…And that’s all, folks!

I can scarcely believe that 14 weeks have come and gone! Let me start with the administrative stuff:

• Thank you all for submitting your final projects/papers — even with the weather disaster and closures this week, you all got your papers in in time! The next time you hear from me will be next week sometime, when I email you your final project marks and comments.
• You have access to your blogs until the end of March 2011, after which I will be deleting your user accounts (logins & passwords). After March 2011, you will no longer have access to your blog content. Before that happens, here are some options for you to consider regarding the future of your blog:
  1. Your blog can stay online forever if you’d like. While I delete your user accounts, your actual blogs don’t go anywhere. In the past, some students have chosen to leave their course blogs online and link to them as part of an online portfolio.
  2. If you’d rather see your blog deleted, let me know and I can take care of it.
  3. You might choose to export your blog content so you can save your work or to import your posts into a new blog. To export your blog posts login to your blog, click on the “Tools” menu on the left and click on “Export”. Then follow the instructions to export your blog content. You can easily import the file into another wordpress blog if you’d like to keep blogging elsewhere (like wordpress.com).
  4. If I don’t hear from you, I’ll assume you want your blog to remain online, so I won’t touch it!

Thank you all, once again, for a thoroughly engaging term. I’ve really enjoyed getting to know you all through your blog posts and our weekly chats and I’ve very much appreciated your energy and enthusiasm this term. Congratulations to those of you who are graduating — I wish you all the best for a successful (and speedy) job search! If there’s anything I can do to help, please don’t hesitate to ask. And if you’re back for a bit more FIMS/co-op goodness next term, enjoy!

I hope our paths cross again soon, if not in person, then at least online!

Back on track

Hi everyone — sorry for the delay in getting this up. As you probably heard, a tentative agreement was reached between the university and the Faculty Association, so there is no disruption in our course. We’re back on track and chatting this evening at 20:00, see you in the chat room!

In the event of a possible strike by UWOFA members…

Hi everyone,

A few of you have contacted me over the past 24 hours asking about the status of this course in the event of a strike by members of UWOFA. Dean Carmichael has posted an update on the FIMS homepage that states that all FIMS classes, seminars, tutorials and labs (including 9763) will be cancelled in the event of a strike. As you know, the strike deadline is midnight tonight (Tuesday, November 2nd), so classes might be cancelled starting as early as tomorrow.

Just so you know, I am almost finished marking your proposals, so I will try to have those back to you by the end of the day.

I’ll post an update here when I know more about the possible strike. Let me know if you have any questions.

Final Project Proposals

Just a reminder: your final project proposals are due tomorrow, Monday, November 1st at noon. Thanks to those of you who have already sent theirs in. And to those who haven’t yet, please make sure to submit your proposals using Google Docs. Here are the relevant bits from the syllabus:

Formatting of Submitted Assignments: Please include your name, student number, and email address on the first page/covering page of your submission. Please also make sure that all electronically submitted assignments (see next section) are saved with your first and last names in the file name.

Submission Guidelines: If you are submitting a paper or any sort of attachment, please submit it using Google Docs (no email attachments please). If you don’t already have an account on Google Docs, set one up and upload your paper there. Then add me (etchesjohnson AT gmail.com) as a collaborator so I can post comments to your assignment online. Finally, please send me an email letting me know that you’ve shared a document with me so I know to look for it.

Questions? Leave a comment or get in touch. Thanks!

Research Week next week!

Just a quick reminder (as if you needed one!) that next week is research week at FIMS. Which means no classes, no weekly chat, and no weekly posting deadline! I will be around and online all week if you need to contact me for anything.

Hope you all have a restful week!

Graded!

Hi everyone — if you’ve had your eye on your UWO email inbox in the past few hours, you should have seen a message or two from me! I just wanted to let everyone know that I’ve sent out all midterm blogging progress reports (you’re all doing great!) and grades for your crowdsourcing assignments (such interesting insights!). As I’ve mentioned to a few of you over the past couple of days, I had hoped to get the blog progress reports out earlier this week, but time and deadlines conspired against me. Thanks for understanding!

So check your inboxes for messages from me and let me know if any have gone astray. I hope everyone is having a lovely weekend!

