Observation Day [10/13]

This Wednesday was almost as bad as my first day of class, I was plagued by a very bad case of nerves. I was being observed by Patricia and though she was my peer that did not help me feel very confident about managing t go through class without the involvement of projectile vomiting. Pat was really nice and she put me at ease but I couldn't stop thinking that if I was freaking out about a peer observation how would I hold up when I got observed by the faculty or get my teaching videotaped!

I started the class introducing her and she went and sat in the circle that my class usually prefer sitting in.  The first thing I did was giving out homework for Friday. Experience has taught me that anything I say in the last couple for minutes of class gets processed out with their enthusiasm of packing up and leaving. I wanted them to work in groups and bring in two articles to class on Friday. One article had to look at the benefits of social media and the other on the unsavory aspects of it. Each group would come to class having read the two articles and present it to class. I wanted them to note the use of argument and the process of analysis involving anecdotes, personal experience etc... Somewhere along the way I realised that I no longer felt nervous.

The class spent about 12 minutes freewriting on the three texts for this module. I had them write one point of agreement and one argument that they disagreed with in the Shirky, Kelly and Carr pieces.
What was disconcerting was that the students asked me to summarize the readings, which was annoying since the readings were scheduled for today. Thankfully, I had made notes on each piece and it wasn't very difficult to give them a quick review of the three texts. Once they finished writing we had an interesting discussion of the points they raised.

I used the rest of the class to highlight key issues like cognitive surplus, the difference between Lolcats and Ushahidi, we explored the idea of deterrence theory. I was very happy to see that the students could make fluid connections between texts. The class was animated and I think they managed to showcase their cognitive skills well. Or at least Pat thinks we had a good class and right now that's what matters...