The workshop serves to make BA-students use the academic tools at hand to investigate relevant and interesting topics related to the internet and technology in a linguistic framework. The students acquire general knowledge on the subject of computer-mediated communication, but more importantly, the students learn to investigate a topic on their own, find litterature, delineate the topic focus and choose which methods to apply.
The MA-students at the linguistics department have a great interest in Computer-mediated Communication. They established and taught this as a workshop for BA-students in the course "Topic of own choice".
The BA-students carry out a project and find their own topic, data, method and theory. They learn to work independently and to use each other for sparring. This prepares them for writing their bachelor's thesis in the following semester. The feedback they get from the MA-students who are further along in the study program help raise the academic level.
The participating MA-students take ownership of their education. They work independently with the planning and establishment of the course and get teaching experience. They also have the possibility of bringing their own data and projects to the workshop and get feedback.
The BA-students have been very positive toward the overall experience of the exam and have made wishes for more collective exams in the study programme. According to the students the connection between teaching and exam is strenghtened through the collective exam.
The workshop sets up a framework for the course "Topic of own choice" so that the BA-students instead of pure selfstudy experience to work with individual projects and at the same time use their fellow students for dicussions and feedback. They furthermore learn to contribute actively to the teaching since this is a workshop and not traditional lecturing.
The MA-students who teach the course get teaching experience from planning and conducting the workshop as well as giving feedback on the BA-students' projects. The MA-students take advantage of the potential in their academic fields of interest by applying it to a teaching situation.