As this quarter draws to a close, I’m already thinking ahead to next quarter’s web design classes. I’m teaching two of them—one undergrad, one grad. They’re very similar, but in the grad class I often take on real-world projects (non profits, preferably) and focus more on the context and users, and in the undergrad class I focus a little more on the back end tech.
The experiment with my MT courseware in my intro class this quarter was moderately successful. Not as interactive as I would have liked, but that’s partly (if not mostly) my fault—I didn’t provide the sparks that might have gotten more of a conversation going.
I used a class weblog in last year’s web design class, and gave all my students authoring capability. This quarter I’m going to keep control of the class blog, but encourage students to use comments and trackbacks (from their own class blogs). I’ll probably set up specific items that are intended for trackbacks—topic-focused posts that encourage aggregation of related resources.
The nice thing about using weblogs in a web design class is that the weblogs are both a communication tool and a teaching medium…as they learn CSS design techniques and backend programming, they apply those to the weblogs they’re using in class.
The ongoing problem in those courses, however, is the tension between wanting to explore conceptual and theoretical aspects of the web environment (from aesthetics to cognition to social impact) and needing to impart specific technical skills.
The pressure for the latter comes from both the students (who at RIT are very career and skill-focused) and the downstream professors in the concentration-level web development courses. The pressure for the former…well, that comes mostly from me. I regularly tell my students that the sign I’ve seen on a colleague’s door in the imaging arts & sciences college—the one that says “Those who know how work for those who know why.”—is more true than they realize.
Somehow I missed that Douglas Rushkoff (a professor at NYU in the same Interactive Telecom Program where Clay Shirky teaches) has a weblog. (And has, apparently, since several months before I even started mine.)
Which reminds me that I have to get moving on my blog panel proposal for the upcoming Media Ecology conference here at RIT in June, where Rushkoff will apparently be giving a plenary presentation. It’s due December 1st. Ack!
I’ve noticed that when I’m on the right track intellectually, everything starts to seem connected. In this case, Rushkoff is connected to Sue Barnes, a new faculty member at RIT whose interests are very close to mine. He’s also connected to Clay, with whom I co-author Many-to-Many, and to Howard Rheingold, who I know through a couple of channels, and who’s speaking this spring here at RIT.
All of that points to the best kind of convergence, the kind that says to me there’s a critical mass of connections and content and interest to spin into something really interesting.
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