So I am teaching IST 110 again this fall ... its not that I am tired of the course, its just that at the moment, I am not sure I have the energy to really focus on it. The course has been redesigned so there is a little extra challenge in it for me. There are so many amazing things going on around here at the moment ... killer projects, great new ideas, three new people starting, new strategic directions, and some amazing partnerships. All of these things are making me rather excited about the fall ... teaching a night class is not up there.
But, with that said, I just had an amazing time teaching at the Governor's School and really came up with some new ways to shift my class. I will be doing the basics of 110, but have decided to continue my theme of Web 2.0 at the core. I will be asking my students to do some (hopefully) interesting things with some interesting technologies. I will once again use the class blog for the primary communication area, but will extend it to give each their own accounts and spaces. I will be doing quite a bit of podcasting -- both my own and expecting them to produce a bunch. I will be testing my enclosure bundles with them as well! I'll use digital video again so they can communicate their solutions in ways beyond text -- and I think I will do a little more of it. They will be blogging their own thoughts on a weekly basis, responding to weekly discussion activities, and posting reflections of class, speakers, guests, and things going on in the world. They will read a combination of Online IST topics, articles, and pieces of the Cluetrain Manifesto to build the building blocks of the course content. Also new this semester, I will introduce them to social bookmarking. I'll be asking them to create their own repository of resources that they will share with the class and do peer reviews of how the sites are related to the course content and to think about why people used the tags they did. Oh, and I will be giving them a large problem assignment -- probably the PSU alumni site challenge I used at Gov School.
All in all I want to do a ton with them. I want it to be fun, hard, interesting, and engaging ... maybe not in that order, but fun has to be number one. I hope I can find a way to pull all that off without blowing their minds. It is a freshman course after all. At any rate, these are early ideas -- semester starts on August 30th, so it is time to get jacked up. Anyone have any thoughts for me? I'll post a link to my syllabus as it goes live.
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