My good humor assorts poorly with the many disappointed folks in Massachusetts this morning after the loss to the Yankees last night. I am pleased because of class last night and Charlie's parent-teacher conference this morning both went very well. Class was great! I was wonderful to see the various environments that students had observed and to see them trying out using the education terminology to interpret and make sense of their observations. The presentations seemed smooth and polished and the presenters, relaxed and comfortable talking about their subjects. Many of the issues that I want to come up were raised at some point and there was very good discussionn among the students. The students are still uncomfortable asking questions about their peers' presentations, but it's starting to feel more and more like a cohesive and supportive group.
The Prometheus course I'm taking moves along. This week, the focus has been developing guidelines for setting expectations about scheduling communicative events for the course: how students and teachers are expected to communicate and when. Buzz and I had some interesting discussion and created a 
draft set of guidelines. I think it will be surprising for people to read our guidelines, which have a very different feel from the approach most faculty use. It's always interesting to me how quickly many faculty become a different person when put in the role of being a student. (I've commented about this phenomenon in the context of BioQUEST workshops -- In looking back, I see I haven't written much, though, so I should probably add some more sometime). One student in the Prometheus commented on wanting to see a "top ten list" of student particpation in the class. I responded saying
As an instructor, I want students to be able to see one another's work, but I would very much want to avoid a "top ten" or having students view anything that represents an assessment of other students' work, both of which I believe will foster competition, undermine the potential for collaboration, and (worst of all) encourage students to focus on earning credit in the class (rather than seeking understanding). Many students want this information only as reassurance for deciding that "they're done", so they can stop learning. I want students to assume responsibility for making this decision for themselves based on their own understanding and (like anything else I want them to practice) I provide low-stakes opportunities for them to come to understand how I will assess their work.
A few more comments about Prometheus: I found that the java-based equation editor doesn't quite work. It doesn't work at all with Safari and Mozilla complains that two of the class files are signed with incompatible keys. It seemingly runs OK in Internet Explorer, but when I created an equation and saved it, the "picture" it produced was wrong -- it wasn't what I had created. And when I tried to open it again, it was different -- both from what I had created and what the picture had looked like. It's true that the equation I made wasn't very meaningful, in that I had just munged together a bunch of elements and filled in their little boxes, but if it can't even do gibberish right, I would worry about trying to use it for anything important.
I've also found that the Chat tool doesn't work -- it requires the Director plugin, which I won't install anyway, but which will only install for IE or the Netscape-branded Mozilla. This is, again, part and parcel of the theme -- using some special-purpose proprietary tool instead of an open standard where the service will allow connections with a variety of different clients, so that people can choose the client that they like best.