Feedback from Gerhard for Final Reports

first let me say that all teams did a good job – and I hope that all of you learnt something important of getting involved in some self-selected research topic and self-directed learning activities within the global context of design, learning, and collaboration.

Assuming that you believe the argument which I articulated several times in the course that there is always room for improvement (because "there are no optimal solutions, only satisfycing ones"), here are a few suggestions articulated in a generic way (meaning individual presentations may have taken care of this so my criticisms/suggestions are mute for them):

• you could have addressed better some of the suggestions which I made in my feedback to you after the second progress reports –> please add at least the following to your reports: "assuming you have split up the work done among the members of your group: include in your final report a table showing the focus of the individual contributors"

• this is important: please add to your reports: (1) a title; (2) the name of the authors; (3) a brief abstract

• this was independent research – so I assume that the people who added no references to their reports used some existing books, papers, web sites –> please add those

• as we discussed in class: the opinions articulated on websites / articles (especially when they come from the people who have big personal stakes in these developments) are not unbiased, but represent their world view; sometimes the teams could have been more "critical" towards the opinions expressed by the authors of their respective sources

• some reports would have gained strength by applying the generic framework presented to a specific problem

As I said in class: previous projects teams found their independent research exciting enough that they continued with it, explore it further with their projects, possibly engaged in an independent study as a follow-up, and ended up with a publication!
Hopefully you have the feeling/understanding that "only the sky is the limit for you"!

Hopefully this helps!