Teaching, Learning, Blogging

Oops. I've been a bad, bad blogger. I've been working on some assessment issues for the Writing Room over the past couple days and tried to escape from the laptop pilot for a bit. Nonetheless, I should go over some preliminary issues that have popped up over the past several weeks . . . and months.

I want to give an update regarding one of my primary concerns with the laptop pilot, specifically the administrative issues asssociated with such a project for entering first-year students.

First, I suspect that once the "college students to be" hear that one section of English 101 will come with a shiny new laptop computer (even if for just one semester), there will be a registration "run" on that section. I'm not sure if that is a good thing or a bad thing, though. The first incoming students to register (although I think one person has already registered for the 8am Tuesday, Thursday section) will do so during July orientation . . . July 19th, I think. Then they will go back home to their family and friends and will not be back on campus until classes begin or a few days before. That leaves us little time to decide how we want to approach and schedule the mandatory workshop in which we will meet these students, give them their laptops and explain the expectations. Then again, it gives us plenty of time between the time they register and classes start to contact them. Hmmmmmm . . . Well, I've decided to go ahead and help create this registration "run" by informing the Pacesetters and Faculty Facilitators of the laptop section. I have been drafting a document that spells out the expectations of the class and the laptop pilot. My hope is that the section will fill during July orientation, and we will have less to worry about come August. We'll see how the plan works.

Second andd perhapss more importantly from an administrative perspective, how many students who actually register for the class will finish it? Each Fall semester, between one and three students (sometimwes more) begin a section of English 101 and either drop it, transfer to another section or simply disappear. If these students have a university-owned laptop computer in their possession when they do so, matters get a little complicated. Also, and I just thought of this, what about the student who adds the section of English 101 to his/her schedule after a couple days of classes? Ugh. Frankly, although I will worry about this to a certain extent, I'm going to avoid "getting all bent" about it. I know other folks on campus who are much more concerned with this difficulty, and I'll trust them to take care of it. I need to concentrate on teaching--and assessing the progress of--the students in my classes.

Well, there is more, but I'll wait until later to share it.

This is a little test from the home front.

It took me some time this afternoon, but I figured out how to ftp this blog to our campus server. Once I figured out how to do it, I was yet again dazzled by my own stupidity for having any trouble in the first place. Anyway, the process seems relatively simple to present to students, but I'm not sure if we will be using the campus server or the "blogspot" server for the student blogs.

Regardless, students in AEGL 101-26 will be keeping a blog; I'm just not sure how we will apply the blog quite yet, and a lot of that depends upon where the blogs will be stored. For example, we might use them as straightforward blogs to replace the required journal, in which case, we wouldn't need much. On the other hand, students may be able to use their blogs as their entire electronic portfolios ("webfolios"). If this is the case, we would probably want to have them located on our campus server to allow more freedom for images, media files, etc. A lot of this, of course, depends upon whether or not students (or Blogger) will have access to our campus www server. I'm not sure I care. I just want to make some decisions. I've emailed Michael, Jeff and Tom to see what they have to say.

I promise to get this blog caught up on what has happened over the past serveral months leading up to today. As I was working on the web site, though, I decided that I needed to clean up the server and play with the blog a bit more. In short, I was distracted . . . ugh.

Okeedokee. I've created the blog with which I'm going to lament and celebrate all the frustrations and triumphs associated with USCA's English 101-26 for the Fall 2003 semester. Thanks to a grant from the State of South Carolina, USC Aiken was awarded funding for what we've come to call the "Ubiquitous Campus Computing Project." As part of that project, much of the campus will be wireless, and students in my AEGL 101 class (section 26) will be assigned laptops for the duration of the semester.

I've already made some important decisions about the class and will share my thinking about them as soon as I get a chance. In the meantime, I will be using this blog to track the development of the course. I hope this blog will be most useful when we are assessing the Student Laptop Pilot sometime in 2004.