I have finished reading and commenting on all of the website proposals for this course (at least so far). Overall, pretty good, although there were many that did not really have "instructional design" style goals and objectives, even among people who took ID last semester! As far as I'm concerned, that's one thing that makes a site instructional rather than just informational. It is the desire/plan/intention to have people actually get something specific from the site, as opposed to just putting up information that people can take or leave. Even so, I think there will be some very interesting sites to come out of this semester.
I have also made sure that I have read all the blog posts added by this class since the beginning of the semester. Although setting up netvibes was not quite as easy as advertised, now that I have it, I like it a lot. It's very easy to see what each post is about, and one click takes you there. The one weakness is that I can't see how many comments have been made to a posting without actually going to the blog. I'm sure that I will miss some of those as we go along. Overall, though not a bad way to see what people are thinking about quickly and easily.
Meanwhile, everyone is kind of worried about Twitter. This is really just an experiment to see if it has any value for us. So far, I'm as skeptical as some of the class members, so we'll see how it goes.
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Starting to Blog the Internet Course
Well, it might be considered unfair to require the students in this course to blog weekly and not do it myself (not counting the other things I blog about separately), so here goes.
I do understand why students feel a bit overwhelmed and confused about the course right at the beginning. We are trying to get a variety of different communications media started here, probably more than one would use for courses with students in other fields. But this is an instructional technology course, and we do want to get some practice with a variety of different things as we go along. The other problem is that these things overlap in the semester, or some of them do, anyway. In this course, the Podcast (to take one example) can be a relatively short, self-contained unit. You read about podcasting, think and discuss about what it might be used for, and then smpend some time creating one (much of which involves learning some audio editing software). It doesn't need to be ongoing, unless you decide to do that once a week on your own.
The thing is, though, that other technologies that we are looking at are not quite like that. Blogging, wikis, Twitter, and others are ongoing and have to be experienced that way. Once we get everything set up, however, it should fall into place better and come together for most of us. And yes, I include myself in that. I'm spending a lot of time now trying to make sure that I have everything covered, that I am following all blogs, and so on.
All in all, I'm hoping that the class will trust me for a little while to see whether it gets a bit better soon.
I do understand why students feel a bit overwhelmed and confused about the course right at the beginning. We are trying to get a variety of different communications media started here, probably more than one would use for courses with students in other fields. But this is an instructional technology course, and we do want to get some practice with a variety of different things as we go along. The other problem is that these things overlap in the semester, or some of them do, anyway. In this course, the Podcast (to take one example) can be a relatively short, self-contained unit. You read about podcasting, think and discuss about what it might be used for, and then smpend some time creating one (much of which involves learning some audio editing software). It doesn't need to be ongoing, unless you decide to do that once a week on your own.
The thing is, though, that other technologies that we are looking at are not quite like that. Blogging, wikis, Twitter, and others are ongoing and have to be experienced that way. Once we get everything set up, however, it should fall into place better and come together for most of us. And yes, I include myself in that. I'm spending a lot of time now trying to make sure that I have everything covered, that I am following all blogs, and so on.
All in all, I'm hoping that the class will trust me for a little while to see whether it gets a bit better soon.
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