whoever owns it, someone expects you to have it

Being responsible for one's website is our responsibility.  Along with a range of useful and gimicky tools, Blackboard has improved the tool that lets instructors back up their courses.  Not only can you export (not taking some parts of student work -- useful for porting a class to the next semester) and archive (taking the whole thing), instructors can fine tune the archiving, deciding which parts of the course to include.  Once you begin the archiving/exporting, Bb-Learn dutifully performs the function in the background and emails a notice when it is done.  The instructor simply returns to the tool's page and downloads the zip archive.  (There's little point in doing the backup and then leaving it only on the Bb site)

Yes, we could rely on IT's help in rebuilding a course.  I don't know the wait time for that sort of trouble ticket.  And I don't want to find out.  I'd much rather rely on my own backup.

When I am teaching a course, I routinely perform a backup every couple days -- at least once a week.  In between, I always download and save all student submissions.  I avoid using the gradebook for anything more than a way to notify students of their running point totals.  The data exists and is manipulated on my PC using Excel.  So worst case -- the system crashes and we revert to a 2 week old backup.  I'd see what was missing in terms of files and upload them from my computer.  And I'd automatically rebuild the gradebook from the Excel files as I do anyway.

Students don't want to hear excuses about how you lost their grades ... and you don't want to face a Learn-meltdown, especially in the last weeks of a course.

I should add that the worst I've heard of (and it was years ago) was that a patch to the system failed and IT had to bring down the system and run the backup from right before the patch was applied.  These days, we often lag behind the Learn patches because IT uses test systems for almost everything.  By the time we see a patch, it has succeeded on the test machines.  That doesn't help when Bb itself has bugs, but most often, it doesn't cause data loss -- just loss of functionality -- which Bb seldom admits to!

In any case, an important part of using Internet tools is making sure they are stable and you can restore student grades if there are problems.  As instructors we can't rely on or blame others if we don't keep backups.

How do you compose?

Our discussion board comments about working from a script for the podcast got me to thinking about how we compose.  What do we need under our feet to begin writing?  and what habits make us efficient?

On one hand, we could think in terms of location and situation.  Several of the 19th C American writers (Hawthorne comes to mind) wrote standing up.  They mounted a desktop on the wall and created a mechanism that allowed it to be adjusted to various angles.  After seeing Hawthorne's in the 70s, I made one and used it for several years, through my BA and MA.  It's now lost to history.  Hemingway used to compose at a Royal typewriter perched on a dresser bookshelf in his bedroom/study.  Perhaps more significant for Hem was that the whole thing was on the outskirts of Havana, Cuba.

A slightly different approach to the writing situation is the writing ambience: quiet or music, coffee, alcohol, or something more illegal.  Many of my students think this approach is very important.  They must have music playing .... until they are forced to write while sitting on the floor in a hallway in Satterfield.

A variation that I indulge in is handwritten, typed or word-processed.  Who insists on typing any more?  Maybe some of us elders, but many of us have been using a computer for 30 years, that typing is probably reserved for envelopes ... if even then.

Sometimes, my choice is a matter of speed: can I type as fast as I can make notes?  Usually.

If we think about the podcast, there is another option that I don't think many of us use -- dictating to the computer.  Of course you could purchase one of the Dragon Naturally Speaking programs (that lie behind the iPhone's transcription tool)  -- but from then until you tell them to stop, you'll be bothered by monthly calls to upgrade to the next minor release at the special price of $99.  I'm not sure about newer Mac OSs, but since Win7, there has been a similar routine in the OS itself.  Activate it, train it (takes a little longer than Dragon) and you can tell the computer what to to and can compose using Word or a notepad.  If you submitted such an essay, it would be equivalent to podcasting without a script -- one time and you're done. But when I've tried dictating, I find that I have a lot of ideas, but the prose is so rough, I wind up polishing and moving things around.

To fudge a bit, sometimes our composing is not writing: it is organizing.  And for that, I usually draw on paper with a pencil or I use a concept mapping tool such as CMap or VUE.  I've laid out several assignments (especially the website) in CMap so I could see what I was doing.

