Above is no whiteboard shot because of a shift in focus this week. In keeping with the initial syllabus (a revision of which I'll post tomorrow), we are now in research mode. We have a GooDoc devoted to bibliographic information about strong academic sources we might use for our collaborative writing project. Most of last night's session was devoted to presenting those sources.
Prior to the research presentations, I wanted to take some time to discuss last week's reflections. However, there wasn't much discussion to be had. Beyond a couple persistent concerns that I hope will be addressed as our research and writing progress, a clear majority of students were uninterested in talking about changing/switching roles/responsibilities. Instead, they just wanted to get to work. I acknowledge and appreciate this collective desire and drive, though I would have liked to see more evidence in the research presentations that followed.
To write that some presentations last night were rough is perhaps a kind understatement. And while helpful on an individual basis, e.g., preparing a presentation forces us to read articles and gather important points for the purposes of talking about them, I'm unsure of how helpful last night's presentations were to the project overall. Due to the roughness, there wasn't much time or opportunity for discussing the sources presented.
In light of this, I assigned some additional work this week, work that should serve both research and writing progress. In addition to the bibliographic information already provided in the GooDoc, I'm asking for a 3-5 sentence summary, 3-5 pertinent quotes, and 3-5 chapter-related tags per source. This supplemental information should help us in considering not only which sources might work best with a given chapter but also in the interest of time as we may be unable to read for ourselves each source in the research pool.
With the GooDoc not all that conducive to finding one source over another, I was glad that JS volunteered to create an online space that should better facilitate our research and writing: http://researchpool.wordpress.com/ I anticipate the tags to be the most helpful at this point as we're just now seeing what's available for chapter integration.
For next week's presentations, I'm also placing some more stringent requirements: no words on the slides, only images. Given last night's roughness, I'm also expecting more polished, practiced presentations, but we shall see.