Dear Group,
I am not finished with my OpenLab site, but it is operating. Overall, I have really enjoyed being in on the first iteration of OpenLab. The staff who have helped us have been excellent: patient and knowledgeable. Here is a link to my site:
http://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/fall11-comp1-5359/
I have three goals in mind with this site for my composition 1 course. First, I want students to have a stable “place” to go each day as a resource–one that is interesting and ever-changing. Second, I want students to be active digital writers, by which I mean that students should gather information from their other learning community courses and share information–text, images, sound, design. Writing digitally will be interesting and perhaps trying as a teacher, but it will also be memorable for the whole class (and for each student). And third, I want to try to get the class to think about Gen Ed and our learning community in concrete ways. I want to discuss their understanding of Gen Ed, and I want them to reflect on what and how they are learning during the semester (epistemology!). To that end, I’ve put Gen Ed on my menu bar–and I have taken a stab at defining it. Like it? Then take it!–just give me credit if you take the whole thing.
My site emphasizes resources for writers and for new City Tech students in general. Please take any of these Student Resources if you think they will help. I like my rss feeds: Thanks to Charlie and to Karen and John for those ideas. I had fun working on the header–thanks Bree. I’ve come up short on an explicit document of SLO. But my Course Policy is a working draft toward those goals.
As I worked on the site and tried to wrestle with grant vocabulary, I was reminded of a largely forgotten poet who once said: “Am running at full speed and likely to emit folly.” –Ezra Pound.
A little folly is necessary if you want to experiment with something new.
Cheers,
Sean
