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?
1 comment:
Hello, Eric. Came across your blog as a fellow Gettysburg resident interested in instructional tech.
For your course, have you considered timeline sites like mnemograph.com or the experimental Google timelines (www.google.com/experimental). I have some more suggestions on this post on eLearning on my blog here: bibleandtech.blogspot.com/2007/12/elearning-tools.html - Especially look at circaVie and Voicethread.
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