Changes?
Honestly, this is one of the hardest sections for me to write. The courses last semester wen about as well as any that I can remember. But this doesn't mean that I would leave everything the same. Here are a few changes I plan to make this semester:
Reinforce a cultural/ecological view of videogames from the start. Last semester, in an effort to get through the rhetorical analysis section, I don't think that I really highlighted the cultural aspects of our readings and activities enough. We did readings tied to these kind of considerations, but I mainly focused on games as objects. I think that a little more attention to the contextual nature of games early on in this semester will help students set up for the later assignments better.
Give more time for the last assignment. Like many instructors, I got a little off schedule last semester. It wasn't much, but it was enough to constrain the time that my students had to tackle the last assignment, and it caused many of them to search for an easy way out by creating multimodal presentations that were little more than PowerPoint. After seeing what some of the other students could do, I've decided to require an interactive revision this semester. This, in turn, means that I want to open up more time at the end for students to build prototypes of their interactive arguments and to test them before presenting the final versions.
Offer more paths. Last semester, I tried to allow students to self-select some of their work, but in the end, many of them did the same type of thing. I don't know if I can build too many more paths into the essay assignments while also maintaining departmental requirements, but I do plan to offer more paths on smaller assignments, like brainstorming work, blog posts, and even readings. I feel like creating an environment where a lot of diverse work is being done, but where everyone is still striving towards the same goals, will be one of the best ways to create an active and lively community.
Integrate more technological interaction. I'm sure that my students from last semester would think I'm crazy for saying this. We used technology almost every day in class. But I want to do even more. I plan to start incorporating online chatting technologies as part of our discourse community assignment. And I also want to spend more time with game creation technologies both as a way to better understand games and to explore different ways of mediating our arguments.