if I could do it all again
Today I gave the final summary lecture to my class in Multimodal Design. Looking back over the semester, I see so many places where I should have done things differently. More than preparing the lecture, I wanted to plan next year's course. Right now, I think I know how it should have been done:
- Better examples in every lecture,
- less of Ulmer's Mystory, more about teaching digital literacy.
- taking advantage of the portfolio assessment, letting students do even more assignments
- remove the assignment that everything should be unified, but instead allow many different stylistic experiments
- having a small assignment early on to bring everyone up to scratch with HTML (a Career Discourse perhaps, as in Ulmer's Mystories)
- try harder to get students to cooperate, forming teams that can have fun together
- update my CSS tutorial, and telling students to use it
- tell students from week to week what I expect them to be doing
- focus more on video: let one of the assignments be to create several video nodes for youtube or something similar. Invite documentary makers to talk.
Let's hope my teaching wasn't completely hopeless, and that I will take notes today, so it can in fact be better next year.