Right, I've posted my homework!
Thanks Vertigo for putting this whole thing together. It really helps to make sure I do the exercises. Otherwise I think I would just have skipped these when reading the book. Also, it is a good book. Quite pacey - despite the subject matter!
I'm already finding the discussion thread a bit daunting though. Very long posts! I did some on-line education last year and I thought I would share some of the things we did there to see if they help us with this exercise. See what you think:
- Short posts, no more than 200 wds. We lost credit for going over, it made for a pacey conversation, and prevented info-dumping - i.e. no need to cover everything yourself - let someone else pick up the thread and take it to the next step
- threads for each topic, e.g. we might have a thread for each exercise, or each chapter, that way we could do things in bite-size chunks.
- Largish groups of about a dozen, that way if someone is off-line due to illness, malaise, vacation, brain-fade etc the conversation still goes on.
- Lots of questions and prompting for others thoughts. Makes for short posts and encourages flow. The course strongly emphasised "dialogue" over debate or discussion.