Hi, Some thoughts below:
--- On Fri, Jun 18, 2010 at 3:20 PM, Yuvi Panda <yuvipa...@gmail.com> wrote: | As a student who sees this happen first hand, I'm incredibly worried | as well. What will happen is, ofcourse, staff will google to find | solutions to exercises, print them out, xerox them and give them off | to students to copy. \-- Or, they might get the answers through known people, and repeat the same questions at every test. --- | Students will type in the xeroxed notes, make | tons of spelling mistakes - which the staff will have no idea how to | fix. Average impact of this course on the average student will not be | much. \-- This does happen with other semester papers too, so it isn't much different anyway. For imparting knowledge, the following three have to be inline: content -- presentation -- audience The fourth dimension is time. Content relevant to the topic of discussion is essential. The way it is presented to the audience is also important. People like a subject or topic, because, they like the way the author has written the material (flow of content) or the way it has been presented to them. The audience should also be interested in listening to the content. Forcing participants to attend F/OSS sessions thus doesn't work. And if either one of these is not relevant to context, it isn't fruitful at all. While, I am happy that students are asking questions, and asking them openly in a public mailing list, it is also important to see how any problems that arise (content, presentation, individual, institute) can be solved. After all, our hacker culture aims at solving problems and finding elegant, beautiful answers. If one feels that content needs work, submitting suggestions to this list is very helpful, and it can be reviewed and suggested to the concerned. If the way things are presented at your Institute isn't to your satisfactory level, then you can ask this list for more help, or suggestions for more material. As much as people can voluntarily help, we also need to hear about your classmates (audience) participation, and feedback, and whether they have really understood the significance and importance of the subject, just as you have been participating in the list. While we don't expect you to change the way faculty teach in the Institute, it is important for you to gain as much knowledge as possible during your college years, given the opportunity to do so. It would be great, if you could also share your know-how, whatever you have learnt from participation here or other user groups to your classmates (and ask them to join such groups as well), so they benefit from the same, as how we have over the years -- after all we believe that knowledge is power, and we like to share, impart the same to others. SK -- Shakthi Kannan http://www.shakthimaan.com _______________________________________________ ILUGC Mailing List: http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc
