10: Choose your own adventure

For my "choose your own adventure" activity I decided to try my hand at making a course outline (which can be found online here). This was inspired by my writeup for Activity 7, where I started wondering outloud about what role Facebook should play in the classroom. A few notes about my course outline:

• A lesson learned: I decided to jump right off the deep end and create an outline for an upper level undergraduate education class to give pre-service teachers a chance to critically reflect on social networking sites and the possibilities they may have in their (future) classrooms. This being a special topics class on a fairly specific subject, there weren't really any samples that I could mould my own outline after. Perhaps it would have been easier to do a more general survey course about educational technology, as I suspect there would have been far more samples to look at.
• Resources for making outlines seem to be sparse. I am not sure if any sort of guide really exists. Once school starts up again and the teaching resource centre starts running courses again, I will be looking for workshops about writing outlines. I believe they have one called "best practices for course directors", so that might be one to look at.
• Writing outlines is time consuming! It took me a few days to track down and read through sources. Even trying to figure out the trajectory of the course took a lot of time (and many revisions). I'm still not 100% happy with it, but at least it is a start.
• Coming up with assignments is kind of fun. I'm not sure if I was specific enough in the expected learning outcomes. As a new course director I suspect I am going to have to be REALLY specific about this if I want to get approval to do anything "out of the box".
• EDIT: I forgot to mention that dana boyd's list of papers on social networking was an invaluable resource when putting this outline together!