Our Course, Web 2.0, and Actual Participation Effort in it

Since we are studying the essence and use of information systems in various environments – this course designed to be an example of such system itself, offering students practical experience in such systems in modern online collaborative situations. The multiple feedbacks (remember systems) in my replies, emails, grades, blog posts, as well as other students’ reviews and comments, as well as error messages when you do something wrong in your labs – all serves the purpose of correcting and improving the functionality of this Learning/Training System. In addition you learn to create a variety of small information systems tied up in a bigger conglomerate in your blogs, that include (in addition to your Moodle experience) various cloud services (like zoho), external apps (that are served into your blogs – there was an assignment on doing this), your own models and programs done in spreadsheet and database tools.

But what is important to understand in this Web 2.0 style interactions and user-created content (your research posts) that the effectiveness of such systems is based NOT ONLY on technical implementation of eth multitude of information flows and corrective feedbacks but also on participants’ desire and ability of READING and USING them in a timely fashion (which some students failed to demonstrate). There still is some time left to change this pattern which is seen (in the context of this course) not just as lack of online attendance (checking the changes in the system requiring individual responses), not just as lack of effort (in acting on these feedbacks) but as a failure in understanding of how such systems work and a failure in the meta-lab work and experience which is the PROPER participation in this course-as-a-platform for learning advances.

I advise the students to look at the course, understand its design and work again from the point of view of the newly acquired IS-understanding, which will greatly increase the learning effect for the time spent (bigger bang for the buck J )