Great class

Well, I worked really hard in designing this course and it is challenging for my students to take a course like this, I am getting to like it by the day. The students are participating in class discussions more and more, the blogs are getting under way, the forums are slow and coming, but that's OK... I really feel like I am rewiring their brains for a different way of learning, most importantly, a different way of thinking. As an instructor, you normally get feedback on and off, but having the class online and teaching it face-to-face, allows you to get feedback instantly. This is pretty wild. And I trust they get the same instant feedback from me.

Reading through the student blogs, I get an insight to my student's lives that I normally don't get when I just have them in class. The mother of one of my students commented on her blog, greatly appreciating the fact that she restarted her blogging so the family is able to get news of her. So touching, really. And another claims that he is really getting into the topics that we are talking about. And he is quick to add, "No, really, I am getting very interested." I know it sounds way too idealistic for me, but if I can change how three of my students think, I think I have accomplished a lot. But of course I am shooting for higher goals...

Battlestar Galactica

I had made myself a promise to blog only about the class in this blog, but I am about to break my promise. Oh well, I can't be perfect.
I just got done watching another great episode of Battlestar Galactica and I am still amazed at the differences between the original series and this one. I still remember 25 some years ago, when I was about 7, me and my dad would cancel everything in our lives and watch Battlestar Galactica, in black and white. Those were the days... It was still a great show despite all the technical limitations. I remember Starbuck was a man and I was totally in love with him. So seeing him reincarnated as a woman always takes me by surprise watching the new series. But it is kind of interesting to see that they are using hand-held camera techniques to shoot the battleship scenes. I don't think I ever watched a sci-fi that uses that technique ever. And the Saylons (not sure if I spelled this correctly) are definitely new and improved in this new series. As a matter of fact, there are no close up shots of the Saylons in the new series, but there were in the old one. And Saylons that took the shape of humans were unheard of, forget about them being self-generating! When you killed one of those suckers, they died, period.
It is kind of scary being old enough to compare the old version of the series to the new one, LOL.

Forums

I began talking to my students about what is expected of them at the forums. This week was basically the honeymoon with the technology, meaning I let them use is any way they wanted it, so they got used to the idea of having a virtual classroom. Last class i gave them a bit more guidance in that i asked them to post stuff that are related to our readings. I also told them that forums aren't chatrooms, they serve a different purpose.
I am also planning on posting a grading rubric for the forums as I will be paying more attention to what kind of interaction goes on in the forums and i will treat it as class participation.

First reaction to technology

I asked my students what their first reactions were to the technology they were using for the class, you know, how the wiki worked out and how it didn't work, how blogger.com worked and how it didn't work, stuff like that. I want them to notice all the glitches, overcome the challenges of using technology to write so they can fully appreciate the impact. I literally want them to suffer all the negative sides of technology and be able to evaluate its full potential after having taken my class this semester. But I also want them to realize its benefits too. Faster communication within the group/community, being able to publish anything and everything for everyone to see, its flexibility so that mistakes are easily corrected and so on. It is probably most amazing that you don't have to be McGann, Spielberg, or Oprah to publish something that everyone would read. You don't need money, you don't need to find a publisher, you don't need to advertise or anything. Any mistakes you make are noticed by the community immediately and corrected. If you have a question about something, you can get an answer from someone who is also interested in the same topic but lives on the other side of the planet. You might not ever met this person, but he is willing and able to help you out. That's the beauty part about reading and writing on the digital platform. But of course, it comes with a price. Technology can be a pain in the neck at times. You might feel like throwing your laptop out the window at times, servers might be down (as some of my students already experienced in blogger.com), it might take a while to figure out how something works. Technology is a wonderful thing that allows us to do millions of things, but I also want my students to experience fully the negative sides of it too.
While some of my students are struggling with what to write on their blogs, some are treating it as if they blogged all their lives. Some are already manipulating the ready made templates, posting URLs, pictures and such. Others need a bit more assistance. But they are learning skills that will last them a lifetime. One of my students writes that although at first she wasn't exactly sure about this blogging, she feels that it is becoming quite addictive. It is very true. This is why I currently have three blogs.

