Today was another day that was especially bureaucratic... I need to remind myself that the Wednesday and Thursday of add/drop week are just crazy-making, and not just for me, but no doubt for the students too! Chasing down students who haven't done Orientation Week assignments, replying to all the students who want to enroll... very distracting. It was hard to find any real time to focus today!
Still, the blog groups are set up, and commenting can begin. I hope that will go well! One student ran into a strange snag with his Google account in Chrome (weird!) which interfered with commenting, but things turned out fine when he used Firefox. So, we'll see: I'll definitely be keeping an eye on the email this weekend in case people do run into problems.
I'll confess that this is the one place where the Blogger solution falls short of Ning: in Ning, the "Comment Wall" and the "reply back" features really made it easy to sustain conversations. I realized too late that I should have had people create a Comment Wall post immediately at their blog, so I will be sure to fix that next semester. It's a logical thing to ask them to do when the Week 4 Internet assignment rolls around, though, so I'll be sure to include it then. Better late than never!
And since bureaucracy wears me out like nothing else, that's all I have to say tonight for my course diary... but hoping for good adventures on Friday without all the add/drop distractions that really tugged at me both today and yesterday. Fingers crossed!
A bright spot today thanks to this marvelous article at Hybrid Pedagogy... I'll try to find some real time this weekend to comment on it in more detail! :-)
