Faculty who are using material from my textbook (be it one chapter or the whole book, either free online or the print version) are invited to participate in a faculty community hosted on Ning. This is where faculty can share teaching ideas, innovative exercises, links to useful articles, video, images, and other content. I’ll also use this as a forum to gather input for improving and expanding the book (I plan to issue revised / updated editions each summer). While my TAs help me maintain and administer the group (and they may contribute), the forum is otherwise limited just to faculty (this allows faculty to share ideas on exams, exercises, and bat about ideas before they’re ‘fully baked’ and ready for rollout to our students). Faculty who would like to participate are asked to submit their University-affiliated e-mail address to verify they are a faculty member.
Send the following info to [email protected]. If you don’t receive a reply within 48 hrs., e-mail John at [email protected].
- Name
- Title
- Department
- School / College
- University
- University’s URL listing you as a faculty member, and showing your University-affiliated e-mail address.
Once moderators verify e-mail that are indeed for faculty, you’ll be sent an e-mail invitation to join. Once you join, feel free to make a blog post for anything you’d like to contribute, and ‘Tag’ the post with keywords related to book content (e.g. “Facebook”, “Moore’s Law”, “Social Media”). Got a question? Use the forum. My hope is that faculty using the course material could jump into the community & search on key words to pull up the latest neat contributions other faculty thought were worth sharing. Thanks for considering our experiment & welcome to the community!
The screen shot below (click to expand) gives you an idea of what to expect. You’ll see various ‘blog posts’ contain links to videos, articles, and online slide shows to supplement class material (sorry about the column of AdSense ads – Ning runs these to support their free community – I don’t get any revenue from ads).
