There
are 5 subsections:
I
am working on a PC-based platform (currently, an NT system with Microsoft Office
Pro 2000). Obviously, you can read the
Web using any platform. But you will
find that some of the units have spreadsheet templates embedded within them. These templates are downloadable, if your
software can use or convert Excel spreadsheets.
You will find a highlighted hyperlink within the text; click on it and
your Web browser (I use Netscape) will begin downloading it for you. If you cannot download it, you can construct
your own templates (the formats are all given in the unit), although you will
probably find it time-consuming.
You
should send your assignments to me as attachments in an e-mail. My preference is for a Word document in PC
format. If you do not use that software,
then attach it as a text file (preferably an “.rtf” file to preserve as much of
your formatting as possible). Most
e-mail software has an icon for attaching files; clicking on the icon calls a
prompt which asks you to specify the drive and the name of the file you wish to
attach.
We
will mostly communicate in this class through e-mail (one-to-one or, sometimes,
one-to-many) and the Discussion section in D2L (one-to-many). In the first week of the class, I will send a
group e-mail to everybody welcoming you to the course. Save this e-mail! You can then reply to it (and copy the reply
to all recipients of the original e-mail) if you want to send something to each
of us, or you can refer to it for the e-mail address of any one of your classmates
(you can also get the same information from D2L). I will, from time to time during the course,
send announcements to each of you using group e-mail.
The
Discussion section on D2L is a place to post messages (just like a physical
bulletin board) that are addressed to anyone who might have some response (but
you don’t know exactly who that might be).
This is the place to post your puzzlement as you try to work through a
particularly obtuse description in one of the units (obtuse? Moi?!) Or to post your “
I
will monitor the Discussion Board, but I consider it primarily your space and will not necessarily
participate in it. I will try to respond
to my e-mail at least daily during the week, but sometimes when I am away from
the office I cannot easily get access to the ‘Net and I may be offline for a
few days (I will let you know when that is going to happen). I will also try to check my e-mail at least
once during the weekend, but my family are permitted
to invoke their right to see me at least some
of the time.
A
class is more than just reading the notes and doing the assignments. Often we learn more by listening to each
other puzzle through an issue, or from seeing a pattern in how each of us
individually is reading (or maybe mis-reading)
something, or from struggling to express our ideas to a diverse group who come
to our ideas with different styles and levels of comprehension. If this is going to happen, we will have to
create a sort of virtual community—we will have to be introduced to each other,
come to know each other, and then come to trust each other (at least, if any of
us is going to risk exposing our ignorance to the rest).
As
a first step in this direction, each of you will create a profile, a
self-portrait as it were, on the Web.
The profile should include your picture, your e-mail address, and as
many particulars as you think are helpful for your classmates to get to know
you. If you already have a resume or a
portfolio on the Web, you may use that (if it has a picture); or you may create
something specifically for this course.
As MSU students, you all have the opportunity to create your
personal webpage on the University’s server. My portfolio, by the way, is at http://krypton.mnsu.edu/~tony/welcome.html
.
The
easiest way to get a digital photo of yourself is to
download a portrait from a digital camera.
Or you could scan a favorite photo into your computer. If you don’t have a scanner (I don’t, but
then I still listen to vinyl records), you can use the one in the multimedia
lab in the University’s
To
complete this unit, your second assignment (I will come back to this in the
“Assignments” section) will be to send the address of your profile to everyone
in the class. “Here’s lookin’ at ya.”
You are concerned with my assessment of your
work, because it will eventually be transformed into a grade for this
course. I am concerned with your
assessment of this course because I am learning from it just as you are (both
about how to teach applied analysis and about how to teach on the Web). It is important that our assessments focus on
outcomes as well as perceptions—effort counts, but so do results.
We
both have e-mail as one ch
But
I will also provide an anonymous survey site on D2L at the end of the course. This site will take your comments as data and
dump them straight into a database—it is completely anonymous. Teaching is hard enough when you have to
interpret the body language and facial expressions of students arrayed before
you (what are they thinking in the
back row? And why are they sitting way
back there?). But teaching on the Web is
a real exercise in “mushroom management” (you know—keep him in the dark and
feed him horse manure). Think of the
anonymous survey site as the virtual equivalent of body language. There are 3 questions I would particularly
ask you to consider:
·
How well is this mode of teaching/learning working for you?
·
How well is the teacher taking advantage of the opportunities this mode
of instruction offers?
·
What future applications do you anticipate for the particular unit you
are studying? (In other words, What are you
going to do with this in real life?)
Each
unit has a “beginning” date listed on the Calendar. You can do your work on any schedule to which
we agree (more about this in the “Assignments” section). But I ask that you use the Discussion Board
primarily to discuss the unit that is current at the time. Otherwise, the Board will become clotted with
a complex skein of threads before we get halfway through.
Also,
the course must eventually come to an end.
I will do everything I can to stay current with your e-mail messages
during the course. When the course is
complete I would still welcome your questions and comments and new insights
(nothing is more gratifying to a teacher than evidence that learning is
continuing after the class is over), but I may not be able to be as prompt as I
once was.
© 1996 A.J.Filipovitch
Revised 11 March 2005