1st anniversary and work

Today is Blas and Loren's first wedding anniversary! We will celebrate with some friends tonight. So I am working hard to finish up some projects before the dinner

I'm trying out a new (to me) web-based Course Management System (CMS) called Moodle. It is supported by the University, but is available for free more widely, and in many languages. One of the virtues of such a CMS is that I can give students access to articles, videos, and other material in a way that does not violate the Fair Use terms of copyright (because the site is only open to the participants). This means I can include more than books and article, and also that I can point students toward resources for research that exist online.

I decided to use Moodle instead of a previous type of CMS called WebVista because the interface (the instructions to the students, etc) can be set up in Spanish, not just English. It also has more tools of the type I am interested in; in addition to a discussion forum, for example, each student can also have a private blog, that I can view but other students cannot, that can serve as a journal. This way students can post to the forum and read each other's ideas, but also keep a journal of the type I used to have turn in in paper form. I've found that a journal with weekly entries is a great way to see if the students are doing the work I've assigned because they have to engage with it in order to write about it. The open discussion gives students a chance to talk to each other, in Spanish, outside of class but about class topics; they can use it to prepare for the discussion, develop ideas they'll use in their writing, and learn from each other's experiences and expertise, not just from me. Moodle also allows one to set up writing workshops where students can do peer review, form groups so students can work together online and develop multimedia projects that they can post for others (podcasts, powerpoint, video, text documents, images).

I'm trying to keep my sites simple and clean, since this is the first time I'm using them, and not load on to many bells and whistles. I don't want to create busywork for students, and I also need to be able to manage this effectively.

I've spent the last two days racing to put the finishing touches on the site because I now have to finish writing this paper for the conference I'm going to in Ireland (yay!) and all of this has to be done by Monday night because I'll be on the road until the night before classes start. I know there will be things to tweak on the sites, but they are more or less done, or done enough for now.

I'm working of finishing the paper, but I think I need to take a break, take a walk, or my brain will stop working.