Interesting times

Yes, I finally met my students and saw that most are in my class not because they were interested in the topic (though some may thought the topic sounded cool) but they had to find a class because they had to drop out of their first classes. As I suspected, the advisors did not enforce the GPA requirement that we asked them to do. But that's beside the point. The most interesting thing for me was to see that most of my students never experienced a teaching envirionment quite like this. Most did not go beyond browsing the internet, most never blogged, most never attended forums, most never read any fiction online. I get the opportunity to teach them, for the first time, these topics. I will have to rewire their brains to be more compatible with today's world. Force them to think in a totally different way, which I never thought I'd get a chace to do. Everyone seems so tech-savvy these days, so familiar with the ways of the digital world. Of course by the time they graduate, they will have already experienced these things and the initial innocence would be gone.

When I explained to them the syllabus and what was required of them, all I saw was bewildered faces, looking at me as if I were insane, that this could not be happening in a real classroom envirionment. They were literally unsettled. No one asked questions. Finally, after the break, one bold gentleman dared to ask, "So what is the difference between forums and blogs?" I knew everyone had the same question in mind. I told him that it was a great question and asked him why he hadn't asked this question before. And he said "Well you looked so serious..." I about died of laughing. I think the main reason was it took him some time to fully comprehend the content that I was throwing at them. Once that was registered, he was ready to ask the question.

I went home, thinking this was going to be long semester. By the time I was in front of my computer, the forums were already in use, the blog URLs and usernames were already entered into the class wiki. I did get some frustrated e-mails asking me how to do things, and I replied back. Then i received e-mails saying "Hey this wasn't that hard!" I read the blogs, left some comments on some.

Now students are concerned about the difficulty of the readings. Well it is college, not highschool, so it has to be hard somewhere so you learn new things, otherwise it wouldn't be called education. These are the most interesting times indeed.

Today is the day!

Today C100 begins. I am so excited to meet with my students and to see how the class will unfold in reality. Initially I thought the class started next week, but one of my students from my other class gave me the heads up. Whew, that was close. The dates they posted online must have been inaccurate and our secretary didn't warn me about it. But everything is a go.
I fixed the problems I was having with the forums, started writing some study questions for each reading, and I hope to write a brief plot for our story project soon, hopefully this week.
I checked and double checked the classroom. Good wireless, at least. I checked out the projector that they will be sending to the classroom, learned how to use it.
It will be a difficult class. Studying digital media is always labor intensive and theory intensive. Especially if you're not familiar with it...But once you are over the learning curve, it is quite fun. But then again, I might be just a tad bit partial.

Forums

I think I should start coming up with questions about the assigned reading to post on the discussion forums and come up with paper topics. I still have another month to go but I need to prepare for them some supporting material on the wiki to get them through the theory readings that they will have to do in such a short time.

Reconsidering the blog assignment

I ran into Thom in the Telecom hallway after one of the brown bags and I thanked him for the interesting T101 syllabus he posted on the Media ecology list and I told him I swiped his blogging assignment for my own class. And we got to talking about it and he told me—though I knew this already but ruled it out—that he let’s the students blog about their daily experiences, which essentially is what blogging about anyway. I told him that I was going to have the students blog about their readings so I can make sure that they do their readings. He recommended that I give them daily quizzes instead. Although I didn’t like his idea of blogging their daily experiences at first, I started to think that that this is what blogging is really about. So if they blog about their readings, they are not really blogging in the true sense of the term. First of all, it is not really fun to blog about assignments, unless you’re a crazy graduate student like I am, secondly, the blogging experience does not include blogging about homework, it should be about whatever that interests you. So the real question is, how am I going to define that “whatever”? I decided to give them daily quizzes instead and keep to blogging about whatever. I think this will give them a better comparison about blog writing and academic writing, which I will ask them to do twice in the semester anyway.