Describe ProblemsInHumanHealthAndNutrition here. (Actually, now the course is called Nutrition and Health in the Science Classroom.)

Hi Merle:

I'm trying out the wiki for our course that Steve was so kind to set up for us. I have a couple of questions for you about team teaching. I've designed courses as a team, but can only remember team teaching one time. It was for an online course for teachers. We had the teachers in 3 teams and each instructor moderated a different team. So, it really wasn't like team teaching at all. It was more like we were teaching different sections of the same course.

Hi Patsy: Help! I answered all your questions and then pushed the save button and all my answers disappeared. Until I figure out what I did wrong, I won't re enter them!!!

OK. This time it worked, so I'll try again. Here we go!!!

Q1: How do you see us team teaching our course? (Oops! I read your question but seem to have deleted your description of different ways to team teach and I don't know how to get it back. Sorry.)

A1 MERLE: Anyway I think both ideas you described are interesting. The first (each have our own teams) gives us a chance to get to know smaller groups of students very well and in some ways it feels like less work. But the second way, we can back each other up and one of us can come in when it is something we know more about. But we'll have to decide ahead of time how that will work. I can imagine that some times we won't want to answer questions with content answers, but sometime we will. Will wel be able to continue to converse either on wiki or in some other ways behind the students' back so that until we get used to each others' styles we can talk it out?

This sounds like a good discussion question for the Prometheus group now as it looks like there are quite a few teams teaching.

A1 PATSY: I'm sure we can work this out. You sound like you will be more busy than I am, based on your reply to Q2. It just depends on how involved you want to be given your course load. I am willing to do as much as you want me to do.

Q2: How much time will you have to give (or give up) for this course next semester? Is it part of your regular teaching load or on top of it?

A2 MERLE: I have a full load (2 courses including a brand new one and 15 advisees, about 6 Division III (senior thesis) students, and some concentrators). The big overload time for me (without this course) is April and early May.

A2 PATSY: As I said above you already have a full load! I am not quite at that point yet...I've been hired 50% time for this semester, but I think I'll be up to 75% or 100% next semester counting our course.

Q3: Do you think we have any chance of getting the course ready for the Spring Semester?

A3 MERLE: Heehee. I thought you said you were going to ask a few LITTLE questions!!!! Well look, we can probably put something together. Will it be what we hoped? Well we hardly know what we hoped because we haven't had much time to brainstorm. If you are asking if I can get 3 cases together, well here's what I think. Maybe. I will have at least one we can test that we will have tested with two groups this fall (and both times decided major revisions were needed in the program). So we'll have to make it clear to the students that they are part of (at least one) exciting educational experiment and we'd like their feedback on how it worked. I could build that into the assignments for the case(s).

On the bright side, after doing last week's assignment and hearing about using writing and revision, there is another kind of assignment I do in class that involves reading and writing analytical critiques of primary research articles. If I can't get more than one case that I trust to work, we could put an article on line for each of the other two "case" assignments in the syllabus and use something current in nutrition research. That would tie into your earlier assignments about food diaries because, for instance, they will have some insights about the difficulty in collecting and reporting subjects' food intake in ways that are reliable. I have a set of stepwise assignments that takes people slowly through writing critiques and I give them detailed feedback on each of these so that when they write their "final" critique, they have guidance about how to do it (I think that series of short assignments is called "scaffolding"). I also have a rubric for writing or assessing the critique they write and we could show that to them also. We could maybe work some peer editing into this too (I have some peer editing guidelines).

I think I'd be comfortable doing this on line if we have a good and easy editor program to use. Because my scriggly handwriting is such a challenge to read in margins and between lines, I've taken to word processing my editorial comments, suggestions (and demands), and the students much prefer that. It also allows me to easily explain why I suggest what I do. The students seem to like that and are sometimes embarassed into writing more thorough critiques when they see that my critiques of their work might end up longer than what they wrote!

But I'm meandering....

A3 PATSY: :-)! I agree. If we can't get three cases complete, I know we can come up with many other great ideas that the participants can use to learn about nutrition and health and apply in their teaching.

Q4: What do you think of the course outline being on the participants' schedule (with Feb and April vacations) rather than the University's schedule? Is the Hampshire schedule the same as UMass's?

A4 MERLE: I'm pretty sure Hampshire and UMass are on the same vacation schedule. I don't know where I'll be that week, but I can't guarantee it will be by a computer. So I'd much prefer working around our vacations. That might work out for teachers who might have an easier time doing their assignments when they're not teaching (unless they're in Aruba).

A4 PATSY: It has been my experience that a lot of the teachers do go away, particularly for the April vacation. Somehow they expect they are going to have their vacations off. I wonder if that is just because of the particular program they are in (MS in Science in Springfield)?

The whole SEO group is going to have to agree on this and I hope I have time to bring it up at the meeting next week. As for me, it doesn't matter either way. Since I work at home, I have so much flexibility that I feel like I'm on vacation a lot of the time. And if I want to go away, I do, and work from a computer wherever I am. Those of you who also teach in-person do not have this luxury.

Q5: How do you feel about each week's activities starting on Wednesday and ending on Tuesday?

A5 MERLE: Sounds fine. I have no real opinion about it and probably won't until we try it.

A5 PATSY: I'd really like to try the Wed-Tues thing. It gives them time to do their work over the weekend, but then go back and add a little to the discussions on Monday and Tuesday.

MERLE ASKED: What does it mean on this page below when it asks for Summary (when I tried to type something in it jumped to a new page. I think that's how I lost my last comments. Also, are my answers a "minor change" or not? Do we have to sign in? I hope this doesn't all get lost again.

PATSY ANSWERED: I have no idea!

SB: If you click the RecentChanges button, you can see all of the recent changes on the entire wiki. Each change is labeled with the "summary", you had entered one. The system can keep track of major and minor edits and it has rules of thumb that is uses to decide whether to guess an edit is major or minor. But you can just pick, if you like. You do not have to sign in, but if you sign in with a "wiki word" (something like StevenBrewer ), it will mark your changes (again, in RecentChanges ) as being done by you. If you don't sign in ,

MERLE ASKED: Do you know what we do next to start another conversation? Do we just continue this one and keep writing under the same questions (and I assume that somehow the new entries will have little red flags or something), or do we start a whole new page? I'm assuming I did the right thing by entering "edit" in order to answer your questions. I think there are instructions somewhere about using this wiki thing, but I'm not up for reading them right now.

SB: Wiki's are more for document development than conversations. Often documents begin as conversations and then gradually evolve into documents. Or into sets of documents. To create a new document, just make a wiki link, either by creating a NewWikiWord? (a word with internally capitalized letters) or putting something in square brackets?, save your changes, then follow the link to make a new page.

PATSY ANSWERED: I have no idea! :-) Basically, I do not think I like this wiki thing all that much. It's much better when we do the track changes in a Word document where you can see things in color. I felt I had to go and label who said what with "MERLE" and "PATSY" to keep things straight. And I think I would have liked talking with you on the phone for these questions. Most important, this doesn't have spell check and I'm the worst speller in the world! But it was a good to give it a try.

SB: To see the changes tracked in the wiki, click the PageHistory button at the bottom of the page and select two versions to compare -- you can see the changes in color. PHPwiki doesn't have a spell checked, but other wiki systems do. And, again, for discussions, a threaded discussion system may be better, but for developing a document, I find wikis to be better.

Cheers! Merle

Merle, Thanks for being such a good sport and humoring me on this wiki thing. Bye for now, Patsy