Student centred learning

Ethics: You can justify anything

One interesting concept to teach in Ethics (from my classes in early 2000), is that you can justify anything. I like to set up the students by asking how many play computer games. .. eventually leading onto “violent computer games” then asking them to describe what the most violent thing is that happens in the game. Thhis often surprises students who have not been involved with these kinds of games.

Eventually I wind up with a statement that I think these games are “evil!!”. This usually generated very interesting class discussion.

http://www.virtualmv.com/virtualMe/vMe_mv/v2/v2com/v2kb/dl_peet/et_00o.htm

At an NACCQ Conference I delivered a paper on this and used this example to show delegates what I did. The presentation was awarded “best presentation” at the Conference.

The cardboard PC

One of my ideas to teach Hardware many years ago was to develop the cardboard PC. Basically the idea was that students would print out a cardboad fold up PC and build it!! I prototyped the idea on a zip disk

http://www.virtualmv.com/virtualMe/vMe_mv/v2/v2com/v2kb/hw/hwcc0000.htm

and although I was keen to take this further, did not progress the idea further!

What do I have?

In this activity I ask students to use some software to determine what the specifications are for the computer they have at home. To help them I have created a page in my wiki:

http://www.virtualmv.com/wiki/index.php?title=Hardware:_What_do_I_have%3F

What I have found is that students become interested in Computer Hardware and as it is very associated with something they have a personal interest in, becomes more than just an academic exercise. The assessment is voluntary and an indication of how good the assessment is is whether they complete or not. Results are uploaded into the Online CMS (Moodle) and are discussed in class. As an aside for many students this is the first time they post to an online CMS so is a good introduction to how this is done.

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