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Dr. David Porter Loudoun Campus History Department
Initial Proposal: I expect that the workshop will give me new ideas about using technology to incorporate into my history courses and our historic preservation program. I would like to become more cognizant of the opportunities the web, and more recent Web 2.0 options such as blogs, make available to improve the student learning experience. The opportunity to meet with some of the cutting-edge practitioners of new technology would help me practically by helping to identify what techniques would be most appropriate for my classes. Final Project: After participating in the Teaching Digital Humanities Grant I have a number of new ideas to incorporate in my courses. In particular, there are a number of Web 2.0 applications discussed in the grant that I either have already introduced into my courses or intend to use in subsequent semesters. Application 1 Wikis: At present student opportunities for student interaction in my online courses are not as smooth as those in my physical course settings. Currently I use the Blackboard discussion boards. While this offers some opportunity for peer-peer exchanges, I find that the discussions are stilted and frequently wooden. Often, postings contain little original thought or insightful observation into the course material. One new idea that will be incorporated into my future courses will be the use of collaborative learning and discussions made possible by wikis. One aspect of my project will be to utilize wikis for each course as a means for students to collaboratively create a body of knowledge for use during the course. I envision this part of the project having two objectives. A. The students would create a general pool of easily accessible knowledge specific to the material covered in the course. This should help the students better master the material covered in the course by researching and writing about the subjects that will be covered on the exams. B. Each student would have a research project/paper that they would post on the course wiki. This would help expand the material on the wiki beyond the just the basics of the class. Application 2 Student video shows: During the grant one of the most interesting ideas was the creation of slide shows based on text and pre-selected web images. This resource, located at www.primaryaccess.org/teacher, presented by the Virginia Center for Digital History fit very well into how my courses operate. I have students do research and present their findings to the rest of the class. This program provides an interesting and creative method of presenting the material and also ensures a framework for the material to be easily viewed by the other students. I intend to use this program in my summer courses. Application 3 Interactive presentations: At present my lectures are accessible via powerpoint and document files. While adequate for use by students, I intend to insert audio files to increase the accessibility of the material. I have two different directions that I intend to explore. A. I intend to insert at the start of each presentation small, embedded audio files that identify the major issues covered in each section of the presentation. These audio files should small so the powerpoint itself is not prohibitively large for a long download time. Based on the discussions during the grant, it seems that audio files of ninety seconds or less would be optimal. B. After completing the initial audio conversion, creating podcasts of the various discussion threads in each course topic. Again, these will probably be broken into smaller files for ease of download – each lecture into two or three MP3 files.
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