Hi Bronek,

On Thu, 23 May 2002, [iso-8859-1] Bronis�aw Rudak wrote:

Hi Boud,

Thanks for your `Propositions'. General outline of your Master' projects looks very good.

Thanks, Bronek. :)

What I suggest to change is the kick-off time: Oct-Nov2002 is (in my experience) too late to discuss details of the projects.

Well, my idea is to *start* talking whenever the academic year starts - is this Sep or Oct ? - making an initial plan, and then depending on how things go for a month or two, correcting and making a more realistic plan.

So am I correct in assuming you're giving your standard "semester 9" cosmo course in the coming semester?

Is this an examined course or an unexamined course?

I would be interested to see if we could work together to help computerise this course, e.g. offer to the students to each prepare html pages (w po polsku) with links for one of the lines in your course guideline (link in previous email), or to develop simple fortran (or C) packages so that they can play around with the formulae for the different bits of physics, and maybe accept part of the work they do on this as a contribution to their examination grades.

I think that client-side clickable image maps (e.g.

http://www.astro.uni.torun.pl/~boud/DE/usage.html#docs

) could help considerably for students (and lecturers) to better understand what bits of knowledge are required for understanding other bits of knowledge, and enabling them to more flexibly fill in the missing bits...

I also think that if Staszek Bajtlik is doing his cosmology course at the same time, and that if students in *both* courses learn the content partly by building html + fortran (or C) pages/software, then they would get an extra motivation by the stimulation of having the exchange between UW and UMK students...

Bronek, Staszek, if you are interested, then here at TCfA we would be happy to host a mailing list, or maybe two mailing lists for your two courses, since the style and content are likely to be somewhat different, though clearly overlapping. My feeling is that it would be more stimulating to the students to have a single mailing list, since this would force them to try to compare the different (though largely overlapping) content of the two courses, which is one of the best ways of understanding something - you can't seriously compare X and Y without knowing what X and Y really are...

Of course, this would depend on the students' access - while here in Piwnice the undergrad students' online facilities (big screen machines or else at least PCs) are getting better, but at the Physics dept they seem to be quite minimal and difficult to access, and I don't know about UW students.

But if we want the students to really learn and develop the freedom to learn and do research, I don't see any alternative.

A suggestion for the name of the mailing list:

cosmo-intro

Cze�� Boud