February 5, 2008

teaching tools

Posted by dogpossum on February 5, 2008 4:01 PM in the category teaching

So I'm all lined up to do some serious teaching next semester. The bit that I'm most interested in is coordinating the subject I did last semester. I'll be able to put together a reader that suits what I'm teaching, I'll get to rework some of my weaker lectures and tutorials, and I'll be able to redo the assessment. There's lots of admin work involved, but I'm actually not too bad at that stuff - MLX has made me strong. Plus I quite like the ob-con-ness of sorting and organising and making lists.
One of my first jobs will be getting some feedback from the sessional staff who taught with me on that subject last year. I want to know what worked, what didn't, what they'd like to see on the subject (or ditched).
The next job will be working through the lectures and reworking the weeks - dumping the dumb stuff, strengthening the good stuff, adding in some useful stuff that was missing last year. I'm aiming for your basic intro to media studies/communications/cultural studies subject, including some really safe, useful 'textual analysis tools' (this is something the department really wants), some stuff about media industries and some stuff about audiences. I'm (mentally) dividing the subject up into those three parts (n those that order), and hoping to have three manageable (and hopefully cumulative rather than discrete) pieces of assessment to go with each (though that's something that needs to be discussed).

I'd like a reader that had a greater emphasis on Australian cultural/media studies (especially in reference to the industry stuff... for obvious reasons), and including some more up-to-date readings (ie not stuff from the 80s... unless it's something particularly important or awesome).

I'm also keen on strengthening the weekly tutorial exercises. I'm ordinarily not the hugest fan of this stuff, but this type of weekly mini self-assessment is important and can be really useful. Putting together a comprehensive weekly exercise (which isn't too long) is also a nice way of making sure I structure my lectures properly (which I'm kind of anal about anyway), make the readings really relevant and giving the students an idea of the most important points in that week's topic.

All this is for a first year subject, so I have to keep it pretty simple. It also has to work as a 'teaser' for later subjects - it has to convince these guys in the general arts degree that media studies/cultural studies/communications is fun and interesting and useful.

I'm a big fan of multimedia components in the teaching and learning tools, but I was very unhappy with webct last year. I'm not sure it's a good idea to get into moodle or another hardcore online teaching tool. But I do think it's important to have some sort of online component, particularly for teaching across campuses, and teaching students who don't spend much time on campus.
I am thinking about just using a plain, simple blog. Something like this one (but obviously not this one) which is super easy to navigate, allows me to embed youtube clips, add in useful links, upload lecture notes, etc. I do have reservations about uploading lecture notes to a public forum, though. This is where it's actually a good idea to have a site where you must log in to get the good stuff.
I have considered other options like druple (bllurgh) and plone, but if I'm going that way, I really think I should use something designed for teaching - like moodle or webct. But I don't think it's a good idea to have students learn how to use a whole new system/site, just for one subject. And I'm not keen on learning myself - it's not really worth the effort.

I also think it's a good idea to use sites that students are already comfortable with. For obvious reasons. This of course leads us straight to faceplant and myspace. But I'm not happy with faceplant. I don't want to encourage students to use such a massive data-gathering business tool.

There is, however, the google option. Google docs is something we're considering using for MLX this year - a central collection point for files and discussions and email and things. But once again, it does require students learning a new system, signing up for new accounts and so on.

So my questions are:
- is it ok to use a blog where the lecture notes are public? My feeling is no.
- should I use something like plone which can have a public 'face' yet also requires students to log in to access notes?
- should I just suck it up and use webct?

All of this is very interesting and quite exciting. I'm looking forward to teaching with confidence material I know well, and to being able to strengthen what I've already done without starting from scratch. It'll also be nice to not be working to such a full-on, heinous schedule, writing lectures as I go through the semester.

Posted by dogpossum on February 5, 2008 4:01 PM in the category teaching