Since not that long ago I became a teacher. I have classes at the Technical University of Moldova - where I used to be a student no more than 3 (or 2?) years ago.

Inforail is a wiki created to enhance the academic experience, for both - my students and myself. You can visit the site by going to info.railean.net. If you go there you can see lists of keywords that refer to the things that were discussed in class, as well as keywords related to the assignments given in the labs.

Inforail is not supposed to be "one source of information to rule them all", it is just a high-level reference that tells you what to look for in books or on the Internet. It may be incomplete, so don't limit yourself only to the keywords mentioned there, always explore things in depth and examine the topics that are related to the one you're currently studying.

The site is not likely to become more than that, because there are many books that cover the subjects very well, and there are many web-sites that explain things in detail.

The discipline is focused on computer networks and IT security. If you want to attend a lesson, perhaps you can visit lab#503 on Thursday at 17:10 (building #3, CIM).

My standard approach is to describe my activities (especially the challenges I find most difficult) in great detail - because sharing is the best path towards improvement. However, this may not be such a good idea because some students can use that information to take shortcuts that will make the academic journey less challenging.

Here are some basic questions for the reader:

• If you're one of my students:
  • what is the least attractive part of the lesson?
  • what do you think about the lab assignments? Are they interesting? Are they complex enough? Are they too complex?
  • which new assignments are you interested on working on?
• else:
  • what kind of assignments you enjoyed most when you were a student?
  • which features a teacher had to possess in order to make the lesson more interesting?

And here are some observations:

• Most students are afraid to ask questions
• Most students are lazy - given the chance to write comments in their code in order not to forget what every line of means, they still manage to not do that
• Some students are stubborn - given the choice between an easy solution and a complex one, some choose the complex one (which usually means writing ~5 times more code)
• Most students are not good at taking notes in class. They understand something perfectly well in class but they forget about it next time; I think this is happening because they failed to write down the most important things mentioned during a lesson. It's not about writing everything, it's about writing everything that matters

I am sure that none of these is new to you. The good part is that I see progress - the students I teach today are more active than my fellow students were several years ago. The future will be exciting, I'm looking forward to it.