Happy New Semester!

I have been thinking a lot about what I want to change and improve for this semester. I just reread your end of class reflections/suggestions and I thought I would give you a sense of what your peers said.

Two messages came through loud and clear: you like small group work and discussions, and you weren't totally happy with the way we did the blog writing.
SO-I will keep using small group discussions as a part of our class. The one frustration that several of you mentioned was that the class is short, so many times there are goups who don't get to report back to the large group. I know that is frustrating. I have some ideas about how we might deal with that:
1. maybe we could have a wiki where group comments are written during class, with one person every day bringing a laptop for this purpose. I wonder if there might be ways we could then use the information stored in the wiki?
2. I can try to give groups a chance to do a quick report and then we can go back and go in depth. I kind of tried to do that last semester, but wasn't so successful at it... One way might be to have 2 groups to each topic, and then the groups would have a few minutes to synthesize their comments and report out after that. I'll think about that some more.
3. do you have any thoughts?

Blogs: you seem to want to post less frequently and/or to bring the blog writings into class more. I think this means that not all of you found the blogs to be as useful for personal reflections on the texts and for making connections on your own. No--I think that is not accurate. I think maybe what you mean is that the blogging felt like a lot of work, and you didn't see how it counted much in the grade. (Although--it did, as part of that blog paper which really helped the grades of many people--have your opinions changed about that since you did the reflection paper?)

Many of you said that you would like to perhaps have 3 required blog entries per week, due 24 hours or so before class, and that would then be used in class. It does seem to me that the writing is a useful way for people to get prepared for class. YOu could write about the topic that is your group's topic, but then some of that nice freedom to explore on your own is lost...hmmmm...

So I am working on redoing the grading scheme for this semester. You will see that the generic Core syllabus is up, but I am still playing with the grading and assignment specifics for our class. If you have any thoughts, concerns, suggestions, leave a comment here or email me directly.
Looking forward to seeing you soon!