Conjuring up these tasks is fun…but hard work. Balancing the desire to provide a meaningful experience with the notion that these should be at least somewhat interesting and even fun to do is tricky, and I’ve discarded a bunch of tasks that seemed like a good idea at the time, but which in the cold light of day didn’t make the cut. By and large, though, I like this idea and am intending to try this again next time I teach the class.
I ask myself, though, why should I have all the fun, and more to the point, do all the work? Moreover, many of you will be teaching or leading training sessions in your careers, and injecting a little creativity and novelty into those can have real benefits, or so we hope.
So for your third and final task, you are to create a task for next year’s class. This task should achieve as many of my goals for these as possible, as described below. You should describe them in terms similar to the way I have, in documents such as this one, laying out some background, rationale, what is to be done, constraints, limitations, requirements, deliverables, specific instructions, and so on, and be roughly similar in tone and length. Task 1 description Task 2 description
The nature of the task and its requirements is up to you. You should submit a Word document, as described above. Your work will be assessed on the number of course objectives your task meets (please clearly specify these in the description), its professional authenticity, appropriateness for small-group work and limited time, the level of challenge it presents, and how fun, interesting, and cool it is, along with the overall quality of presentation.
This task is due at 8:30am on May
25. In addition to the Word
document, your group will have 2 minutes to present your task to a panel of
distinguished judges in class on the 25th. Please use this
Catalyst dropbox for your written
submissions.