Writing about teaching the greatest open course on the interwebs.
My class of ds106 UMW students are off and running. If anyone sees them, tell them to keep going. The semester start pulls at both ends for me. It’s exciting to bring a new group of (now 26) into the fold; at the same time it is daunting to realize that they are starting from […]
(a copy of this just sent to my UMW students) cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by David Reeves Attention ds106 Bootcampers! At ease. Despite how overwhelmed you might feel 4 days into this class, let me assure you that you are all fine, and either on track or ahead of the […]
(lazily copy/pasted/cross-posted drom ds106) cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by mbecher As another open resource for my UMW ds106 students, but open to anyone who is taking on ds106, I am trying a concept of an online open laboratory. Each week I am doing the same assignments I ask of […]
Now a few clicks over a year old, the ds106 Daily Create is a core part of our digital storytelling class at UMW. Almost a year ago, we discovered an accidental attribute; on January 25, 2012, TDC 17 was one shared by @noiseprofessor was to do a video: Show us your keychain and tell us […]
cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by B_Zedan Ripping the page out of the Jim Groom playbook (again), and as I did when I taught ds106 the first time last Spring in parallel to him, here I share the class evaluations from the Fall 2010 section of ds106. Frankly I love […]
cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog A bit earlier I looked into my rear view mirror at last semester’s ds106 class I taught online for the University of Mary Washington. Since then I have been deep inide the bowls of the ds106 ship, doing quite a bit of organizing and […]
Just so my students who start ds106 starting tomorrow know who they are dealing with! There is still time to drop, ha ha.
cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog
Here comes the requisite apology for late blogging…
I had plans to write up some reflections on the past semester of ds106; this is part 1 of a series, in the next one I hope to look out the front windshield to some ideas for the next iteration of the class I am teaching at UMW starting January 14.
Some summary I’ve assembled from my section (I reelly like using Storify for this):
This was the most highly functioning groups of students I have had this year. I saw more than a few of them really pick up the level of writing to be more than reporting “this is my assignment” but where they were thinking and reflecting on it. I’m going to sprinkle a few quotes from them as this post grows legs.
And my last bit of advice, start early. Start early on the assignments and start early asking for help. The professors are more than helpful and have lightning fast responses compared to all those other dull professors you’ve had. Don’t fall behind, because as I’m finding out, from week one until week sixteen, it all builds off what you learn. And if you learn a lot, and understand what you’re doing, the assignments will be a lot easier and you won’t stay up all night trying to get your URL in by the deadline. Plus, start early on your summary. A good summary should take 45 mins ““ 1 hour to type up. That way you can explain what you did and why you did it. Take my advice and you will prevent hacking away at DS106 for hours and hours on Sunday and wishing you weren’t so stressed.
— http://rescuesgtsocks.com/2012/12/12/the-final-post/
First, I cannto say enough about parallel teaching with Martha Burtis; last summer we co-taught the Camp Magic Macguffin iteration of ds106. This past semester we each had our own section, but collaboratively planned each week so we were doing the same assignments- doing this while I was bopping around the country. We tried each week to publish a video review of the week’s work, our Tuesday Videos. We did these as one off ad-lib videos via Google Hangouts, used solely to record and publish the videos. Sometimes they went live within 5 minutes of ending the sessions.
The other big change (another Brilliant Idea from Martha) was our use of an LMS.
What?
Yes, we used Canvas– as a gradebook. The way we graded in the past was a large cumulative grading at the end, based on some general outline of percentages. The students never really knew where they stood. The new wrinkle was that each week students had to blog their weekly summaries, and that was a URL they would enter in the Canvas gradebook as a record of what they did that week.
cross-posted from ds106.us… This is something we usually ask our students to do near the end of the semester that we did not do for Fall of 2012… and in fact, I think its best done outside the scope of the class. It’s also something that any interested person who looks at, participates, or just […]
cc licensed ( BY ND ) flickr photo shared by ind{yeah} A rather annoying grain of sand in the ds106 machine of syndication is the loss of web sites when students give up their domains, or just obliterate their blogs after class. It’s a common theme of the distributed web, the stench of link rot […]
