Yousuf said:
Is mochima.com some sort of educational institution?
Yes and no. Mochima.com is basically me (that is, my home-based
company). Through the company, I provide training (mainly in the
area of software development) as well as development and consulting.
In this case, I am the instructor in a "PC Hardware" course taught
at John Abbott College (as part of a 1-year certificate in Network
administration).
If you're curious about this particular course, I invite you to take
a look at the course's web page:
http://www.mochima.com/net
For one of their assignments, I though of researching and writing
a paper/essay on a particular subject (related to PC hardware, but
specific enough that wouldn't be appropriate as part of the material
that I cover in the course). Also as part of the assignment, I asked
them to post their report (a link to it, with a brief summary) in a
related newsgroup, hoping that people would read it and discuss it
(contributing with ideas, comments, criticisms, or whatever additional
information they may find appropriate).
Also here, if you're curious about the assignment (the rationale
behind my asking them to do this), I invite you to read the following:
http://www.mochima.com/net/paper_presentations.html
You're the second one asking to have their papers marked by us.
That's not really accurate. First of all, it's more like the fifth
one, not the second one ;-)
And secondly, it's not really "their papers marked by the newsgroup".
I want them to research on a subject and write something interesting
enough and with high enough quality that would encourage others to
participate and discuss the subject. Given that newsgroups are an
excellent source of experts, I thought it would be a good opportunity
for learning (certainly they will learn more from this than from
answering some boring review questions from chapter whatever of the
book), and mainly, a learning with better chances of having real-life
value (the information they get here reflects other professionals'
real-life experience, and so their comments and discussion is likely
to be much more valuable than whatever they could read in a book or
what I could hope to cover in the course with a limited amount of
time.
You actually *have* been quite helpful with some of the other groups
(well, the "Apple dumps IBM for Intel" thread comes to mind -- IIRC,
you did contribute with interesting comments that they certainly
appreciated, and that I think were quite helpful for them to improve
the quality of their report and their presentation on the subject)
Cheers,
Carlos
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