Over the course of the term, I’ve maintained a list of ideas on “what I would do differently next time”. I thought I’d share some of them here and invite your feedback, so do leave a comment & let me know what you think. And if you have some of your own ideas to share, please do!

  • Allow course participants to blog anonymously. I apologize for not making this an option this term - I honestly didn’t think about it until a colleague suggested it to me. Do you think you would have preferred to blog anonymously (or pseudonymously)?
  • Create short screencasts for some of the more complex tools (like Feed2JS & RSS2HTML).
  • Consider doing a couple of class chats during the term. This term, everyone did a tremendous job with the weekly blogging, and I saw a lot of interesting discussions develop via comments & across blogs, but I’ve been thinking that a couple of synchronous meetings (over IM or Skype) would provide an opportunity to connect in real time that we didn’t have this term.
  • Add optional podcasts to the reading list for the auditory learners in the class. There’s a wealth of LIS podcasts out there that we could have made better use of this term.
  • Set the due date for the Final Paper Proposal later in the term (I realize that having the Proposal due a week after the Blog Review was a bit much!)
  • Send course participants a “progress report” on their blogging half-way through the term. Since I don’t have strict guidelines on what I’m expecting from the weekly blog posts, I thought it would be a good idea to give students an idea of how they’re doing mid-term (something else I thought of too late this term! My apologies).

Thoughts? Comments? Other ideas? I’d love to hear them!