Internet Technology assignments are online
As some of you might already know, last semester I have taught a class, called Internet Technology, at University of Lugano (USI). This has been a great chance not only to teach students something I was very passionate about (I have been lucky enough to be allowed to choose the topic and the contents of the class, so I basically put everything I liked inside it), but also to make clear in my mind some concepts and links about Internet in general plus Web 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, and following ones ;-).
At the end of the course, I decided not to evaluate my students with a classical exam. I thought that for a subject that evolves so quickly it would have not been useful to ask for notions that will become outdated, or in the worst case false, in few months. I rather wanted to be sure they had grasped the main concepts and got the right attitude to deal with Internet-related topics and technologies now and in the future. So I asked them to write a short paper (around 10 pages) about a topic related to the ones we discussed in class. I suggested some (you can find them here) just in case there were students without ideas, asked them to communicate me their choice in advance so I could check that everyone was working on a different topic, and finally gave them enough time to complete their work (and enjoy their Christmas holidays in between!).
I have corrected students' assignments about a week ago and I have to say that I'm pretty satisfied by them. As "everything is already online" nowadays it is very difficult to write something really new, but I think that most of these works provide both online references and some personal insights that, together, help in making those documents useful to interested readers. I have asked students if they wanted to share them on the course wiki with a CC license and most of them agreed (yeeeh!). You can find their documents here: their English is not great, but I think you might appreciate the contents anyway ;-)
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