So What DID We Do?

That is a brilliant question.

[Conn's students] were learning, by trial and error, largely error, how to build a set of pseudograv engines. And they were putting together a hundred and one other things, all of which was good training for the time they'd be ready to start work on Ouroboros II.

[...] Conn was enthusiastic about that, remembering the so-called engineers on Koshchei, running around with a monkey-wrench in one hand and a textbook in the other, trying to find out what they were supposed to do while they were doing it. Poictesme had been living for too long on the leavings of wartime production; too few people had bothered learning how to produce anything.

Cosmic Computer (Junkyard Planet) by H. Beam Piper, p. 140, 159.

I'd like to take a moment to follow in Hillary Ulmer's footsteps but with a focus on what we did rather than what I learned. I feel we've been much like the students in this story, with an eBook writer in one window and a "SomeSortOf(TM) HowTo(TM) Write eBooks(TM)...for Dummies(TM)" site in another.

1. We took a disparate group of ~40 students in a Renaissance-to-Present Civilization class, decided on a combination eBook/TEDx approach, organized them according to individual interests, and produced a tremendous amount of content.
2. We learned that honors students--especially younger ones--are very very very grade oriented and react adversely to being told "you are not being graded...even though you are." Older students also react adversely, as they are on their way to graduating and seek to minimize their outputs. (I'm looking at you, James :)
3. We increased Google+'s membership by 30-40 people. Goodreads, Twitter, Flickr, Prezi, Diigo, Wikispaces, and a couple of others have also benefited, though I suspect most of these accounts will go fallow after the class ends. (I'll be keeping my Google Plus account though. It's much better at flow control than Facebook ever intends to be.) The wide variety of web 2.0 services that I've experienced have left me excited about the power, nervous about the vulnerability cross section, and bewildered by the maintenance costs of them.
4. I love Kindle. I've possibly read more fiction than nonfiction this semester, as I found H. Beam Pipers works on there for free (public domain FTW).
5. We almost wrote a book. A tremendous amount of work went into this, and an amorphous out-of-reach goal is, at long last, nearly done. Hopefully the folks over the summer will be able to bring it to fruition.
6. We learned how to and how not to work in groups. Marissa Pielstick got extremely frustrated with the Open Science group's rigidity, while James Williams and Phillip Pare were able to lead one of the larger groups to a poetic synthesis of the media.

Anyhow, these are just a few thoughts. I do recommend the above-quoted book. :)