A retired faculty member here, Don Kroodsma, recently had a book published and came to see me about setting up a website for it. We talked about a variety of options and he decided that using the generic templates I had created for building course websites and adapted for building generic standalone sites would be the easiest way to put something up. It took about an hour (two days ago) to pour all the content into the site, and then another hour yesterday to build a couple dozen links from the front page to specific comments embedded in the site. there are still a couple dozen little corrections to make, but the site is basically done. Yesterday, we registered the domain name and today it is resolving, so I can point to 
The Singing Life of Birds and have the links work. Pretty nifty. The book looks like an obvious gift for a certain member of my family, so hopefully that person won't run off and buy a copy.
This afternoon, I'm attending a critique session for the Science Education Online program that Buzz and I taught in last fall. This afternoon, we're talking about Chemistry by Example, a course that was focused on providing teachers with techniques for teaching chemistry that they could use in their classrooms. The course had a pre-requisite: Matter in Context, that had a single theme. This course, by contrast, was more eclectic. The course had three main aspects: discussion (40%), and quiz (40%) and a final project (20%). I asked whether or not there was any assurance that students had actually conducted any of the activities. The answer was that there wasn't, but that from reading student journals, it appeared that most of the students had done the activities. When Buzz and I taught, we had more-or-less required that students do the activities and had journal entries and imagery requirements to ensure that students did. It was very reassuring to me, to see those entries and have confidence that the students were actually doing what we were asking them to. The quizzes in the class were 10 true/false questions -- not how I would approach teaching a small class. Why not just do open response?
One of the activities described was really cool: students boil poland-spring water bottles with cap on and cap off and compare the bottles to an original. If you boil it with the cap off the bottle gets smaller (but not orthoganally across both axes). If you boil it with the cap on, the bottle gets larger. The challenge is to come up with measurements of the changes and propose models for why the changes have happened. Nifty!
StevenBrewer