Summary of this semester

Oh dear, how do I sum up this semester? It has truly been awful. By far the most awful and tragic part is the death of Deborah Street, our co-investigator on the project. Deb died on the 28th March, suddenly and unexpectedly. This has been a terrible personal sadness for us on the project team, as Deb was a great colleague to all of us, and a good personal friend of mine. Her enthusiasm for teaching and supporting students will be sadly missed by everyone.

On a more mundane note, the tablets have had several problems this year (see below) and we have realised that they are sadly lacking in memory now, as we increase the activities we want to use them for. This makes then very slow. We have experimented with putting 4Gb of memory in them and this helps enormously, so the remaining project money will go on doing this for all 21 of them.

We spent a whole day last summer planning what we would do this semester, based on the findings of the previous year. We planned on around 20 - 25 students. 5 days before the module started in January another 25 students were added to the cohort! This threw our plans out completely, and we really flew the module by the seat of our pants, as far as the tablet project was concerned. We couldn't do what we wanted to do as we had such a big class to manage, and this is reflected in the responses to the questionnaires and focus groups - much more negative than last year.

All in all, a semester I would never wish to repeat :-(