Students and websites
While finishing off the last parts of my programming work for university, I posted a reflection on my department’s collaborative blog, RedGloo. I noticed that over the past few days, as the deadline has been looming, people who I never even knew took the course had started using their blogs, if only to post their own reflections. This is because the reflection carries marks with it.
At other times, the blog is very quiet with only a few people posting regularly (one of them being me and the others being mainly staff and the odd older student). It’s therefore interesting to see that attaching 5 marks makes so many people dash to the website they’ve probably never been on since fresher’s week when they had to sign up.
I posted an article on the blog wondering why more people weren’t using the blog more regularly to post their comments and views on programming or more general computing issues. I got a comment from a fellow student that summed it all up: there are too many social networking and blog sites already out there that take many people’s time, and there is no time left for “minor” blogs like RedGloo. Even so, lecturers say that they’ve learnt a lot from it that they are going to take forward and incorporate into the modules for future years.
On a related note, I was tweaking my friends list on the homepage, and wondered who else I knew who had a website that I could add. I browsed through my Facebook friends list, but couldn’t find anyone who did. For computing students, this surprises me, since I would expect many of them to have at least a personal one-page site or maybe a blog. Maybe the time will come…
On another, still related point, I have decided to expand my student activities online - I will soon be opening up my previously closed portfolio of sites to students. Until now, I only designed a few, select sites, mainly for friends and the odd small business or organisation. From now on, I’ll be marketing my web design services to students, starting at the University of Reading. Also, I will soon be opening up a free-of-charge PC help site for University of Reading students and also offering my help with computing problems, which I’ve already been doing to an extent recently. More on this coming very soon!