Lisa's dashboard

Is there a way to do this without getting so "fancy," to borrow Vu's description? Or might you spell out the details of "what you need to do" a bit more clearly, for those of us less familiar with "all the programmer speak on the page"? Many thanks.

This is less a reply than an echo. I and several colleagues are using wikis to allow students to schedule appointments for office hours. (See http://professorgordis.pbwiki.com.) Requiring them to sign up for accounts will create an extra barrier and make this system unworkable. Will you have a version of wiki passwords for pbwiki 1 any time soon? Will the current system be phased out for existing wikis? I need to know, as colleagues have been modeling wikis on mine, but I won't be able to recommend this if students need accounts to edit.

Thanks.
Lisa

In several of my seminars, I set up a page for each class meeting. At the top of the page I list the required reading assignment and then list options for further reading. Each class session also has assigned student moderators. In the days leading up to the class session, they're responsible for posting a class plan: questions and passages they'd like their classmates to consider in preparation for discussion. The other students are responsible for reading the class plan and posting responses, either directly on the page or using the comments tab. When we arrive in class, I set up a writing prompt drawn from the students' comments, and after the students have written for five minutes or so, the moderators take over, and direct the discussion. Because the discussion has started in advance of class, and because students have been sharing ideas about what questions and passages are interesting, the discussion is livelier and more collaborative than it might otherwise be. For me, this has been a big improvement over the more traditional seminar presentation.
--Lisa