Reflecting on my first year course

I’ve been teaching first year Business Informatics for 3 years now and I think I’m starting to get the hang of it.  No, that’s not right, I think the students are finally at a place where I’m not that far ahead.

When I started teaching this course, it was pretty ‘scrugged’.  It was a traditional IS/IT course with a ‘shotgun’ approach to learning.  We basically filled students with the bits and bolts of Information Systems.  Each week was a new set of stuff to be remembered.  When I took over, it was renamed from Business Information Systems to Business Informatics to coincide with the new book ‘The Book of Informatics’ which just happened to be written by our Professor of Information Systems.  That book gave me licence to innovate. I spent my summer holiday reading it and rethinking the course.  Since then, there’s been continual updating and tweaking to get it right.

One thing that struck me tonight during the lecture is something that I ask during the first lecture each semester.  How many students have a FaceBook?  This year, I think nearly a third of the attending students raised their hands (last semester I think there was about 10 out of 200 in the room).  I got daring and asked how many had a MySpace.  Not as many.  Then I threw caution to the wind and asked how many had Twitter.  Surprisingly, there were more on Twitter this semester than there were on FaceBook last semester.  Last semester I actually had to ask if they’d even heard of Twitter and the response was a dismal no. So, there’s a very different feel to the class which is only partly explained by being in a smaller lecture theatre. Heck, there was even a student who approached me at the end of the class to tell me she was a mod on a wiki somewhere (I can’t remember where now, but that’s post lecture funk, I’m sure I’ll be chatting with her again).

Amusingly, no mobile phones went off, so I didn’t get to dance to any unusual ring tones, but I did dance to the music I put in my video. I did mention that it was probably the lamest video that they would have to watch all semester (it came after the sheep).

It’s always interesting doing this course, because I’m able to push the boundaries.  I tell students they are not buckets, and I will not fill them with facts to be regurgitated in the exam – any facts in the course will be outdated by the time they finish their degree so that’s a pretty pointless exercise.  This group seemed to get that, although some seemed a bit tentative.  But that’s okay, it really is only week 1 and there’s a heckuva lot more to follow.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 28th, 2009 at 8:30 pm and is filed under Ramblings, teaching. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.