And, finally, as I begin drafting, I often use Scrivener (available for PCs and Macs) so I can break the piece down into several sections, revise those sections and then pull it all together.  Yes, you could do the same thing with Word or a notepad, but sometimes convenience (all in one file -- or so it appears to the writer), safety (keeps versions and can backup/restore any of them), and flexibility (see ideas as cards on a corkboard, as an outline, or as tect) win out.  At under $60 for the Mac and under $40 for the PC (because it is a newer program with fewer features) it is a bargain if you want to think in terms of sections of your work.

Whatever it is, a favorite keyboard, a special room, a special piece of music, or a special program, we do well to honor our fetishes.  What do you want? vs. what do you need?

Owning your own, part 2

It would be useful if the university changed its priorities for classrooms and labs -- but many of us have had the experience of needing one when our equipment is down.  So eliminating all the labs probably is not advisable, but maybe one per academic building?

And what about faculty refreshes ... in which faculty get the use of a PC or Mac from their first day.  (I don't qualify for one, but I do get to share two with four others in my office.)  Should we expect the university to pay for our equipment?  how about mileage for coming to and from campus? or for those who teach at more than one campus?

The issue of owning-one's-own is larger than that.  Cloud-computing has been gaining adherents over the last couple years.  Why buy Office when there is a cloud version?  How buys a program to store and organize images and video when you have [insert favorite photo website]?  Who owns those images stored on the web?  Pause before answering, "Well, I do!"  Maybe not.  Pity the woman in Cleveland who lost all her photos for the last years when her cell provider discontinued its online albums for non-Smartphone users.

And in our case for our classes, the same cautions apply for our course materials.  If you have materials on your CMS, either keep copies on your personal computer, or backup (and download) the materials from the CMS.  Wiki materials? again, figure out a way to back it up.  You can whack a wiki with Adobe's Acrobat -- not the reader, but the full program -- but then you still have to extract the pages.  There used to be a free program called WebWhacker (not the same as the Blue Squirrel program of the same name); and there's HTTracker (I think that's the name).

If you don't have it in your possession, on your own equipment, it isn't safe; and if you don't have your equipment backed up regularly (every week for me), it also isn't safe.  I backup my server on campus once a year, only because it isn't usually critical -- except the wiki I run for my classes, and that I back up weekly.

More than once (unfortunately) I've had to restore my main machine because I ran something I shouldn't have.  And although I've sometime lost a day's worth of work, it is someone comforting to be able to take 4-5 hours off and come back to the machine as it was on Monday morning at 5AM  (I run the backup overnight on Sunday into Monday.)  It takes some time, but it saves on the Di-Gel®.

Owning and using the means of production in class

5 Reasons Why BYOD is a Bad Idea

Only five reasons?  that doesn't sound like enough to stop what is basically a good idea.  Look what happens when you don't!  Count the number of classrooms and labs at KSU 

• that are filled with aging computers, 
• that have computers of a single platform (PC most often ... Disclosure: I am a PC-user, have used Macs, Linux, VAX, etc. and really don't care as long as the box runs software that gets the job done.)
• that need constant maintenance
• that get/lose software at the whim of the university's license or the wishes of the administrator of the room

Yes, most of the time, the classrooms in Moulton work just fine.  That can't be said for others that are running 3-year-old versions of Firefox, use a program that prevents updating the single-machine's system (a good thing), but that prevents the software from updating itself -- so you lose a couple minutes while Acrobat Reader updates itself, only to have the update lost on the next reboot.  Same with the 2-year-old version of Java that Firefox no longer will use.


And it is all transparent to the student and instructor.  You turn on the box and it just works ... until it doesn't.  And even if you know what the problem is, fixing is only good until the next reboot.


You can't add new programs, so no new CMap or VUE if you want to do concept mapping, no utilities that handle ebooks, etc.  You get what you get.


