When the first class meeting involves dripping water, the second
class meeting must include some sponging up. 

Actually, the steady drip from the ceiling on Monday inspired some wonderful
insights about the mysterious water source one floor up–and when it wasn’t
raining outside.  After obligatory syllabus-readskimreading, we
collaboratively chalked a
professional writing free-association map. Everyone contributed two
impulsive associations
(I’d structure it a bit differently next time, urge a bit more contemplative
attention to the emerging relationships, spontaneous though they were).
When everybody left, I grabbed a photo of the chalk board, and today I dropped it into
a CMap for later reference.  I’m thinking about introducing CMap Tools,
even encouraging its use for part of one of the projects, but I also was
thinking it’d be interesting to revisit the first-day map of sorts, perhaps
expanding it periodically as a group.  Or even have students work from a
common file to revise their individual concept maps for semester-end portfolios
(something that moves nodes around, adds pieces, points to found relationships,
etc.).  For the mapping activity, I basically turned everyone loose at
once, which gave me a change to watch interactions, conversation, preferences
for mapping off of the terms from others, and so on.  Primarily, I was
curious about what would come together, where we were starting, how we tend to
think about the terms naming the course.