Course thoughts for outside consultants

Here's my Information Technology & Society course as it's currently taught. There is an enrollment of 22 (3 students have dropped the course); in previous years enrollment has reached the ceiling of 30.

Syllabus

Overview

Students in this course will get a grip on computer technology, how it's used to disseminate information (and the trustworthiness of that process), and how this all affects the society of which we are a part.

Topix :

email, course management, browsing and searching the web, building web site, enhancing photos, producing presentations, crunching numbers

Tools:

squirrel, moodle, mozilla firefox, macromedia dreamweaver, adobe photoshop, ms powerpoint, ms excel

Pedagogic :

assignment journal, discussion forum, peer assessment workshop, working groups, shared web site

Higher order thinking (Bloom):

Cultivate an awareness of Internet hazards from hoax or fraud to phishing & viruses, critique own & other's web sites and articulate statements in a non threatening way, co-operate in a group to create a web site that assesses the social impact of a recent I.T development .

Specifics

week #	Topic	day	sub-topic	homework / project
1	Introductions	Thur	Syllabus, files & finding, screen dump & saving	h/w
2	Email & Moodle	Mon	Squirrel Email	h/w
		Thur	Intro to Moodle - hoax & phishing	h/w
3	Moodle Formatting & Tools	Mon	Formatting Moodle journal entries with htmlarea	h/w
		Thur	Moodle Tools : Glossary & Workshop
4	Browsing & searching with Firefox	Mon	Browser basics & configuration	h/w
		Thur	Searching & Finding on the web	h/w
5	Dreamweaver, HTML tags & Lists	Mon	Intro to Dreamweaver, practice HTML codes
		Thurs	Lists and links	Project stage 1 : choose topics
6	Links, tables & graphic images	Mon	Links & tables	h/w
		Thurs	graphics & html	P Stage 2 : annotated web resources
7	HTML page practice	Mon	format text with html tags	h/w. P Stage 3 : glossary, outline
		Thurs	MIDTERM
8	Styles & stylesheets	Mon	Introduction to styles	h/w
		Thurs	Styling links & lists	h/w. Proj stage 4: first draft
9	Floats - images & menus	Mon	Floating Image & caption and list	h/w
		Thurs	Work on project web site
10	Simple web site design - project final stage	Mon	Markup project html
		Thurs	Apply color scheme with styles	Proj stage 5: group work
11	Digital images and the web	Mon	Scanning & Photoshop
		Thurs	Enhancing images with Photoshop	Proj stage 6: final submission
12	Introduction to Powerpoint	Mon	Basic principles of good slideshow design
		Thurs	Practicing slide design	h/w
13	Advanced Powerpoint	Mon	Evaluate presentations
		Thurs	Tables & charts	h/w. PPT project
14	Excel Introduction	Mon	Excel basics
		Thurs	Excel Intro #2
15	Intermediate Excel	Mon	Formulae & charts
		Thurs	downloading & importing data. More charting	Excel test
	EXAM		Multiple choice & practical

Next year

• I'd like to make more space to cover 'society' issues such as the credibility of information on the web (and have students engage in assessing this). I'd also like to spend time in assessing the usability and accessibility of web sites and have students articulate their critiques of web sites in a non-threatening way.
  To make space for this I'd like to drop the two weeks I spend with Excel.
• It seems to me that the level of work I require does justify this course being relabelled as a 200 or 300 level course. In practice, first years can manage the course - indeed they often perform better than their more experienced peers because they make sure to do all their assigned work.
• Currently I have students working in groups to do their major project. When the group gels this seems to work well. However, there have been major personality clashes or students just opting out and this interferes with what can be accomplished. I am toying with having student do individual projects and use groups for discussion forums.
• Next year I will have students subscribe to 'Wired' magazine (at $12 a year, this is cheap) and subscribe to the Webreference email list and then make these resources the subject of group discussion forums.

Posted by markp at November 10, 2004 04:12 PM | TrackBack