Preparing for Week 2

I'm being challenged this week to try to teach the world of blogging and the blogosphere in a single presentation and a couple of weekdays for the students to read them before the first BGI Intensive begins. There is lots of material all over the internet on blogs, but it is scattered all over the place, and much of it is very dated. Trying to wean it down to essentials for the students, and then figure out what is important that is missing to place elsewhere in the course has been difficult.

Also a challenge that half the students are relatively new to social media, and there are some basic skills that I want to teach. I wasn't happy with any of the existing web pages on good passwords, so I wrote my own on Password Best Practices. Ideally I think these skills, plus skills like Social Bookmarking should be taught early on to first-year MBA students, allowing this class to focus on more advanced skills.

I also need to write an article on on basic username and personal brand name usage, but the students need to have their personal brand strategy figured out first, which is a discussion during the Intensive.

First Elluminate Session

Monday was my first session teaching with the Elluminate eLearning software. I was well prepared for the session with a good concise set of slides introducing the course, my Scan Focus Act approach, Shared Language, and Social Bookmarking, but discovered last minute that my slides were too large to be uploaded to Macintosh version of Elluminate. Ended up showing them in screen sharing mode, which doesn't work great with multiple monitors and Mac OS X's Spaces functionality. However, it seemed to work out OK. Next time I'll try exporting to PowerPoint and have Amy upload it using the PC version of Elluminate.

I've been in quite a few Same-Time Different-Space collaborative environments, but I found Elluminate somewhat sterile. Although most all the students were there there it still felt like I was reading my presentation to a blank screen rather then speaking to an audience. I think it is the lack of continuous audio (you have to "press a button" to speak). I think it made my talk a little stilted, but we'll see. I also need to figure out how to get the students more actively involved — there is a chat backchannel, but it wasn't used extensively.

As I want this course to be open course, another challenge is going to be exporting the Elluminate session as some type of video. There is replay functionality, but it requires Elluminate and a BGI account. I think I may be able to screen record the replay to get the class into a video that I can publish.

Working on the "Using the Social Web for Social Change" Syllabus

Working on the syllabus for my BGI (Bainbridge Graduate Institute) course on "Using the Social Web for Social Change".

I have a pretty good handle on what I want to teach in the course, but I'm also intimidated by the amount of material I'm asking the students to cover in just 12 weeks. So much of it is going to just be a "survey" of the surface of the field. But it will give them all a good start, and the real important part of the class is the action learning they will be doing with blogs and social media projects.

I'm also uncertain about different pedagogy approaches. My teaching experience is largely as a coach rather then to a class of 25 students. Thus I tend to favor a more interactive approach. I have tried to build that somewhat into the course, but I don't have a good handle on what works and what will not.