I had fun in class today. It’s such luxury having a small group of active, engaged, smart students! And I love that they write each single week. It makes good discussions flow so easily.

“OK, everyone who’s interested in discussing games, definitions and narratives, over to that side of the room. Everyone interested in discussing Turkle’s 1984 article over to this side.”

All the boys went to the structuralist definition side. All the girls (only four out of fourteen students) went to the Turkle side. Usually I’ve tried to do a kind of summary of the small group discussions in plenary at the end of the class, but today I remembered what I was told at my university pedagogy course when I complained that I found the plenary summary difficult: “Are you sure that you need it? Perhaps you’re only doing the plenary because you need to feel there’s a result, and not because it helps the students learn?”

There aren’t enough computers in the room for each student to blog in class, so I asked them to jot down quick notes about what they would personally take from the class discussions and this week’s readings. And please blog it after class. Everyone was still writing when I left the room.