Yay! The semester is over! Of course, students still have exams and papers, but today was the last day that my class met, and our students have turned in everything. Now it’s just time to grade (which, of course, is a major project in itself).
This semester was an experiment. We changed the assignments a little bit, we incorporated more technology, and in general we shifted from lecturing to providing tools to our students to do their own learning, and I’m really happy about it. Today was the second of two days where students gave presentations on what they’ve been studying all semester and we learned about online music and intellectual property, the digital divide in India, net neutrality, identity theft and privacy, and new vs. traditional advertising methods. And in hearing these presentations we really got an understanding of how the students approached research in light of this class (which focused on how to do research) and how their understanding of the information environment has changed in light of the semester.
Up until now, students have been finding resources independently as we covered different ways to do research. The final project was a group paper and presentation using the resources they found. To do these tasks and to share them, the students used Google Docs and Google Notebook. We also kept a blog, and that was my favorite part of the whole semester. Students had to respond to things in the blog, but we also used it to push out information of value. Both my co-teacher and I will be presenting on this model at Lilly South in Greensboro.
We get the student evaluations after grades are in. Here’s hoping students liked the model as much as they told us in person. 
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