If Casey’s Class went online: 2 ideas

Just like in F2F classroom, in online learning environments, when you go late on your tasks you get advantage of having the opportunity of seeing everyone good ideas but the demanding for still being creative increases dramatically.
Most of you have given very good ideas for transforming the Caseys’ Journalism Course into an interesting online course. I loved the idea of using online discussion groups and online collaboration tools, like wikis, going to virtual field trips, exploring videos in streaming online systems (like Youtube), create presentations (with Glogster) or commercials.

I would like just to complement all your ideas with 2 more:
1) Inverse Blooms’ taxonomy
Sometimes it can be interesting to inverse Blooms’ taxonomy and to start with activities that explore higher order thinking skills and move back to lower skills. Because in real world, in very often in virtual environments, things do not happen in that specifically organized crescent order. And students need to be able to, sometimes, create, invent, construct, evaluate from scratch.
For example if you say to a student “Watch this piece of Fahrenheit 9/11 and answer to the question “How do the three basic defenses against libel suits work with such films that seem to slant the truth? in the discussion board”. You don’t need to guarantee that he totally understand the difference and the true meaning of libel, privacy, ethics and taste.

It can be difficult for smaller children but I always love the idea presented by Bruner that we can teach everything even Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation, to a small children as long as we know how to structure the information in simple unit and, based on it, create new propositions.

2) Go international
One of my favorite aspects of www is its internationalization. In the internet I am all around the world. Also I like to see the online learning not just as one way for having access to new courses and materials but also as a way of develop things and do things that would be very difficult to do in the traditional classroom- approach .
Therefore, I think that in an online course Casey could promote that her students ‘go international’. This means, for example:
. research for journal articles, news, political speeches from different countries (make them think about the important of select reliability of the information that is found on trustworthy fonts all over the world);
. make students analyze legislation that regulates journalists in different countries and reflect on its implications if it was applied in the USA
. make them find, contact and online interview (through Skype) journalist of prestigious newspapers, not only in the USA but also in China, UK, India, South Africa, … make them create an script for the interview, applying in it the knowledge acquired about code of and then publish the interview (on Wordpress)
. find out another Journalism Class, let’s say, in other USA state or even in Mexico, Canadá, Germany, and develop an online collaborative project with that course instructor where both classes could discuss together the documentary “Media Hype: When News Coverage Goes Too Far” and then also collaboratively write (in a Wiki tool) a synthesis of a (collective) statement about it.