Meetings

The Baylor seminar meets on Wednesdays from 4-5:30 p.m. Central Time. Schools can do their seminars whenever it's convenient for them, so long as we stay in "sync" each week on the reading assignment. There may be opportunities for synchronous interaction along the way, though I'm not counting on that. Rather, I'm thinking primarily about asynchronous interaction and leaving the door open for other inspirations as they arise.

Streaming and Skyping

Depending on the occasion and the mood at each site, we could consider live streaming via uStream with opportunities for networked affiliates to watch and participate in the chat. I may try to Skype in a guest speaker or two during the semester--if I do, I'll try to stream those sessions. And of course we can consider Skype or uStream for synchronous inter-site participation, if the inspiration strikes.

Blogging and other social media

For best results, participants should blog at least once a week. Participants can blog on the readings or anything else relevant to the seminar. Participants should also comment on one other local participant's blog each week. Of course, other good blogging practices (linking out to other blogs, embedding media, etc.) are also strongly recommended. There are also many opportunities to set up distributed blogging conversations both locally and across network sites.
We also have a discussion forum for shorter, more back-and-forth interaction. This participation also gives folks some experience with a forum other than the one in Blackboard--one that looks more like the many forums on the Internet itself, with avatars and sig files and communication that's more richly expressive.
Participation in Delicious, Flickr, and Twitter is also strongly encouraged.

Aggregation/syndication

Alan Levine and I think it would be good for each site to come up with a webpage that aggregates local content and also feeds that content out to a massively multi-site aggregation portal on Netvibes. That portal will function as a kind of visualization/dashboard of all the activity. As an example, for the Baylor seminar last spring I set up a "motherblog" that aggregated/republished blog posts and our Delicious stream: http://courseblogs.atlhub.net/baylor_nms_s10. I'll set up a similar motherblog this year for our site at a different URL matching the newer tag.

Local enrollments

18 is typically the maximum for an effective local seminar. At Baylor, we have 14 plus me, mostly because of funding and space constraints (we meet in my program's commons area, which is rather cozy).

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the New Media Consortium for its support and encouragement throughout this continuing experiment. Alan Levine in particular has been a constant inspiration and a great collaborator throughout this project. Thanks to Tim Logan and the Baylor Electronic Library for their moral and financial support. Thanks to my colleagues at Baylor for making the first seminar a wonderful experience, and encouraging me to continue the experiment.

And thanks to all of you who participate, singly and in groups, locally and through the network. Your participation makes this experiment richer and more influential for all of us--and for participants who will follow.