1) To me, the some of the most interesting moments in the course have occured when several members of the class enter into conversation. The short flurries of dialog often bring a lot of perspectives onto the table simultaneously.

2.1) Lectures - I'm personally a fan of most of the lectures. I'm sometimes frustrated though (by myself as well as the class) when the lecturer asks the class for some input and the class stays stubbornly silent. I say stubborn because I really think that often some members of the class have things they could say, but just don't.



2.2) Guest Lectures - I'm usually a big fan of guest lectures. For another one of my courses, the guest lectures are the best reason to show up to class. However, thus far the guest lectures haven't managed to really capture my attention.



2.3) Practical Sessions - These have been eye-opening and brought context to some of our discussions. While I wish we could get more experiance out of the system using less classtime, I think they have been valuable.



2.4) Small assignments - Mostly, I think these have been good. If only that they force us to think about the class on a regular basis. This is definately an environment where the more we work within the framework of the class, the better it is. Some of the papers have been on the long and dry side but they surely beat reading an engineering text book. Other short assignments have been wonderful to read.


2.5) Efforts to get us involved - I think the class has had every oppurtunity to get involved, but hasn't really gotten into it as much as we could have. I'm not really sure what more you guys could do.


2.6) Use of technologies - I think the use of the WWW in courses is a great thing, hands down I like not having to keep track of paper copies of things. I'm disorganzied and there are a stack of handuots from various classes in a pile on my floor. The Swiki has been an interesting experiment. I think it's worth noting that I have seen any of the students really changing the structure of the Swiki. The main effort has been in getting it do the basics in turning in homework and making decent web pages for projects. However, I think we get a feeling for how cool something like the Swiki would be in an environment where everyone used it. I think it's been much more useful in that way than practically. The question I still have about technologies like the Swiki in a traditional classrom is why would several people decide to carry on a conversation on the Swiki when they can see and talk to the person in the next day or two?


2.7) Peer-to-peer learning - The one strength of the Swiki that most of the class seems to have used at least on occassion. Reading the answers other people have submitted is very useful. It also seems to lay the groundwork for many of the p2p discussons within the classroom.


2.8) Independant reseach - I like the idea behind the self guided research. It has prompted me to read some very interesting material and expand my thinking somewhat. I like it, but I definately wouldn't shed tears if I heard it was not going to be a part of futre classes.



2.9) Projects - I think the projects needed to be started earlier even though people might not have really known enough to understand where to begin. Again, I like the idea behind them, but I'm interested to see how they turn out.

3) No midstream corrections are obvious to me. Perhaps I'll have more to say at the end of the semester.

4) I'm getting tired, so I'll try and be brief. This class has not been my highest priority but it has been the one I look forward to. As one of my high school teachers said "you put out the fires closest to your ass." I feel I've got lots of fires all around me. When I've had the chance, I've put solid amounts of work into the reading, thinking about, and answering the short homeworks. Sometimes, they are just one more thing on the long list of deadlines and I do the work which I can afford to do. This sometimes turns into a fairly low effort performance. Occasionally some work is very interetsing and I do a better job than normal. Most of the time I think I'm somewhere in between. Not just scraping by but also not investigating many extra sources and contributing back to the Swiki.