Twenty-three grad students sitting in the lab across the hall, waiting for me to make my grand entrance.
Caffeine? Check.
Handouts? Check.
Pretests? (Yes, I give a test on the first day. I'm so mean...) Check.
Class web site up? Check.
Butterflies in tummy? Check.
Curtain's going up...
Uh-oh.
Class web site up? Not check -- I get a 404. Unless you're just hiding it from us non-RIT peons.
Is this correction for you: http://www.it.rit.edu/~ell/409/409-032/
Ooops! Typed the URL in wrong. It's fixed now.
(No, David, that's the class I'm teaching tomorrow morning...)
Knock 'em dead, Liz!
D'oh! I should've check your class schedule.
Sounds exciting!! Lucky students. I know a bunch of asp.net programmers that would like to take your classes. Especially the one about how to write browser friendly websites.
This is fascinating, Liz, great stuff. One of the big questions for me is how the 'grey area' or 'registers' will work out (I commented on this in my blog following Danny O'Brien). The blogging seems to me to be in a semi-private 'register' and yet it's open for all to see - do you have any thoughts on the impact this will have on the openness of your students? Would you move the blog to an intranet if it became an issue?
I talked about it a bit in class. The openness is a big advantage in many ways; David Weinberger engaged in dialog with my students last year when I assigned a reading from Small Pieces, and Shelley Powers commented on my students' posts in my XML class last year. That was great fun.
I did tell students that if they felt more comfortable posting comments to the class weblog with a pseudonym, that I was okay with that--as long as they let me know what the pseudonym they were using was.
Their individual class blogs are really no different than the web sites and portfolios that students have always done for our web classes--the fact that it's a MT backend only makes it easier for them to update them regularly.
And I'll continue to use our closed, password protected courseware (Prometheus-based) for things like grades and file submissions.
It went very well last year, so I'm optimistic about this year's use of the technology.
I see you do not discuss "attention span". Depending on the purpose of the website (e.g. Textbook vs. Blog vs. Attention-grabber) you might want to teach your students to write in "bite-size" pieces.
1 Idea = 1 bite.
Depending on the reading public for whom you are writing, the bites should only be 3 to 8 lines in a blog (say).
And definitely not more than a screenful per idea, just to aid comprehension.
'Nuff said?
Oh puleeeez! Butterflies? You Profs are something else. You wield so much power -- have you no idea? Check your Johari Window. You certainly appeared calm and confident on Monday night. It's just us techie-fledglings that are nervous about performance. After all, we don�t carry that cocky confidence that you noted from our undergraduate counterparts. They were raised with this stuff. We were raised with rotary telephones.