Interviewing Gill via email reminded me, indirectly, that I ought to blog about the DZX222 tutor day at the beginning of the month. Some of the points raised included: the virtual sumer school is not a break from everyday life for students like a residential school. Students may feel isolated and vulnerable to both doubt […]
Martin LeVoi referred to ‘critical mass’ – the size that an online group needs to be in order to be effective. Thought I’d go and check this out. ‘Critical mass’ doesn’t appear to be a technical term in regular use in the literature, but there is some discussion of group size. Glass and Smith looked at […]
Back in the Eighties, when you thought yourself lucky if you had a 16K Spectrum instead of a 1K ZX80 or a ZX81 with a 16K RAM pack which fell off at the slightest touch, I used to edit Sinclair Programs magazine. Kids wrote programs and sent them in on cassettes, I played them all […]
At the DZX222 weekend, Martin LeVoi gave a very interesting talk on how the virtual res school had originated (1994: 12 students, 14 staff, all the students had to have computers and mobile phones shipped to them). Now that it’s been running annually since 2002 and is attracting 700 students in one year, Martin […]
Research process is hotting up. First of all, the DZX222 help conference went live yesterday, and there’s already a lot of activity as the students get involved. There are now 701 students on this presentation, which just keeps on growing. And I’m starting my two student pilot interviews, so that’s an important part of my […]