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June 13, 2007
Online-ifying and Online Identity
Today's assignment is intended to prepare us for our final projects. And yes, at this point the laughter from the malicious glee of my students is positively deafening.
Our final project is to take a face-to-face (f2f) class (or a hybrid class that mixes f2f with online elements) and turn it into an online-only class. I will admit that I spent the past two days completely at a loss as to what class I should transform, or whether I should just start from scratch with a new one (after all, both of my classes in the fall will be new preps for me).
But then I realized that the answer was staring me right in the face -- when I get back from NYC I'll be teaching a summer course on children's literature that I taught several times in my Ph.D. program at Pitt. The class is a pure f2f class; in the past when I've taught it I haven't even used a course blog. This time, however, that's going to change.
One of my students from the CyberCulture course asked me if he could take the children's lit class. I told him sure, but then he told me that he was going to be out of the state during the class meetings. He said he'd do all of the readings and writing assignments... and so of course I said sure. At first I wasn't sure what to do with this twist: a dozen students sitting in a room with me, and one lone satellite student orbiting in deep space. Then it hit me: I'd ramp up the online aspects of the course for everyone in a pilot of a purely-online course I'd offer next time I taught the course.
I don't mean that I'm going to send the f2f students away. Instead, I plan to replace the writing assignments I usually use with this course with a series of online collaborative elements to the course. This will help my exiled student to feel connected (because he will be -- he'll be working with the f2f students), be more interesting (and challenging, but in a good way) for everyone, and will help me to get this class up-and-running as an online course, which it needs to be to reach all of the students who want to take it but who don't stay in Burlington (I got a lot of this when I announced the course). I'll post more about this tomorrow.
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Since I started blogging for this seminar, I've been thinking more about my blog. I'm not, frankly, used to colleagues reading my blog. I know that a few at UVM do, but they're a distinct minority and they're bloggers themselves. (As I wrote that, I realized that I have no idea why that makes a difference, but somehow it does.)
Here, I've got a different audience who come from widely varied technological backgrounds and with widely varied technological experience, and I'm feeling a little self-conscious of the backlog of housekeeping and aesthetic work the blog needs.
So, you may notice a few minor cosmetic changes around the old blog, and you may even note things that don't seem to work or load properly. Grrr. If you do see anything that needs work, please let me know. Thanks.
Posted by reparent at June 13, 2007 7:43 PM