New 2010 Class of "Using the Social Web for Social Change"

The week my new 2010 class of "Using the Social Web for Social Change" began. I have 20 registered students (however, two haven't show up in class yet), and because of the popularity of the class last year, I have a number of auditing students.

My biggest challenge this year is that I'm trying to practice what I preach to my fellow teachers, i.e. move my lectures as much as possible out of Elluminate and Intensives and into other media allowing for more interaction, and to make this course open courseware available to other institutions that wish to teach students to effectively affect social change.

A challenge that I wasn't prepared for is that I'm not able to use last year's schedule as-is, which I thought would be a time saver. Instead, this year we only have one Elluminate before the intensive, whereas we had two before last year. As the course is front-loaded, this means that our students are a little less prepared that last years. Also, with my goal of having students post in a public blog by Blog Action Day on October 15th, I'm having to adjust my course plan around a bit.

Another other big difference this year are the number of students in the class who want to use social web for local communities — I'll probably shorten one of the less relevant topics to this class (such as wiki) and add more about geo-local social web.