Group Projects: Final Teams

Thank you all for stopping by and signing up for your topics/groups! Here is the final list of who is working on what:

• Wikis (due Friday, October 1) – Erica, Jessica, David, Kim
  
• Social bookmarking/tagging tools (Friday, October 8 ) – Ashley, Rhiannon, John, Teri
  
• Social networking tools (Friday, October 22) – Emily, Katie, Peggy, Stephanie, Alain
• Microblogging/lifestreaming tools (Friday, November 5) – Alannah, Rebecca, James, Natalie
  
• RSS/mashups (Friday, November 19) – Joey, Doris

I will send all groups email messages confirming this info so you have each other’s addresses.

A couple of notes on the Group Project:

• remember to run your ideas by me before putting a lot of work into them. Once you’ve had a chance to brainstorm and come up with your idea for a prototype, shoot me a quick email with a rough outline. I don’t need a whole lot of detail, I’d just like to make sure you’re on the right track.
• you might want to set up a wiki and/or chat room for you to connect with your group members if you’re not all in the same place (I suspect that that will be the case for most of you!). If you need advice on this, let me know.

Good luck with your projects! I’m really looking forward to seeing what you all come up with.

Group Projects: Sign Up Here!

This is the “sign-up sheet” for the Group Projects. Here’s a reminder of what the assignment is about (from the Syllabus):

The main deliverables of the group project are a working model or prototype of a library service built using social software/media tools, and a blog post that explains the service, what software was used to build it, who the target audience is, etc. (there is no particular word-count for the blog post, just make sure that you’ve communicated all the important aspects of your project). I’m looking for a few things with this assignment: creativity, usefulness of the service, and evidence that you’ve thought through a particular “problem” and provided a meaningful solution with your prototype. There are 5 types of tools groups can choose from for this assignment: wikis, social bookmarking/tagging tools, microblogging/lifestreaming tools, social networking tools, and RSS/mashups.

…Each group should run their idea by me — I’d like to make sure you’re on the right track before you put too much work into your project. I’ll put out a call to sign up for groups during week 2, so keep your eyes open for it. Groups should have no more than 4 students and each group will receive a single assessment which will account for 25% of your overall mark. To submit your group project post a link to the prototype and publish the accompanying blog post to one (or all) group members’ blogs, then send me an email with the link to the blog post and an outline of who contributed what to the project (all group members should be cc’d on the message).

To sign up for one of these topics/dates, simply add a comment to this post indicating which topic you would like. As noted above, each group can have a max of 4 students (fewer is fine), so once 4 people have signed up for a group, that topic/group is no longer an option. So please glance over the comments already posted before adding yours in case the topic you wanted is already all spoken for!

• Wikis (due Friday, October 1) – Erica, Jessica, David, Kim (GROUP FULL)
  
• Social bookmarking/tagging tools (Friday, October 8 ) – Ashley, Rhiannon, John, Teri (GROUP FULL)
  
• Social networking tools (Friday, October 22) – Emily, Katie, Peggy, Stephanie, Alain (GROUP FULL)
• Microblogging/lifestreaming tools (Friday, November 5) – Alannah, Rebecca, James, Natalie (GROUP FULL)
  
• RSS/mashups (Friday, November 19) – Paul, Doris
  

I will update this post over the course of the day to indicate when each group has filled up. (Last updated Tuesday, September 14, 20:48)

Weekly Chat

Thank you all for weighing in on your chat time preferences. The results are in and Wednesday at 20:00 is the runaway winner! So starting this week, and going until the last week of term, we will have our course chats on Wednesdays at 20:00 Eastern.

Remember, the chats are optional, so don’t stress if you can’t make one. I will continue to send each week’s transcript to everyone after the chat, so you can catch up on what you missed.

Thanks for voting!

Updated to add: I have added the weekly chat dates to the Dates page so that page provides a good overview of all dates and deadlines for the term.

Email from me

A couple of you have mentioned that you have not received any email messages from me. It could be that my intro email (sent Monday, September 6) got trapped by your spam filter, so be sure to check your spam folder. It would have come from my Gmail account (etchesjohnson AT gmail.com). Once you approve that message as not spam, you shouldn’t have any more problems receiving messages from me.