Back to School

Another visit this evening to the University of Washington's Bothell campus, thanks to an invitation from Alan Leong who asked me to present Kerika to his Competitive Engineering class.

Had a great time as usual: talking about what I love to talk about, with a very appreciative and perceptive audience. The students were a diverse bunch, ranging in age and backgrounds, and so the Q&A period was a lot of fun.

A trend worth noting: for some time now, US companies have been pushing universities to produce graduates that are good at working in teams. As a result, universities and colleges everywhere are shifting to more group projects as part of their pedagogy. This is particularly true in majors like business and engineering (and presumably not true at all in majors like physical education?)

When students need to work on group projects, they often don't have many attractive choices for infrastructure. Most schools have something like Blackboard, or its open-source equivalent Sakai, but these are oriented towards the needs of instructors and administrators rather than student groups.

Students tend to like Kerika because it is light-weight and intuitive, and it works on Macs -- which are increasingly common on campuses -- and works across networks. Plus, they can manage large files that email cannot handle: "legitimate" files, I hasten to add, not song-swapping or stuff like that. Students tend to have large files simply because the "digital generation" is very comfortable with embedding graphics (e.g. pictures and illustrations pulled off the Web) in their presentations and documents.

And I like working with students a lot: they have a great, open attitude towards new technology!