proposition for masters students 2002/2003

[Boud Roukema]

Hi Bronek,

On Thu, 23 May 2002, [iso-8859-1] Bronis³aw 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¶æ
Boud