This morning Phil asks "You seem to have vanished. Shall I send out search parties?" It has been a busy couple of days.
I'm having a lot of fun with the projects students are working on in class. I love the intensity of trying to envision an interesting project and making it work. Each of the projects is in a different state: some are well-structured and nearing completion while others are still struggling to define goals and means. It's wonderful for me to see the ideas that students are bringing to the projects and it gives me an opportunity to ask them to reflect on what kinds of learning they expect with one approach versus another.
Last night we got to see students "persuasion" projects. The goal was to produce a 30 second "commercial" that persuasively presented a concept or idea in Biology. In the past, we've always had a lot of fun for it and have just done it in class. This semester, I enlarged the project so that students could spend more time on it (because its fun). In the end, many of the students waited until the last minute and were still limited in how much time they could spend on it. I don't know you how you fix that problem. Randy suggested setting multiple deadlines -- make people show a rough cut after two weeks and then have the final project due after 4 weeks. Maybe adding that kind of structure is simply necessary. I thought if it was this fun, people would just naturally spend more time doing it.