At 7:08 pm -0400 8/10/01, Brian Carnell wrote: >Ref: http://www.smeed.org/1582 > >Duncan wrote:

[snip]

>When I was in college, and from my wife's experiences teaching, only >a small percentage of students are genuinely interested in the >subject matter.

I would agree with that. Several years ago we surveyed the incoming first year intake and one of the questions we asked was along the lines of "how interested are you in Computer Science?". Fully 25% of the students ticked the "No interest" option. I find that scary and if it's typical across disciplines may explain the fairly high drop-out rates we see.

If it were not for those genuinely interested students I would find my job pretty demoralising. So far it seems that I have two keen students - which works out at about 1.5% ;-)

> >I don't know how things work over there, but we have a very bizarre >phenomenon in the United States wherein at the conclusion of a >semester, many students sell back their textbooks in order to get >back a small percentage of what they originally paid.

I believe most students hold on to their textbooks over here. But there is a vibrant second-hand market for textbooks too. Like you I find it bizarre but given the financial costs of being a student I can appreciate their need.

[snip]

>As for knowledge management, one of the first things I thought about >Conversant is how well it would work in an educational context. I >know our University has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on >much less capable software (in fact at this very moment most classes >are still using a proprietary message board system, written >specifically for our University, that runs on a VAX mainframe).

I agree entirely. I would have hated to have coordinated http://www.arspentia.org without Conversant. But I learnt a few lessons and if I use Conversant again this year I'll make some changes. There is no doubt at all in my mind that Conversant is much more capable than most things purporting to be a CMS.

Cheers,

Duncan