The Spring semester closes and we had a successful run of New Media One: Perspectives. John and I will be reviewing student performance, even after grades are recorded, and changes to come for the course in the Fall and a possible run of New Media 2 in the Spring, although these days its tough to schedule so far in advance.
This weblog was the first deployment of a course-devoted space for us and it worked pretty well, though what to do with the weblog once the course is done is a mystery. It will remain a space to test new web applications, of course. It is a new media weblog, after all, and thus, at heart, should be sandbox-like.
Some of the changes we envision have to do with getting people to use a lot of the media spaces we examined in class, such as Flash, Inform, and other systems, such as Storyspace, and synthesizing exercises with technology. Come Fall, more options will be opened to us. Maybe lab space, maybe mobile studio. Another element we will introduce is standardizing written material with a citation method, such as Chicago style, so that we can incorporate formal rules into the presentation process. This should only take about an hour to do. I note that many of the students in the course had taken Composition, our Freshman writing course, yet they did not appear to have internalized the formal styles taught in that course.
Good luck to our graduates and to the others who will move on.