I’m teaching the course ‘Information Extraction Algorithms’ (well, pure data mining in practice) at the post-graduate program ’Applied Mathematical Sciences’ of NTUA’s School of Applied Mathematics and Physics.
I’m strongly considering the idea of employing a blog to serve at the core of the learning process. The class is held at a pc-lab, so it came somehow natural to me to create a blog where I admin and all students author.
The target? Except from posting lecture notes and publicizing assignments or announcements, I feel that a blog could evolve as the greatest of tools to foster conversation among students and finally enable a really educative experience, powered by the students themselves. The plan is to accept assignments by public posts, instead of filing them out of sight, and motivate each student to comment on the works of others, while learning by the comments received by herself. The concept looks simple and clear, however I have yet to find any similar references (any links would be really appreciated!). Let’s see how it all goes.
I also plan to stream live the whole course (it’s all in greek, though, apologies), while I’m looking for a wiki wordpress plugin to enable collaborative notes’ keeping during the lectures (any ideas?).
The feedback during the introductory lecture today, while we were creating the wordpress blog on the fly and assigning author rights to all students, was really hopeful: “It’s cool, it looks like facebook…”
cross-posted from a Course by Blog