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?

So, how far do you outsource?

Back at my old job I had a server that was devoted to instructional tech- the LMS (Dokeos) ran on it and I also added a bunch of custom apps, mostly written in PHP/MySQL with an occasional bit of Flash thrown in. It was a handy place to host stuff like a Wiki that didn't really need a dedicated home as well as a place to experiment in.

I haven't had that at GBurg and I've sort of missed it. Where can I put little one-off apps, host a wiki, etc? (The Wiki in our LMS, Angel, is not exactly a biug win) But as time's gone on, I've begun to wonder if it's really necessary. Other people are happy to host stuff, and perhaps we really don't need to do much of anything much anymore.

After all, this Blog is hosted: I'm not using the blog tools in our LMS or installing a blog on a server. I ran a survey tool on a machine at my old job: when the company decided to stop free educational licensing I dumped it for an open source product, still hosted. Yet SurveyMonkey is just as good, works for a quick, small survey and if you really need a lot of stuff, it's cheaper than hosting a product yourself. We don't have a good Wiki on campus, but I just pointed a professor at Wikidot for a project they want to use. I could even outsource the entire development environment since I just got an invite to Google App Engine.

I'm not sure I'd want to host anything needing serious security- I've had people do surveys that fell squarely under HIPPA- but for a generic one off it's not so bad. I could worry about losing the company that runs the outsourced server, but in reality that's no worse than when we lost the survey tool at my old job: we still had to migrate all of the data anyway.

So how far do you go?