Schedule of activities

Here is the proposed schedule of activities I proposed in my sabbatical application.

Month 1: research Web 2.0 for educational purposes, sifting through the hype and the reality of the communities and applications currently being used.

Month 2: begin to explore Second Life, especially Angel Learning Island and other virtual campuses. Also, choose a few web 2.0 applications, such as Pageflakes or Netvibes, and explore more closely their value in college classes.

Month 3: create some assignments that could be used in online classes based on the research and exploration noted above.

Looks neat and tidy, doesn't it? Well, so does the "writing process" taught, especially this week, all across the nation in thousands of composition classes, presenting an orderly cause and effect set of tasks to compose an essay. Anyone who has spent any time writing learns right off, it ain't that neat. Writing is recursive, where we try some prewriting, then some drafting, then some more invention techniques, then throw it all away and start over, then freewriting, so on and so forth.

Such will take place with my research. While I will focus on the aspects of my work as described above, I expect to take(and already have taken!!!!!) many sidetrips, dropping out of research to play with web applications, dropping out of web applications to do some research, or sketch out a preliminary assignment.

I'll try to keep things looking orderly and sensible in this blog, but I look at the exploration as play, and like a child making mud pies, I expect things to get rather messy.