Learning Testimonial

Throughout this project I have kept a blog and gone to class every week. I feel that I have been engaged and I have been quite interested in my own work for the duration of the semester. I do however, feel that my communication with the lecturer, Malte, and other staff or classmates was not as defective as it could have been. I think also, in retrospect, I feel that a project with a more well defined outcome would have been a little more engaging and certainly a lot more simple to communicate about. That said I am happy with the outcome as a set of theories and a way of looking at issues in the future. I also feel that my learning and development throughout the last year has been positive and subject of the interaction with the teaching staff. I do however feel that my interaction with staff inside and outside of the class has also been of great benefit. In this case I should thank Malte as well as people like Soumitri and Scot Mitchel.

I think the issue of abstraction was not the biggest problem during this year. I feel that one of the things I had a hard time with, which has not been an aspect of my engagement as such, is the lack of structure in the definition of requirements. What, for instance, the specific requirements of a Major Project actually are is something that has only recently become more clear to me, after attending the GRC. Similarly the I think the projects proposed to this class were in general either too large or too small and for most people there was some difficulty in trying to apply the expected level of rigour. This is obviously an important point of learning for students at this level however I think with more structure there could have been better attempts made and hence more well done projects would be the average outcome. This is not something I care about too much though as I think in the end, the presentations of people in the class represent their interaction well and the feedback they go helped resolve any ambiguities. Though this kind of feedback could have been usefully earlier on it seems like a more structured lesson and hopefully a more distinct instance of learning. In particular I think there was a failing of rigour on the level of a thesis in some of the more practical projects. I think this is quite a serious failing as it seems, from my point of view, to undermine the nature of the class completely. I think for the sake of the students involved this could be better controlled.