Updates and Tables for March 10-12

Tables for This Week

Here’s the Table Teams map for this week (March 10 and March 12 classes):

The blogging teams (Team 8 on March 10 and Team 9 on March 12) will swap places for the two classes, but otherwise the plan is the same for Tuesday and Thursday. The team that is blogging the class will have the (now stable!) center table.

Mid-Course Updates

I will talk more about the course updates based on the mid-course survey at the beginning of Tuesday’s class, but summarize the changes below:

  1. Most people indicated that they are happy with their current teams and remain in the same tables and discussion groups. A few people have been moved in ways that we hope will improve the remainder of the semester. If you’ve been moved, you should either know the reason because it is related to what you submitted, or you didn’t submit a form at all and have been moved to help balance the sizes or other factors. If you did submit a mid-course survey but were moved or not moved in a way that you dislike, please reach out to me. If you didn’t submit a mid-course survey you don’t have grounds to complain, but you should realize that this was a required assignment which was made clear in the two classes in which it was discussed and the announcement and subsequent reminder sent in Canvas.

  2. There have been some changes to the Schedule. No ones scheduled presentation time has been moved forward, but some are later than originally scheduled, and some previously scheduled News team presentations are now removed. With the adjustments, each team will be “Blog Team” twice (teams 6 and 7 will be jointly responsible for blogging the 16 April class), teams 1–4 will each be responsible for “News” twice and “Lead” once, and teams 5—12 will each be responsible for “News” once and “Lead” twice.

  3. The expectations for presenting teams (both “News” and “Lead”) are now more specific:

    • Before 5:00pm on the day before you are scheduled to lead (so Monday for Tuesday classes and Wednesday for Thursday classes), share your plans and draft slides with me. You should do this in an email with all of the team members who are contributing cc’d so I can reply-all to everyone. The “before 5pm” deadline assumes that if I am able to get you feedback before 8pm you will have time to make revisions before class. If not, you should get me the slides before noon.

    • Be creative! All presenting teams so far have followed fairly closely the same format. This isn’t a bad format, but it is definitely not the best for most topics. Teams are encouraged to incroporate more interesting activities and use the class time in more varied ways.

    • Better presentations. I will provide some more guidance on general ways to improve presentations in Tuesday’s class (and maybe more in later classes), and although you are not required to follow everything I say it is expected that you’ll design presentations in ways that are mindful of it.