I worked all day on evaluating students in the online class. It's midsemester feedback time for discussion and journal. I think it took me longer than it usually does, but that isn't completely blackboard's fault. I am requiring another small assignment for every discussion (students submit their best post). But that isn't solely responsible either; the assessment seemed more rich than usual. It might have taken longer, but I think the results are better. I like the journal commenting feature. I usually respond to journal posts occasionally, but since the switch to blackboard, I have not responded at all. I had not spent any time figuring how to respond, it wasn't a priority. So in addition to compiling my usual tally of points, I went through and commented on many of the entries. It is almost like a blog, and it could be a dialogue. It think there are interesting possibilities for the future; I may have students post an assignment for all class and see if I can get other students to make comments.

Evaluations have taken up pretty much the whole week. There is still more to go. But I did manage to steal a little time to work on the article, as I mentioned. It is about the toleration class, specifically, it is about one assignment in the class that is intended to reduce ignorance of the unfamiliar, stereotyping and prejudice.

Now that I have slept on it for a day and done a little looking into guidelines, I believe I have found a suitable market for it, but I am thinking that it may need to be cut by about 1,000 words and I probably should add more literature. Sigh. I don't think I can get to that until summer. Or maybe I am just being overly critical? It is probably good enough to send with the expectation of getting a revise/resubmit, which how most academic journals respond for the first round anyway.

One thing I am going to do is get permissions from all the students whose self-assessment essays I quote. The quotes aren't very long, and they are anonymous, so that probably isn't really necessary either, but I think it would be a nice courtesy to do it, and I have no doubt every student will be flattered and will say yes. I have good relationships with students and this assignment is one that they all really liked.

I see as the week has gone one, since I haven't had to be on campus, I've slipped back into my preferred owl pattern. Staying up too late. I have to start getting back into the routine, Tuesday will be here in no time!