Finding documents for the course

So I started my last blog talking about my search for course documents for the students to read to learn about the issues the course is about but I kind of got distracted.

At first I was nervous because I never taught the course so I am developing the course material from scratch. My last blog I talked about how I have tons of material because I was so interested about the events. I wrote a few long blog posts about it that resulted from my having read lots and lots of articles, over a hundred.

So I was able to narrow down my class into three sections. Before, during, and after the events. But since these will just be broad strokes because there is just too much to cover in class I wanted to also dive deep into some issues. So for this I had the idea of creating something called a Case Study where we could focus on a specifit thing like the fall of Bear Sterns.

So this week I was plowing through all my blogs posts trying to track down the resources and links that I used to create my blog post, that I failed to source in my blog. So now I ran into a second issue. I have too many documents. And I wanted to use a minimum amount of articles supplied by me because I wanted to use some of the concepts we learned in our class, letting the student do the heavy lifitng.

Professor Pickett told me that it is a hard concept to implement as a teacher and I am seeing that. I have so many documents, video's, resources, authors, journalists, websites, and blogs full of information that I want to share with my future students. I have so much that I want them to see and hear and learn but at the same time I have to let the student do the heavy lifitng. I guess I can guide, so when the students get off course I can say hey you should check this guy out, or this writer out.

So I will have to go through my course again and take away some articles. In another instance I gave two articles by the same guy when I should probably introduce my students to as many different authors as possible. Hopefully they will read the author I provide them with and than on their own they will read more articles by that author because they like him.

Another issue I am having is questioning if I have too much for the student to do. I really wanted them to do a group project but it seems like too much work. Mabye I will have to find a way to incorporate all the work I am currently giving them into a big group project.

For example I have the student building their own database of experts but maybe I can or could transform that assignment into the group wiki project.