Greets all
Random griping about the vagaries of education are not interesting.
There are more useful places to post concerns about academic processes.
Setting E2 as a university project does not bother me in itself. I can imagine a lecturer like Michael Wesch doing something similar for his Digital Ethnography subject. He has previously sent people into the wilds of YouTube and asked them to come forth with wisdoms. He also pitted them against each other in a fabricated world economy and watched a goodly percentage of them die a virtual death. Both projects have resulted in some interesting thinking by the students and some interesting media for the internet at large. I guess I am expecting that this kind of exploration of digital community space might become more common as the kinds of spaces available become big enough to yield interesting results. One day there will be thousands of students lost to the synaptic morass that is percolating on Simulacron3's scratchpads. I doubt "The Project" will be a soft target.
In higher levels of university learning it is common to submit a paper for a peer-reviewed publication. Only a set number of those submissions get in. Perhaps you could consider this your first opportunity to develop a live profile on the issues you are interested in.
FTW: My feeling as a fellow Australian on E2 is that I would like to welcome the students here, but to ask them to pull their collective and individual fingers out of their derrières and to do us proud. While in E2, forget that the class is there and write something you feel strongly about. Node the best surf beach, node a band, node some of our wondrous marsupials, or deranged eccentrics, something you care about, collaborative communities perhaps, or an animation studio, aesthetic and cost differences between stop-frame and digital animation?
Link the sucker: Do a search for a collection of three or four words in your writeup (while you still have it brewing in your scratchpad) and look for interesting nodes to link through to. The things you link to in E2 give your writing an additional dimension for wit, clarity, and irony. Enjoy that depth of literature and personality under your writeup and give it some decent roots into the nodegel.