Versus BYOD -- otherwise known as students owning their own computers.  After a couple weeks in a class that uses a range of software, those who can't or don't want to configure their computers (some students won't take the laptop that Grandma gave them for graduation because it might get dirty or scratched!  yes, I've heard both explanations) ... those who don't want to configure, use the university's aging computers or use portable software.  And their personal computers remain unconfigured.  Fine.  But then they go home for a weekend, for Thanksgiving, or spring break and their haste to leave campus, decide to submit their work when they get to their destination ... only to find that they can't get a connection, or that their hardware/software isn't configured correctly.


And there are some (fewer and fewer ... probably around 5%) who can't afford their own equipment.  We do need to address the truly needy with purchases spread over a couple semesters' of tuition, or encourage the reluctant by charging a per-minute fee to use the university's equipment -- a class-rental system.


Better yet, let's make part of the First-Year Experience course that is always looking for something meaningful to fill 15-weeks of instruction (not difficult to do, but most courses fail to find something and are reduced to what one of my ed students a couple years ago called his three hours of rest each week).  We could get them on Learn and any other software that their majors required.  We could give them basic trouble-shooting instructions or ... heaven forbid, post that information online and keep it up-to-date.  We could teach each student to be responsible for their own technology, just as we expect them to maintain their modes of transportation.  (Who uses the campus bus system in a pinch? especially when you need to get cross-campus in 15-minutes?  We train 'em to walk fast, park at the meters in lots near their classes, or to schedule classes within walking distance.)


We are not doing students a favor by UTMD -- Use the Man's Devices.  Buy your own, use your own, and learn to maintain your own.  And ask the university for a reduction in the technology fees, especially if they don't even provide paper!

Guilty as charged

I've been accused of reading widely -- too widely.  That's how I run across writers such as Dan Ariely author of "Predictably Irrational" and "The Upside of Irrationality," Jonah Lehrer ("How We Decide"), Susan Cain ("Quiet"), et al.  And websites such as http://800ceoread.com, and Seth Godin's http://changethis.com -- monthly epamphlets (at < 25pages, I don't think they qualify as real eBooks -- especially since they are usually snippets of the main ideas from the authors' books.  Many are the usual thing with a little difference.  Others summarize bigger points (Hugh MacLeod's 49-page "How to Be Creative" published in 2004 and still at the top of ChangeThis' list of popular postings.)

And, of course, getting ebooks from the local libraries, especially reading them on my Nook, has been an absolute disaster for any discipline I could claim.  Now I can take my wandering reading habits with me.  (Ariely, Cain and Lehrer are all available through SEO or the Ohio eBook Project)  I had an older 1st-year student this past semester whose buddies kept coming over to borrow his truck and made concentrating on his school work difficult.  Between the Nook and the libraries and ebook services, I've got even more insistent buddies.

On the other hand, there are advantages to this grazing -- or this monkeybrain reading.  I do pull in a lot of information, get exposed to a lot of ideas that don't appear in the composition journals that I supposedly keep up with.  If I don't remember where I've seen a lot of the ideas, the reading habit has encouraged me to try to organize my notes, the stack of pages that come in in print form, and the screenfuls of book marks that I'm supposed going to read.  Linkrot has its benefits: if I don't need to read a link immediately, often the gracious gods of the internet move the material so I can ignore what I can no longer find. (Why was I reading that interview with Elon Musk of Tesla and Space-X?  Insights for my 2nd year comp class?)


And, of course, I have a ready supply of ideas to reflect on -- except when I forget to turn my quasi-leisure reading into satisfying a course assignment.  I've put down the ebooks about web design and am actually ready (forced by time) to finish up the website assignment.

build that website or design the CMS fast

everyone's an ITech web designer! and a couple people think Tom Kuhlman has a rapid protyping method.  He tends to emphasize tools a little too much for my taste, and because his method is generalized, does not spend a lot of time on deep knowledge, the discipline-specific content that most of our university courses should focus on.  That's understandable: he has a background in training, which is not exactly the same as in education.  When he writes about learning being a "process" it seems "sequence" is a more appropriate term, rather than "understanding."  Learning=knowing the steps and why the sequence works, rather than understanding underlying principles and questioning the sequence, the methods, and the material itself.  He's got some nice clip art and the ideas (such as they are) are a little more than the usual.  But I struggle to apply his methods and those of other business-oriented presenters to education.  I often go on to something else, muttering, "when I get more time, I should try to devise a different method".  Standardized (and sanctioned) rubrics such as Quality Matters are ok but hardly earth-shaking.  So, look to Kuhlman to help you build it fast, but not with a lot of invention.

blogging is SO 2010?

