home


 * NOW AN ARCHIVE ONLY!**

It's true...after 10 years, I have stopped teaching KS 101. It's been great, and I have some sadness around leaving it behind, but this space will continue to be a record of a few of my teaching approaches.

Feel free to browse around and contact me with any questions.


 * Welcome** to our wiki -- if MyLearningSpace goes down, we visit this place for files, discussion, updates... thus far things have never been dire enough that we actually have needed to move discussion here, but as a file repository it's been quite useful.

I created this on the fly, so it's a bit rough. It is now a kind of ongoing history of the course, and will remain an archive as long as that's needed. If you're a WLU student in KS 101, feel free to add stuff to the wiki -- that's what it's for.

If you're just visiting, please feel free to examine the syllabus, assignments, exam and so forth and contact me if you have questions.


 * News...**

So our first lecture was yesterday, and we did hold tutorials. Corrected syllabus is up on MyLS and the first two Minijournals are open. Latest syllabus is up here now too.
 * Jan 11 2014: First week up and running**

MyLS had some hiccups, or hiccoughs if you're precious like me and had a BritLit fetish as a child, much of the afternoon. It's working normally for me now but I'm not sure how it is for you. IN any case look under Assignments for your IRP rubric and IRP 2 instructions.
 * March 4 2013: Content inaccessible this afternoon**


 * Feb 7 2013: MyLS, after the three-day outage last week and slowdowns/ unavailabilities both Sunday night and Monday this week, seems to be ticking along fine now.**

Your lecture slides will be up on MyLS again, as will your assignments. However, just in case, I will also put any new content up here (check the left side navigation menu for Assignments and check this Homepage for news items about any deadline changes as the result of system downtime). Good luck with your Reading Quiz 1 (due Friday the 8th by 10:00 a.m. -- no change in that deadline as the system has been fine since the Quiz opened Wednesday morning at 10:00 a.m.).

For now here is skeletal lecture slide set:
 * Feb 1 2013: MyLS has been up and down since the 29th -- mostly down. So check back here for updates re: what to do!**

January 2013 -- Yep -- 9th year runnin' now. Back in the KS 101 saddle. Feels like home. This year I'm planning to change only a few things to improve the flow of the assignments (including the mini-journals), and to improve the lectures. I think I'll do more writing work in class. People need to write more in order to improve writing. Like, who knew!?

January 2012 -- KS 101 is back on deck at WLU with 3 CAST MA students taking two tutorials each (I have two as well). 200 students! Quite a bit of growth since 2005, when there were 90. This is the first year that many of the students will be YOUNGER than my own kid. This does not bode well for my pop-culture up-to-dateness. Again I shall have to do the old tried-and-true trick: get the STUDENTS to supply the cultural references that they want to interrogate and explore!

June 2011 -- KS 101 is on the conference circuit again; this time, I'm presenting about the quiz tool, intelligent agents, and mini-journals. Co-authors are Larissa Parsons and Kristine Lippett, TAs from Winter 2011. Handout and intro PechaKucha are on the left nav menu under TLT2011 (Teaching and Learning to the Power of Technology conference in Saskatoon).

January 2011 -- KS 101 has begun. We have another KS101 alumna as one of our TAs, and we have a CAST MA student as well. Significant changes this year: tutorials are biweekly, we now have 200 students, and WLU has switched from WebCT to Desire2Learn, calling the new LMS "MyLearningSpace" or "MLS" for short.

April 2010 -- Trevor and student team presented at WLU/MHR conference; presentation title: "Engaged and Motivated: Creative Assessments in a Large First Year Interdisciplinary Course" by Holmes, Trevor with C. Basch, S. Blyth, L. Barton, K. Chambers, A. Connerty, B. Cooke, B. Mantha, M. Sloutsky.

January 2010 -- yep, here we are again. Same textbook, slightly different syllabus. Will post stuff from Winter 2010 on the site now, and maybe archive other stuff.

May 2009 -- Grades are in, another term wrapped up. I'll post things occasionally about the course here, perhaps plan a bit for future iterations if I get to teach it again (after 5 years with the course in two different capacities, I still don't feel anything like "finished" with it).

April 3 2009 -- WebCT has been up and down all week, again, and we can't upload files. It's going down during the whole lecture time today, so the exam is posted here as of Friday April 3rd after 1:30 p.m.

March 10 2009 -- WebCT, Novell, Groupwise, and even WLU's homepage are all busted again. So I'm posting IRP 3 here in Assignments, in case you were wondering about it (and wanting to decide about the field observation on Friday the 13th, bwahahahaha)