I recently completed the first term test for the course and I feel so good about it! The way that this course is structured works perfectly for me and is really set out in a way that is going to help me do very well. I know that a lot of people hate quizzes that occur as frequently as ours, but I love them! They are never difficult, but simply knowing that they exist forces me to keep up with the material and study what we have learned from week to week. Since I study a little bit every week, it makes things a lot more manageable when it comes time to study for a test. Since I have already done the bulk of the work, some review about the history of computing, and reinforcing my understanding of how to do math in binary* was all I needed to do in order to prepare for the test. Normally if I hadn't studied and crammed my brain full of knowledge in the 24 hours leading up to the test I would have been FREAKING OUT, but not this time! This time I was well prepared and not stressed at all! All that being said, I don't have my mark yet so hopefully I won't have to eat crow upon receiving it.
Soon we will have to complete the second part of our Wikipedia assignment which involves learning the ways of the Wiki community. I'm not sure how I feel about this assignment yet in terms of how interested I am in completing it, but being an avid Wiki user I feel as though this assignment will certainly help me better appreciate the time and effort that complete strangers put in to helping me better understand the extremely complex genes and proteins I find myself investigating for other courses. For the most part I have chosen to help create better references in my chosen articles. Many a time I have been told by some academic authority not to trust anything I read on Wiki. I feel as though it doesn't have to be this way, and an easy way to fix that is by adding references. I would much rather use Wiki as a way of finding various scientific papers that I need to refer to than searching the U of T libraries website for hours on end. Anyway, a slight digression, but I am more than happy to contribute to a website that I greatly appreciate. Again, I am very fond of the way that this project has been broken down into three parts. It makes it much more manageable and keeps me on top of the things that I am doing. Perhaps I should be setting out a structure on my own for my other courses and projects...
* Math in binary is awesome! I loved learning this, though no matter how hard I wrack my brain I can't quite put a finger on why.
My hope with the quizzes --- that they would act as very gentle coercion to keep up with course work --- seems to work in your case. You also seem to have a pretty good attitude.
ReplyDeleteThere was a paper in Nature a few years back showing that articles in Wikipedia on science topics were, roughly, as reliable as the Encylopedia Britannica --- and more up-to-date. I think that you should use it the way you would use a review article: get an overview and then move on to the references.