For the past week, I've been working seriously get my new course, 
Organisms: Diversity and Interactions, ready for the fall. Buzz and I met today and hashed out most of the final details -- there's still a fair amount of tweaking to be done, but most of the course is ready to go. I'm really pleased with what we've put together -- I think it's one of the best courses I've ever developed. I think it would be a better course if it was taught as a face-to-face course, rather than a distance ed course, but I still think it's a valuable course for students.
There's still one piece I want to work on. The course asks students to spend a lot of time doing natural history observations of a maple tree in a natural environment. We're having them read two books while they work in their projects: one book, Forest and Thicket, by John Eastman describes organisms, mostly forest trees, and their associated species. It describes the natural history of maple trees, the various caterpillars and insects that eat them, other plants that live with them, particular fungi that are found on them, etc. Many of these associate species are also described in other sections of the book: You can start one place and begin to explore the complex tapestry that is the forest community. The other book,
Creating a Classroom Community of Young Scientists by Jeffery Bloom is about helping teachers approach science education from a constructivist, student-active, and community perspective. (Here's the author's site which has some more detail about the book.) It describes how to create an engaging environment that draws students into investigative science projects and offers lots of background and how-to guides to take on substantive projects. But it focuses on helping students understand science as a community process. The last piece I need to develop is a way to help teachers appreciate the synergy between a biological community and a learning community: between an ecology of organisms and an ecology of ideas.
I was feeling really good about where we'd gotten when I got an email from the PI on the grant that's paying us to develop the class. She has "several questions" about the fact that we're not using the horrible "learning management system" that is provided the distance education outfit on campus. Well, that's not entirely true: we created a single page that has a link to where all of the resources are actually posted. It would be possible to use it more, but the experience we could provide to students would be substantially poorer -- and that's just if we used the resources that it has. We want to have students use blogs (to manage an on-line journal of their observations) and wikis (to do collaborative projects). The "learning management system" has nothing like that, of course. All you can do is post Word documents. I expect we will ultimately be able to do what we want to, but it really brought me down after I was so pumped earlier in the afternoon. I'm just lucky to be someplace like the Biology Department where I'm empowered to do really cool stuff. It would be horrible to be in one of the other departments on campus where you just have to eat whatever dog-food they're serving this year. Each year it's a different brand, but it's always dog-food.