Class notes
In most of my classes, I assign students to take notes in a class wiki each session.
The students assigned to this are responsible for the first draft of the notes. The notes are available to all and can be edited, corrected, and emended by any student in the class.
How you take the notes is up to you. You can take them live in the wiki during class. Or you can take them using some other programme or by hand in a notebook and copy-and-paste or type them out into the wiki later. I usually assign note-taking to more than one student at a time: these students may work together any way they wish: they could take notes independently and then combine them in the wiki. One person could be assigned to initial note-taking, and others to editing, supplementing, typing out, etc. If you have to take notes more than once and have regular partners, you could agree to take turn about being responsible for the notes.
Your participation in this exercise will be graded on a pass/fail basis, with “reasonable effort” being the main criteria for a pass. If a group of students has been assigned to take notes on a given day, all students in the group will receive the same mark.
Beyond establishing that the notes have been taken, I will not evaluate them in any way. As in all wikis, the participants are responsible for ensuring the accuracy and completeness of the contents.
What the class does with the notes is up to the class. In previous years, some students have used them to form study groups, for example, or compare their experience in and understanding of the class content.
