Hard copy notes

Here is a picture from the A&P pavement art competition

HI Guys, I am very interested in what happens to our material once students finish their course, as a great accumulator of paper material I often think how I would cope with the information I needed being on-line for only a short period of time. I could be very unsustainable and print it out I guess, I encourage students to keep stuff as an e-book (if there is a term like that) for future reference. When I studied here in Veterinary nursing, a few years ago now, the notes were sent to us in huge folders and covered the whole course material, I remember thinking do I have to know all of this? I would read bits of the course material that wasn't even relevant to the unit I was studying at the time, and very often got side tracked into doing other stuff because I found something interesting; I was able to be very disciplined though and do what was needed but I can now imagine a student overwhelmed with the old hard copy material, reading irrelevant topics and struggling to get back on track. The idea that the information is now sent out in manageable chunks, in individual units with timeframes and guidance through wiki books, work plans and weekly study plans from the tutors seems much more manageable.



So I have completely changed my idea about the need for hard copy materials, when we changed over I first thought that we were short changing students who paid for a course and now had to pay to print out their own notes etc, but I now see that it isn't the notes that provide the driving force for the study, it is the interactions between people, students now access stuff any time of day or night, and at any place (with a wireless connection) and we can keep notes up to date at the touch of a button, it doesn’t get more flexible than that! But on the downside, I think when our students finish the course the shell is closed to them so they have no on-going reference material to support the lifelong learning idea whereas I still have my monster folders. I wonder if we should now be encouraging graduates to join other forums to remain current such as the Veterinary Nurses association and others like our OP facebook forums, if anybody has any suggestions feel free to let me know.