored to your understanding of the course material.

3.3.1 What’s the Problem?

I’m not psychic.

If you send me an email consisting of nothing more than “I’m stuck on this assignment.”, there’s really no way I can give you the kind of answer you are hoping for. You need to tell me:

Which assignment?
What part of the assignment are you stuck on?
What have you tried so far? (Be specific. If you’ve tried lots of things, tell me about your best attempt so far.)
What happened when you tried it?

If you have an issue with a webpage, tell me the URL. If a link is broken, tell me the URL of the page containing the link and describe the location of the link. Don’t just tell me “the link to assignment 2 is broken”. I probably have a dozen different links to that assignment in different pages.

3.3.2 What’s Your Environment?

Particularly when you are working on assignments, you may be working directly on your own PC or working remotely, using your own PC to control a remote Linux server or a Virtual (Windows) PC from over the network. Some of you will be using Windows PCs to do this, some will use Apple OS/X, and a few may use Linux boxes. Each of these operating systems comes in different versions. Furthermore, you will often have multiple choices as to what software you are using to communicate between your PC and the remote Linux server.

It is therefore often important that you tell me:

What is the operating system of the PC that you are working on?
Which remote machine, if any, were you connected to?
- What software are you using to connect the two?

Again, if you don’t tell me those things, I’m just going to have to ask for that information, delaying the process of getting you the answer you want.

3.4 Thou Shalt Not Paraphrase

There’s nothing more frustrating than getting a question like

“When I try to compile my solution to the first assignment, I get an error message. What’s wrong?”

Grrr. What was the exact text of the error message? Was this on a Linux, Mac, or a Windows machine? What compiler were you using? What compiler options did you set? What did the code look like that was flagged by the message?

No, I’m not kidding. I get messages like this all the time. And it wastes my time as a question answerer to have to prompt for all the necessary information. It also means a significant delay to the student in getting an answer, because we have to go through multiple exchanges of messages before I even understand the question.

The single most important thing you can do to speed answers to your questions is to be specific. I’m not psychic. I can only respond to the information you provide to me.

Never, ever paraphrase an error message (“I got a message that said something about a bad type.”)

Never, ever paraphrase a command that you typed in that gave unexpected results (“I tried lots of different compilation options but none of them worked.”, or, my personal favorite, “I tried everything.”)

Never, ever paraphrase your source code (“I tried adding a loop, but it didn’t help.”)

Never, ever paraphrase your test data (“My program works perfectly when I run it.”)

All of the above are real quotes. And they are not at all rare.

The problem with all of these is that they omit the details that would let me diagnose the problem.

3.5 “Copy and Paste” is Your Friend!

To copy text from an xterm, or from a Linux or OS/X terminal, just left-click and drag your mouse across text to select it. To copy text from Windows CMD terminals, left-click and drag your mouse across the text, then click on the icon in the upper-left to drop down the menu and use the Edit menu item.

Your selected text is automatically copied to the clipboard, and you can paste it into an e-mail message or Forum post.

To paste text into one of these programs, try:

clicking the middle mouse button, if you have one.
- The scroll wheel on many mice fills in for a middle mouse button.
- Some of these programs will allow you to simulate a middle click if you click both the left and right mouse buttons simultaneously.
On Windows, hold the shift key and type the “Insert” button. (Shift-Insert is less known, but more widely available than Ctrl-v.)

And it’s not all that hard to provide those details. Error messages can be copied and pasted into your message. The commands you typed and the responses you received can be copied-and-pasted from your ssh/xterm session into your message. Your source code can be copied-and-pasted or attached to the message.

3.6 No Screenshots

Most of the time, the information you need to show me about the problems you are encountering will be plain text.

Please don’t send me screen shots…

Screenshots are often hard to read and often do not allow me to make the fine distinctions I need to tell what is going on. Keep in mind that raster graphics formats (gif, jpg, png, etc.) often look very different when rendered on screens with different resolutions, or when rendered by different email programs.

Screenshots also slow down or complicate my responses, because if I can’t copy-and-paste text from your message, I need to be much more indirect about describing where problems are occurring or what changes might be necessary.

…unless you absolutely, positively, need to show me graphics.

Try to copy just the relevant text first. But if that doesn’t work, take a screenshot, but do it correctly.

Use your operating system’s screenshot facility. If you don’t know what that is, look it up!
- Do not snap pictures of the screen with your phone.
  Sorry, but those are almost always unreadable.
Take a shot of just the portion of the screen involved. Don’t grab a picture of your whole screen if you want my attention to focus on a few square inches.

3.7 If I Ask You a Question, Answer It

I often respond to a student’s question with further questions of my own.

Teachers since Socrates have always done this, and students have always been annoyed at it. But who are we to argue with history?

Sometimes I do this to get more info I need. Sometimes I do this to guide the student towards an answer I think they should be able to find for themselves.

It’s surprising how often students ignore my questions and either never respond at all, respond as if my questions were rhetorical, or, if I have asked 2 or 3 questions, pick the one that’s easiest to answer and ignore the rest.

This pretty much guarantees that the dialog will grind to a halt as I wind up repeating myself, asking the same questions as before, and some students go right on ignoring my questions, …

1 : Yes, I realize that many students would prefer Discord rather than MS Teams. However, Discord is not FERPA compliant, so I can’t use it as an official component of a course at ODU.