*blows dust off the desktop*

The past few months have been some of the busiest of my life:  completing the encylcopedia was supposed to make things a little easier, but I had multiple conferences, three online writing classes, and a backlog of things that were sort of delayed because of the encyclopedia. But I can see the light at the end of the tunnel of the spring term, and while I'm still behind, I may survive.  I have been thinking long and hard about online teaching issues, as I finsh my second year of fulltime online teaching. 

The IT department has had new hires, and are doing wonderful things in getting out to talk to faculty and supporting innovative ways of online teaching. In theory, the new version of eCollege which is coming is supposed to address some of our concerns. They are looking into wikis, specifically hosting wiki software on the university's servers. I am going to get some training in a program that will allow real time talking through the computers to students: I think that will address the major gap in the online class environment when it comes to "library labs." I can answer their research questions directly. My graduate creative writing poetry class which will be taught online this summer for the first time will not have a paper textbook: instead, I am researching good resources for poets online which I'll assign students. I'll also ask them to find some good sites for a small percentage of their grade, and they can share those with their classmates.  While I plan to keep all the workshopping in the protected environment of eCollege, I am moving toward assigning reflective/reading journals online, rather than in eCollege where only I can respond to them. I have used LJ for this class work in the past, but am irked by the removal of the basic/ad-free accounts (very irked), and am thinking of using Blogger (recommended by a colleague who has her students blogging in her courses).

And that means I might actually find myself having a blog instead of only LiveJournals!