. List all unfamiliar and important words and terms; look up and write out definitions._. Write in one or a few sentences your version of the author’s thesis or point of view._. List three or four important subtopics._. Pose a question about each reading that would lead to fruitful class discussion — a discussion you are prepared to lead, if called upon.At the end of the semester, these wiki-notes, when combined with blog posts, blog comments, and forum comments, will constitute the final student-constructed learning journal. Students are encouraged to work on their journals for a small amount of time each week throughout the semester, while doing their readings. Toward the end of the semester, students are encouraged to edit, embellish, and/or augment their journals — employ narrative or pose an argument. If you know more now than you did when you made the original post or note, then here’s your chance to improve on your performance. Make your case to the instructor that you’ve learned enough about the course topics to earn a high grade.
CREATE A MAINTAIN A PERSONAL LEARNING JOURNAL IN YOUR PERSONAL WIKI PAGES
At the end of the quarter, you will have the opportunity to present yourself in your best light and demonstrate how you have engaged both theory and practice. Use your wiki pages to organize a learning journal in any way you’d like to organize it — by theme, date, syllabus, or other schema. Use your blog posts and comments, your contributions to email list discussions, your forum posts, your class notes on your personal wiki as the raw material. Feel free to improve it and expand upon it. Show what you’ve thought and learned. Feel free to tell a story, argue a case, examine a philosophical question, challenge an assumption. Have fun. Get serious. Teach yourself something.
INDIVIDUAL CLASS NOTE TAKING
Use the wiki to take notes of the most important points that arise in class sessions from lectures, discussions, guests, demonstrations, lab exercises. You shouldn’t try to be exhaustive, but should strive to use the least keystrokes to capture the most important substance of each class discussion. Link as you think. That is, if you think there is a significant resource in this syllabus or elsewhere on the web that could enrich your notes, designate keywords as anchors as you write, and then later add URLs for make working links. These entries will be raw material for your learning notebook, and they will also be your individual contributions to a collective enterprise — the aggregation of individual notes into a refactored group-authored notes page for each class.
Refactoring: aggregating individual notes
Before each class session meets, a different team of two students will work together during the week to refactor (aggregate, fit together, edit slightly, expand if necessary) the individual notes taken during the last class session by all the students. Edit the syllabus wiki to sign up to refactor the notes for each class session, two students per session. Each team should complete its refactoring of the previous class session before the next class session meets.
Participation is required. This is a class about both the theory and the practice of online social communication, and each student is expected to engage the texts, the instructor, and classmates in regular, ongoing, substantial discussion about the subject matter — online as well as in person. Each student is required to post two blog posts, one substantial comment on another student’s blog, one personal wiki note for each reading; later in the semester, the blogging requirement will be replaced by a requirement to make two substantial forum posts each week. Although these posts and comments each stand alone, they will also constitute the raw material for a student-constructed learning journal. Grades reflect the quality and regularity of classroom leadership and participation, online blogging and posting, team projects, a final exam, and the final draft of the personal learning journal.
