Course planning?

I'm teaching a first year seminar next semester on the intersection of materials science and society- how the development of the materials we use has affected the course of history. This is a new thing for me- I'm used to teaching chemistry, where you have your textbook, you cover chapters 1-10 and you have to do all of them since the next semester (taught by someone else) covers 11-20, and you have to do them in rough order since the text assumes you already know chp3 when you do the problems in chp5.

Now suddenly I have total freedom- I barely have a text, I have no schedule, no specific goal I have to meet beyond what I design myself. I have stacks of articles to read from various online and print resources. I have group projects and demos. I have discussion questions. And I have 20+ topics I can organize in any format or order I want.

Uh, yeah. Freedom isn't always free- how do I manage this to build some coherent piece with assignments, lecture notes, discussion questions and responses, daily readings, etc? I usually just work up a notebook of stuff to discuss in lecture- topic outlines, sample problems, etc. Easy since I already know what I need to say, but now that's clearly not going to do it.

I can't seem to find anything obvious online. Google calendar + a wiki maybe? Any actual readers have any ideas?

Google apps

I'm up at the CLAC conference right now and sat through a very interesting discussion led by Hope college, who ditched their old email system and went totally to Google apps.  A couple of the interesting takeaway points

• Google has detailed terms of use policies which go through privacy, data mining and email ownership issues.  They do *not* own the data or emails- that's up to the given organizations if the person or the college owns it.  They can potentially data mine, but won't report anything identifiable.  A couple of colleges have had counsel look over the contracts and they have no issues with the setup and don't think that it exposes them to any FERPA/HIPPA related issues.
  
• 6 month lead time for changes in policy, so you'll have a bit of warning if they decide to start charging.  Folks using it said they'd be willing to pay anyway- you go back to senior staff and talk about how much money you've already saved
• Search not sort: you have to train your faculty to not throw things away and not to bother sorting into folders.  Google can search them faster
• Delete in gmail really means delete- you *cannot* get it back under any circumstances.  This is by design due to privacy issues
• They can include campus-wide directories for emails
• Calendaring has grown organically at schools using it, to the point it's now the default calendaring system even if there are others available.
• They now have a blackberry connector.
• Gmail will *not* do mass email.  You need to keep some solution for alum and admissions to mass-email folks
• They want folks to move over to Google mail for alums as well- oh, that has ads...

With google docs available as well and all the issues around large scale saving of email (See our SAN issues) I won't be surprised to see more and more people moving to this.