Thanks to the COM352 students for contributing a bunch of new pages! I'll be moving these pages into the main area of the wiki soon.

From UMassWiki

Any class’s success depends on several variables. They can be simplified down to how many people paid attention, in a general sense, during the lesson itself, how many people were interested in the subject matter of the class, and how many people were affected enough to be motivated to take an active role in the work outside of the class, or adversely, how many people understood the possibly complicated and difficult subject matter well enough to successfully complete the before mentioned work. The first of these variables, the hopefully captive audience the class should become, was marred during our previous lesson. This failure can be attributed to something besides the professor’s ineptitude, however. The complicated subject matter of the class, the many ins and outs of the UMass Wiki, led to many students losing focus and paying attention to something other than the task at hand. The only true way to eradicate this problem is to simplify the many processes identified with the UMass Wiki, which sadly is not possible for anyone except the overall administrator of the Wiki site. One way to ease this problem might be to divide the class into several more specific lectures dedicated to different aspects of the larger Wiki whole. This of course depends on the ability to do so and the professor’s discretion. The only other problem of the class, assuming that the students are motivated by necessity to do the outside work, was that of the subject matter and the student interest in it. This is yet another problem, unfortunately, that can only be attributed to the students themselves. Students interested and adept at technological tools will of course be interested in this aspect of class, or perhaps so well attuned already that the difficulties of the Wiki will not faze them. Other students, which seemed to make up the majority of the class, will be turned off by the many intricacies of the processes being taught, and thus quickly lose interest. This problem can only be alleviated by the simplification of the Wiki, which, as before mentioned, is impossible on this level, or by the division of the class into several more specialized lectures, which rests at the teacher’s discretion.