With a few weeks more of tinkering, I developed a Lego autopilot that had most of the functionality of a professional device, if not the performance. But it became clear that Mindstorms, for all its charms, was too big and expensive to serve as the ideal platform for homemade drones. Looking for a better way, I decided to conduct my search for answers online in public, sharing what I’d done and found. Instead of setting up a blog, I registered DIYDrones.com and established a social network for people who were experimenting with autonomous aircraft.

That distinction—a site created as a community, not a one-man news and information site like a blog—turned out to make all the difference. Like all good social networks, every participant—not just the creator—has access to the full range of authoring tools. Along with the usual commenting, they can compose their own blog posts, start discussions, upload videos and pictures, create profile pages, and send messages. Community members can be made moderators, encouraging good behavior and discouraging bad. Open to anyone who chose to participate, the site was soon full of people trading ideas and reports of their own projects and research.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/06/ff_drones/all/

So we should learn Ning? (or a free replacement)  [Those I knew who built in Ning left when they decided they had to make money off it.  Note: the providere of some of these tools are not making the tool available so our classes can be better; the tool is free until they can figure out how to make money off the most users.  So spread the word about that nifty new site and see how long before it goes "pro."]

So if you, like Chris Anderson, want visitors to your corner of the internet, provide a place for them to share, not just to read your thoughts ... and post comments.  We don't want comments; we want code!

Reinventing the wheel or making it local?

I noticed an NYTimes article about the AFT's plans to develop a lesson-sharing site.  Good idea?  After all, if we are just copying from a textbook's teacher's guide, wouldn't lessons from a live colleague be just as beneficial?  We might not teach either the lesson from the textbook (what makes us think that the textbook author -- not an especially respected role in academia ... see its role in tenure decisions -- has special insight?) or the lesson share by a colleague would meet our needs.  Chances are we will use the lessons as a springboard to something of our own, or if we are just beginning to teach or new to a course, we may use the lesson until we can develop something on our own.

In my department, some folks are working with ITec people to develop courses that will pass the muster of the Quality Matters rubric and its evaluators.  Any borrowed course would probably need to be reconfigured to meet that rubric.

All of which seems to be a narrowing of the role of the individual instructor.  Even tenure doesn't protect one from having to conform to a lesson design that someone else has approved -- which is not to say that our beloved course that we've taught for years was well-designed.  We liked to teach it and enough students wanted to take it, so we didn't have to redesign it.

Many of us have had professors who not only didn't share or borrow, they simply reused.  One of my favorites (a Harvard grad, no less) used to photocopy his legal pad notes each time he taught his courses, freezing the original in amber.

Ultimately, it isn't the particular lesson that we share, but collegiality, a sharing of how we teach.  As many of us know, the classroom can be a lonely place, with little feedback from our peers.  Does everyone cause students to panic and withdraw?  Does everyone reach out to students in difficulty, only to be ignored?  Does everyone have problems teaching the x-number of uses for a comma?  We sometimes need to be reminded that we are not alone, and that no matter what the outward and institution show to the contrary, we really operate from a position of experimenting, not from a position of certainty.  That's what makes teaching so stressful ... and fun.

patterns of engagement ... and dis

With all the tools available to a modern instructor, I wonder if anyone has plotted out patterns of engagement by successful students.  (Too little time to do the research, but a moment to reflect.)  By that I mean, is there a pattern to how students begin a course (slowly with intervals of neglect, quick bursts of energy that can't be sustained, or ... pick your preferred pattern).  And when things go well in a class, do the engagement patterns of categories of students synchronize; do we encourage each other to rise to the occasion?  or when things don't go well, do we take cues from each other and leave at the same time?  Google can track when feeds see activity, but as far as I know, there is record-keeping, but no plotting of participation in CMSs.

