Online teaching is funky. The students complain sometimes that it’s harder than face to face because they have to make time for it, and I always tell them that if they’d take a Tuesday night class then make Tuesday night the time for working on my online class. Of course, I don’t take my own advice. We don’t work that regularly, but the one constant is communication. Perhaps we don’t grade every deadline, but maybe we grade every other. But always remember to keep in communication. Shelley likes to remind everyone that there’s always that one student who is a luddite and is stuck in an online tech course. We both think there should be some warning in the course catalogue, but these are the students you work with. You sit down and help.

I sat down tonight to work on my 8 week course. Yes, I have a course that’s only 8 weeks but boy is it intense! Now, I have students in that class who have NEVER CHECKED IN! Nada. Never. Ooooops. I’ve tried to call many of them (1 disconnected phone, 3 voice mails, 1 ring ring ring), but nothing. For the people I have tried and tried to get ahold of and totally failed, I finally dropped. I don’t feel too badly. It’s been 5 weeks!!! The class only has 3 more weeks. Bye bye. If they’ve logged in atleast, then they stay.

Problem is (and it’s controversial) is that some students will never work on a class. They just log in to get the student aid. They’re ok failing it for who-knows-why. Some opinions are to let them stay and fail, while other people balk that it’s our taxpaying money putting them through school & it’s being wasted. What do you think?

I knew that if I stayed at work today I wouldn’t get my Eng 101 online course written. I’ve felt so unmotivated this week. Shelley and I met to work on this class last weekend, and we worked for a good five hours, but now I can’t do anything. I’ve been almost frozen from working on it, and she’s had a worse week than me. Finally I took off during my release time to do work somewhere else. There’s a local coffee shop near work (since I need to go back for my daughter from daycare), so I went there. Been sitting here for 2 hours now, and yes I got some work done, but not the important work. I forgot my text book.

The most important two things to do are: 1) flesh out the modules (hence needing the book!), and 2) set up the online web portal through the publisher. Shelley worked on this, and she’s in a meeting. I am working on some other smaller parts, like writing grading criteria and sample assignments. This will gone for another half an hour before I pick up Claire and head home. I can work more tonight, tomorrow and then finish things on Sunday (morning?).

Last night I was grading and went to refresh Google docs. Suddenly everything looked a little different, and I suddenly realized they made a format change that gave me several options I’d been praying for before bed for months. Where to begin?

Page breaks – Google docs now let’s the user set his or her own page breaks, which really helps me break up really long documents.

Horizontal Rule Breaks - This is an old school formatting style that also helps break up sections, but you don’t see it that much anymore.

Label colors – just like in gmail labels, you can now color code your Google doc labels! Woohoo! For optimum use, color them the same as the gmail labels to which they correspond (e.g. all emails from English 101 people are labeled “Eng101″ and are red in color. all docs and spreadsheets from English 101 people are labeled “Eng101″ and  are read in color) Woot!

Attach doc – Now you can attach your currently opened Google doc directly to an outgoing Gmail.

Owner options – You can change ownership of docs, so if you are quitting an ongoing project, etc…

Text format Styles – You can now format text headers like Titles with H1, H2, H3, etc… which correlate nicely to word processing programs to create Table of Contents.

Now I think what I haven’t seen, but I’d like is the ability to select multiple files and archive them all into a zip file automatically. I have old class files I will probably never need again, and I’d like them off Google docs, but I don’t want to do download them one at a time. Ugh!

Earlier today I had a meeting at MCC about a multimodal English 101 course I am developing, and we’re building this course specifically in Web 2.0. This is a Freshman Composition course… not necessarily a writing course. It doesn’t say it’s a writing course, and even though we will write in the class, it’s more like Michael Wesch said when students may write 10-20 pages of formal writing for a class, but while taking that class the students may write 500 pages of email alone. Composing artifacts for a course does not denote formalized printed, styled papers waiting for copious red marks. Tonight in my meeting I shared Alan Levine’s 50+ Ways to Tell a Web 2.0 Story which is a list of Web 2.0 tools that a user can use to tell the same story over and over again with different tools and from different perspectives. When we talk about multimodality, this is a large part of that. Now with any move towards new technology, you need to convince the paper and pencil people, so a written analysis that details the rhetoric utilized will be submitted, but what will that look like? During a pilot session, I think it will look more like a paper, but later who knows…