On Teaching & Learning "Out Loud"

Well, today I had the pleasure of reviewing the work of the six people who participated in this Summer 2011 edition of Teaching with Technology. I've sent final evaluation messages with my thoughts and my thanks to each of them. And now it seems appropriate to reflect a bit on the way we conducted the course, and to speculate a bit about the future of this space.

Way back when the course started I posted some thoughts about what I had hoped the course blog would do in my overall plan for the course. Drawing on Krause's article "When Course Blogging Goes Bad," I put some optimism out there into the uni(blogo)versisphere. Now that we are on the other side of July (boo!), 120+ posts later, I can call it: success! We've not only used this space to share ideas, share responses to readings, offer statements of teaching philosophy, show sketches of what students' interactions might look like in online courses and other things. We've also created a resource that others out there may find useful.

If we have done this, do feel free to let us know. I hope that as we head into the Fall and some of us, at least, move on to our next teaching assignment, we will return here occasionally to post about our experiences. We might also share thoughts about a new tool or a new reading we come across.

I know I have a lot of cool new stuff to read that I've been gathering up all Summer. One on my list is a new book by a colleague of mine Brad Melenbacher called Instruction & Technology: Designs for Everyday Learning.

I'm also eager to try out this new drag & drop composing (blogging-esque) platform called WebDoc to see if it might have some legs for classroom use. Looks promising. I know there will be others...

If you are a fellow traveler - a teacher with technology - we hope you'll stop by, leave a comment, or maybe even do a guest post? Drop us a line! And thanks for listening as we learned out loud this semester.