And what could you do about it anyway?  Would more instructor posts encourage more student posts?

As I hear the whoosh of approaching deadlines, I am persuading myself that much of how (well) we learn is about time ... and attention.

Not complaining, just noticing

An author of a book on technology and teaching has an impossible task: keeping up with the technology and with the pedagogy.  Keeping up with the pedagogy is what 2nd edtions are for: pulse on the listservs of some academic disciplines, some key bloggers, a couple print resources, and teach a couple courses from time-to-time, and you can usually find out about the major directions within a couple months, especially if you add in some conferences for f2f contact.

But how to keep up with educational technology, especially applications?  Slogger that Will Richardson mentions in the blogging chapter is long gone, replaced by a internal form in Word 2010.  Unless it has something to do with my privacy settings, none of the addons work with Blogger anymore.  Google wants my eyeballs on their site so I see their ad.

GoogleGears are gone; so too are countless apps that Richardson mentions in passing.  And, rest in peach, Google Wave, replaced by Google+ whether we like it or not.

It would be easy to argue that when you deal with a company like Google, it chooses the profitable tools and discards the rest.  And to some extent, profitable means "tools the audience uses."  But in many cases, it takes the audience (especially educators who can't turn a course upside down in the middle of a semester just because they'd like to investigate a new bit of code), it takes an audience time to find an application and find its affordances: what the program allows the user to do that the user needed or now wants to do.

One of the usual ways that authors keep their books updated is with webpages, and Richardson is no exception.  A similar text from a college publisher might have an extensive online presence, complete with a quiz bank, instructor notes, and an errata page.

Richardson includes a list on his blog that he keeps up-to-date.  But he (probably not his publisher) might provide links to such updated materials in the book itself and provide a specific location (not just blog comments) where readers could add materials, sort of a Richardson-pedia.  True, there are mechanisms in ereaders to record and share our thoughts, and there are sites where we can share bookmarks and notes, but a concerted effort by the author to consolidate reader comments and link them to specific pages might easily improve the book and keep it fresh.  It has been done before: use the web in a concerted way to update and revise the book.

We experience every day the situation of information that is not linked or is not linked as prominently as celebrity "news."  If the internet dies, or needs refurbing, it may be in large part due to having good information that is not easily discoverable by an audience that could use it.  Certainly Vannevar Bush's and Ted Nelson's models of data structures that influenced Berniers-Lee's webdesign paid more attention to links (URLs) and not just nodes (sites).  We'd do our readers and students a service by having them learn not just about consuming the culture (the "read" part of the read-write web) and produce it (the "write" part) to connect information, but also to link it to other parts of the web.

Designing and Pacing based on the slightly-better-than-good-enough student

Many times when we design a large assignment, module, or entire course, we focus (as we should) on goals and objectives.  We make sure they both align with programmatic or district mandates.  Often, we try to see all the things we can do, but sometimes we don't prioritize the "can" from the "must" do.  In fact, we often forget is what it feels like to be a student who obediently tries to go through our carefully designed steps.  Too often our pace is not sustainable with their skills.  If the internet has affected learning in many useful ways, it has also encouraged us to try to do too much and too fast.

What I do rely on are students with skills that I have accurately anticipated.  A diligent student should be able to complete this assignment in class; keeping in mind their other courses, they should be able to do this much work outside of class.  The old measure of two hours work outside of class for every one hour in class has long ago been discounted, though many people still offer it as a guideline, especially for college students who claim to only work on courses an hour or so a day outside of class.

I tell my students that they need to work as long and as hard as they need to, to learn the necessary skills ... i.e. the skills they will need to use to get the grade they want.  No, I can't easily get them to get out of the grade-centered mentality.  After more than a dozen years of school, they come to college and to my class with a set of protocols and expectations.  If I work this long, I'll get an A.  Far too many tell me at the beginning that they are in the course to get an A.  To them, that sounds like an expression of dedication to the grade-winning task; to me it sounds like a student who is signaling me that s/he has been rewarded for effort and expects me to agree.  This would-be over-achiever will knock herself out to be perfect, and whether s/he achieves perfection or not, s/he'll always think s/he's fallen short.

