RE: the above: I think these are excellent ideas that would be more applicable to a grad. course or a senior seminar. Not sure it's feasible to ask students to do this kind of heavy lifting in an intro. 100-level non-majors course.

I like all of these activities.

Two caveats: 1) student schedules and 2) Access to said technology. It has advanced for a lot of us . . . but not for all of us.

This is key. I call it low stakes.

I am happy with VoiceThread.

Interesting. But this section seems way too meta. Is there space in the calendar to do it justice given the learning objectives in most of our intro. classes?

Ugh.

Is this applicable to what we're doing at John Jay? I've made my weekly synchronous meetings optional, as per protocol, and students haven't participated much. Would prefer strategies for dealing asynchronously.

Neat idea for an icebreaker.

Not sure how much facility with social media enables students to learn online. Think it's something of a faux-pancea, honestly.

Indeed. This reminds me of Antonio Gramsci.

Certainly, but they must also know how the digital divide, and tech. limitations, complicates the situation for diverse populations. I wish that this issue was brought up more.

Yes. My wife teaches elementary school and this stuff is big in K-12.

This sounds great, and, when I was in grad. school I had a few small seminars of less than ten students where we "constructed" the course en-media-res, on the fly, with the instructor. I also think that Noam Chomsky is an advocate of this sort of method, but I'm wondering whether it's practical to make "constructing" the class part of the class in an intro. undergrad. non-majors course. And an online one at that. Certainly, it's a way to facilitate buy-in, but there are technological and time constraints at work too.

I just tried annotating this field of nothing.