Welcome to the New and Improved Purdue ECE Kiwi:)
Spring 2008 Course List
- What is a Kiwi?
A “kiwi” is a collective learning tool that Mimi is developing. In a kiwi, students post course material, questions, comments, observations, or whatever else they think is relevant to the course. The goal is to create a large study group as well as a repository of learning material whose form and content are constantly evolving. The key difference between a kiwi and a course webpage or textbook is that a kiwi is “for the students, by the students”, as opposed to “for the students by an authoritative expert”. I particular, the presence of mistakes in the material is an integral part of the kiwi concept, which is used to enhance learning.
- Why the name “Kiwi”?
Because, in a sense, a kiwi is the opposite of a wiki page in Wikipedia: while the goal of a wiki page is to have supposedly knowledgeable people collectively build an authoritative reference on a subject to be used as a learning resource, the goal of the kiwi is to have people who, a priori, know nothing about a subject collectively build their own learning resource. That assumption is that the latter provides a better way to learn in an academic context.
Note: if you notice an unacceptable post or dislike the way a post has been made, please report this to Mimi directly. It is important to understand that negative comments are not constructive. More importantly, they can be hurtful. Now we all want to have a nice and active kiwi, so let's all constructively work together to encourage everybody to make useful contributions. For example, if you notice a post full of spelling mistakes, posting the comment "Please learn to spell!" is not going to accomplish anything, aside for upsetting the person who initially made the post. A positive, constructive alternative would be to post the following comment: "Here is a really good tool to check the spelling of your text: it's called "ispell" and it is freely available through the website www.gnu.org". So just remember: contructive comments go on the kiwi, and negative comments go to Mimi.
