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Holy heck. It’s Wednesday already? I would like some tips for stopping time.
I’m wondering who watched Digital Nation on PBS last night and what you thought. I haven’t had time to watch it, yet, though the whole thing is viewable on their web site.
Actually I was wondering if the ProfHacker team (or its readers) has a list of must-reads or must-subscribes or must-listen-to RSS feeds, blogs or podcasts that are in line with ProfHacker interests. I mean, aside from LifeHacker, of course.
Speaking of semesters, my university is currently undergoing the switch from quarters to semesters. Ugh. Talk about stress.
Any tips for keeping track of student contributions to class wikis and blogs? Amid the welter of other day-to-day chores I’m finding it hard to be sure I’m doing a good enough job of this, but I need to do it as part of my evaluation of their work for the classes.
What sort of wiki? If it’s a MediaWiki you can easily view students’ participation based on what changes they’ve made. Blog posts and comments are both easily tracked as an RSS feed. A Moodle, on the other hand, allows you to see a log of everything a student has done, right down to what pages they visited, when, and for how long.
Likewise, you could add a participation log to the students’ requirements for the course and have them do the work for you.
Rohan, I use PBworks for almost all of my wiki needs, and it is very easy to see what changes each individual has made to the wiki, just as Ryan suggests for MediaWiki. But since I don’t have the time or desire to do that either, I build in a component of self- and group-evaluation into my wiki assignments. Toward the end of the assignment, students have to write me an email and score themselves and all group members on a 1-10 scale for how they contributed. They also have to write me a few sentences about why they gave this particular score. I will occasionally review records, but I’ve found that the self-evaluations are more or less what I would give myself.
Also, depending on your wiki tool, I wonder if it would be possible to get an RSS feed of all page changes?
could you say a little more about the blog-related assignments? i can describe how I do things (1 class w/ 46 students blogging & commenting, 1 class w/ 18 students blogging & commenting) but only if it’s actually helpful based on your set-up. (IOW, I’ll spare y’all the details unless it’s relevant).
Thanks, everyone, already! I’m using PBWorks and I know I can see the individual changes as part of the list of recent activity, though I’m not sure how far back the tracking records go, so I should check that: if I fall behind, how risky is it that I won’t be able to catch up? I am trying to note each contribution to “gardening” in order to rate them as to how active and helpful they are. Brian, I like your suggestion of having them do some of this–though it’s not hard in theory just to put a check next to their name each time you notice they have made an edit, in practice, with 25 students per wiki, that’s a lot of watching and noticing. I am keeping the email updates, and that may turn out to be my best backup if I lose track for a week or so. Next time I think I’ll be less quantitative in my rubric, but I knew they would be asking me “how often do I need to do this to get an A?”-type questions so I tried to spell it out. I suppose as much as anything it’s a question of making a routine of it–10 minutes at the end of the day to mark off who has done what would probably do it.
Julie, the blog is easier at this point as it is only a graduate seminar and I’m using Wordpress, which lets me track them in a range of ways. But I’d be interested in knowing how you mange this with your class of 46, in case I get ambitious enough to incorporate a blogging component in a larger class some other time.
PBWorks keeps all records of page edits in its page history. I have yet to see any expire. That might make it easier for you (or at least your document retention)!
I’d love some tips on managing assistants. For the first time in my teaching career, I have a work study student helping me out and now I feel this giant responsibility to fill up all 19 of her hours in ways that both help me and benefit her (more than just monetarily). I’m particularly curious if anyone has tried using an online scheduling program to assign tasks for an employee or intern, etc. I’m planning to share this student with other faculty members, and it would be great if we could all give her assignments through a tool like that… Anybody got tips?
So I’m teaching two sections of the same class. In the first section, nobody contributes during class discussion. In the second, we have a rollicking good time. I can’t figure out if I’m subconsciously shaping the sections, or if it’s just random. Driving me nuts.
It really might just be random. I think anyone who has taught for a few years has seen this happen in the same semester or in different ones. One class thinks a book is the best think ever written whereas another hates it with a passion. Sometimes, teaching two sections of the same course can feel like two preps.
This has, and is, happened to me and it just seems to be random.
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