Often, it is this take-no-prisoners student who crumples first because they are only well suited to "do school," and when the tasks are more complex or take longer, s/he lacks the perseverence that another student of less accomplishment learned long ago.  That student has long ago settled for less than perfection, either because s/he knows it is unattainable or a fiction, or s/he knows her skills aren't adequate to achieving perfection.  Instead, s/he tries to be just a little bit better than good enough; s/he doesn't slack, but s/he knows when s/he has learned the skills and that another four sleepless hours are not going to result in mastery.  And so it is this student whom we must use to pace our instruction, and the one we keep in mind when we design a course.

Our just-a-little-better-than-good-enough student will prod the sluggard to some effort and show the perfectionist that there should be some joy in learning or a parallel social life.  It is with this student in mind that we need to find the course bottlenecks, prioritizing the high-order skills, and sequencing tasks so that this student who wants to do all right can succeed.

Brint, Steven, and Allison M. Cantwell. "Portrait of the Disengaged."Web. 6/13/2012 <http://cshe.berkeley.edu/publications/publications.php?id=413>.

the uses of blogs, tweets, chat, and discussion boards

As I scurry from one tool to another these last days, I wonder if there isn't a better way, or a more unified way to interact, at the cost of the uniqueness of each tool.  For example, what are appropriate discussions to initiate on twitter? on the course discussion board? in our personal blogs?

What is an appropriate use of twitter, for example?  I write this 11 min. into the Campustech twitter session (https://twitter.com/search/NextGenLearn) that seems to be nothing more than a venue for us to preach to the choir

• Where do you think most education will take place over the next 3 to 5 years? Brick and mortar? Online?

Engaging in any fora? probably not.  But a "webinar" might make the hour's content a little more visible.  i.e. will this twitter get any more substantive?  are they trying to sell us something.

There's supposed to be a study back in here somewhere.  I see a lot of assertions by the audience and anecdotal comments, and some scattered comments from McGraw-Hill HigherEd and CampusTech.  But nothing coherent so far.

What I'm reading: a shared folder in RefWorks

No attempt to enter all the documentation data, but enough for anyone to find the resource.

RefWorks shared folder

The link to the shared folder is tricky because RefWorks want to put a session code in the link.  I think this works.

Half an Hour: Education as Platform: The MOOC Experience and wha...

Half an Hour: Education as Platform: The MOOC Experience and wha...: Presented to EdgeX2012 , Delhi, India, March 12, 2012. My name is Stephen Downes, I'm from Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada. New Brunswick is...

Having just completed Dr. Curtis Bonk (U of Indiana)'s MOOC last week, I was very interested in Downes perspective.  While the waves of readings and peer posts sweep over you (well, as many posts as 10% of the 4000 students in the MOOC can sweep), you wonder whether all of this will get some focus.  For me, it never did.  If education is a platform (as Downes has argued), then I was left on the edge.  It was difficult for me to judge the MOOC by what it said it would do (that was never clear) and judge it by the experiences that I was having.  I got my badge for the minimal participation that was required; I got a couple readings; but most of all, I got a glimpse of what a high-octane instructor looks like when he is performing.  ("Is that your hyperactive instructor?" my wife would ask as she walked behind my screen and saw Bonk jumping up and down ("Women in Asia, jump up!")

But, tedious as Bonk could sometimes be -- not getting to the gist of our weekly 1 hour (stretching into 2 hours) live video performance, I had to admire the sheer energy the man expended on catching our attention.  Sure he had his groupies from past courses to bounce off of (an aspect Downes notes in his critique of the attempts of the MOOC to create a group experience), but a lot of it was unvarnished Bonk.  By the end, I not only had a question ("Am I that energetic? and is the hope for calmer instructors like me?"), I had answers ("Not at all" and "maybe there is a space online that is for me.")

