Cinder Cooper Project

Cinder Cooper
9 May 2008
NEH Digital Humanities Workshop

Teachers Make the Worst Patients

I was reluctant at first. “I’m too set in my ways to learn how to integrate digital tools into my teaching practices,” I said. “I don’t have time to learn what I really need to know to make this a worthwhile endeavor” I argued with myself. “I’m an old loser, whose kid has to download songs and podcasts on to my IPod, which was his hand-me-down” I declared to myself. Finally, I bit the bullet, after asking myself the most important question: “What have I got to lose?” The answer was nothing. Over the last nine months I’ve learned about blogs, pod and vod casts, digital archives and essays, and much, much more. And while I am overwhelmed, I see myself slowly integrating technology into my courses. It started small, with just Power Points to serve as outlines for my lectures. Then I began to play around with PowerPoint, adding links to media on the web, copying pictures, and eventually embedding sound. I can no longer survive a teaching day outside of Smart Room. Now that I have taken that first step, I feel a little less anxious about using more technology; the problem now is that I want to use it ways that I don’t have the skill set for. Through this workshop, I have found that I do not have to recreate the technology wheel; I can adapt things that already exist for my purposes and use the support system and expertise already in place at the college. From the Digital Humanities workshop, I’ve learned ways of focusing my technology use. While I’ve been using the web throughout my teaching career, I am now approaching it from a 2.0 perspective.

I have revamped the Website I used as a supplement for one of my courses that I teach online and face-to-face, African American Literature. The Website was once a place to store the PowerPoint presentations I used in class as an outline and to complement the readings and house additional syllabi and study aids, including review material and directions for assignments. Now, my website (www.nvcc.edu/home/cicooper/dhittc%20unit%201.htm) is being developed to serve as a compendium of resources, complete with assignments based on those resources. For example, I am using Blackboard as a shell for my website. Once a student logs into my course on Blackboard, he or she will see a prompt for an assignment and a link to my website. After viewing the assignment, which is based on material from the website, he or she will then be directed to respond to the Blackboard Discussion thread the matches the assignment.

The second component of the new direction I am taking in my course is blogging. I have created a general blog at www.aalac.blogspot.com for my Composition and Rhetoric course and my African American Literature course. Again after being given a link to a specific post on the blog, students will read the entry that will contain prompts for writing, which they will respond to in their own blogs, created for the class. Here students can see what I and their classmates are writing about based on whatever topic we are studying for the unit.

Finally, I am incorporating digital essay (using www.primaryaccess.org) assignments into my cache of tools to reach students with multiple learning styles. I have discovered that my students buy into writing more when they are given multiple ways to engage in the activity. As a component on online writing, they will be creating “This I believe” essays for submission into NPR’s database of “This I believe” works.

I am beginning to see digital/online technology as sound pedagogical practice and not just bells and whistles to distract students. I am beginning to see the web as a place for mutual collaboration and interaction. In the Web environment, my students and I not only search for, evaluate, and analyze digital sources, we create them as well.