ILW review

I was working at a University in France last week (independent learning week for webauh/d students) as part of an exchange programme. It's always interesting to learn about another culture in order to better understand your own. Undergraduate students in France get many more hours of class contact than their equivalents in the UK (roughly twice as many hours of lectures and practicals per week). A consequence of this is that UK students have more time for independent learning; French students are more likely to be able to get by if they do little more than attend their classes and complete the associated practical exercises. Whatever you think of this difference it remains a fact that UK students are expected to take more personal responsibility for their own learning and to do relevant reading and practical work in between weekly lectures and tutorials. Some people claim that developing this personal responsibility is a good thing; others might say that UK students get short-changed in comparison with their French neighbours. It all depends on your understanding of learning and teaching at University level.

Anyway, getting back to ILW, there were some excellent contributions from a few students; so while the quality of the contributions was good, the quantity of contributions left a lot to be desired. The contributions ranged from some visionary, idealistic contributions (thanks Adam) to some highly practical contributions that assessed issues such as maintenance of websites, bandwidth used, and various aspects of web usability. As somebody who recently bought a 3G modem so that I can connect anywhere I can get signal I've become a lot more sensitive to websites that insist on dumping a lot of material that I don't wish to see (adverts, photos, videos, etc) into my monthly allowance. I was impressed by some quite mature contributions that put emphasis on speed of loading, security, accessibility and usability. Thanks to all those students for their excellent points. Daniel's contribution about google chrome was thought provoking, and a good reminder that the world of the web is still developing and still has a long way to go; today's technology will seem awfully old fashioned by the time you graduate! We learn and develop by building on the past (apart from a few innovators who have the vision and confidence to implement a completely new idea) and so it's important to develop a good understanding of how things work today in order to build future applications and technologies on this foundation. I think one of the benefits of going to University is that you get the opportunity to see beyond current technologies and get the chance to think about what is possible, and what technologies people may be using in a few year's time. Some of your contributions were in this forward-looking spirit (thanks to several of you, and in particular UoP_prm70190), although quite a few clearly could not see beyond current technologies and seemed to assume that what we have today is at some sort of pinnacle, rather than on a rising development path.

If I wanted to be charitable I could content myself by saying that the majority of you perhaps enjoyed reading the posts on the wiki over at freerangelearning, but were perhaps too shy to believe you might make a worthwhile contribution of your own; or would it be more realistic to suppose that most students do nothing outside the classes they attend? If the latter scenario is true the whole premise of independent learning is flawed and you guys would be better off studying in France!

Independent Learning Week

ILW got off to a slow start for me because on Monday I wasn't able to connect to the wikispaces site due to a technical problem, and on Tuesday I was busy all day. I'm working in France this week; now I have the proxy server correctly configured I am able to connect to wikispaces, and having done so I'm feeling a bit underwhelmed by the engagement so far.

I was worried that a group of over 200 people might produce so many responses we would have difficulty organising it all. As there are so few responses I'd like to try to understand why ... your comments on this post will be illuminating.