I admired the live contact Bonk provided, and I am going to try to incorporate a weekly online live session -- not a podcast or vidcast, but instead of time when I sit at my computer (doing other work), waiting for students to pop in and ask questions, I'm going to try to develop materials I can deliver live that relate to how the students makes her way through the course.  No jumping up and down, but some visual connection with students I see on other days face-to-face.  And probably via a Google+ hangout.  So I'm game this summer for using hangouts to meet in small groups to get used to the media.

beginning a course, making habits

At this time in a course, I'm reminded how important it is for me to establish habits.

The theme of these days is ORGANIZATION --

1. curation (where)
2. content (what, how)
3. time (when) 
4. communication/collaboration (with whom)

As I work on each item, I think about the "why."

Anal, yes, but I usually avoid getting caught up short, and working through all the materials at the beginning, gives me an overview of the course -- skimming so I notice where the bottlenecks might be, major assignments and more challenging skills.

CURATION
In addition to folders on my computer, I usually select an online repository: GoogleDocs, SkyDrive, or DropBox (only if there is no private or sensitive information).

Most often, I choose GoogleDocs because I use it for other aspects of the course (see below).  I use the same username (ksuengerssu12 for this summer's courses) for everything I do in connection with the course (subscriptions to webtools, RefWorks, GoogleDocs, etc.)

I set up folders for any course contents that I want to have online, a couple places where I'll compose, share, or save online materials.

Side note: why create a Google address for each semester?

1. the campus implementation of Docs does not include several tools (especially iGoogle, Voice, and Google+) that I want to use.  Without giving out my home phone number, I can get student phone calls via GoogleVoice and then discard the number at the end of the term.
2. at the end of the semester, I often delete the address so I don't have a lot of addresses to check.  (I forward all email from these addresses to my campus address, so I don't miss anything and I let Google archive in-coming mail so I can keep my campus mailbox pretty empty)

CONTENT
Usually when I get access to the course site, I scan the materials and then begin downloading what I can: structure of the course (I capture screens of menus and such) and the files.

Why? I guess because I am concerned that I won't be able to access them from various locations (though I don't have anything as a Lake Erie sailboat ;)

Also, I eventually compile those files (sequenced as they were on the website) into a PDF that I can annotate and link.

TIME
And ... something I haven't begun yet ... I put the course due dates and activities into a calendar.  These days, I use a couple Google Calendars: one for readings, one for assignments, one for my schedule of when I'll start work on the assignments, etc.  I could use a single calendar and color-code each type of activity, but it is easier for me to use separate calendars in the same Google account and color each calendar differently.

COMMUNICATION
Finally, I set up any email addresses and chat methods that I may use to communicate with others in the course.  Again, Google seems to be easiest because it gives me a email address, a chat area, and, now, Google+ that will let me chat (text, audio, and group video)

Today's tasks: create and complete the calendars and read some of the course materials.

Course goals and tools

Personal Course Goals: try integrating a range of tools to improve collaboration; reorganize/streamline Learn site based on calendar organization; provide students archives of all significant instructor materials (syllabus, class slides, tech how-tos, etc.)  Design alternative instruction modules described in terms of Quality Matters rubric.

Contacts

• Email
• campus address
• ksuengerssu12@gmail.com (forwarded to campus address)
  
• LMS
• campus Learn 8.1 practice course
• Twitter
• ksuengerssu12

Tools

blog

• Blogger.com 
• I was going to use W.Bloggar as a desktop client until I discovered it not only is out of production, but that (even though I have the most recent version) it no longer works with Blogger.

RSS Reader 

• Online: Google Reader
• Desktop client: RSSOwl
• Aggregator: Calibre -- turns feed entries into an epub file for easy reading and

CMS

• KSU Learn practice course

Research curation and citation generation

• RefWorks 2.0

Extended composing

• Online
• GoogleDocs
• Windows Live Word
• Offline
• Scrivener for Windows
• Word

Visual Thinking

• CMap
• VUE 

Twitter

• TweetDeck for PC
• TweetDeck for Chrome browser
• username: ksuengerssu12