Project for the Humanities in the 21st Century Seminar

Nancy McTaggart

2007-2008

I have spent years now thinking about how to teach my online courses more effectively.   Unfortunately, much of that thinking has been done in isolation and without as much knowledge as I would have liked.  It was comforting and inspiring to work with a group of faculty who were struggling with the same issues and to learn from experts who had things to add to my knowledge.  Some of the benefits were practical in terms of specific tools or websites that I could use.  Some were more philosophical in terms of how to think about what I do. Most were a combination of these things, and the impact on my teaching is just beginning to surface.

• John Thompson’s presentation on the digital natives and Web 2.0 caused me to think more broadly about what I’d seen my own daughters do at home and what I was doing in my classes.  There seemed to be two broad lessons from this.

• Use more visual and audio content in my courses. 

  My daughters use YouTube to learn anything from how to set a mousetrap, to how to create a pot on a wheel, to how to play a particular piece on the piano.  The power of the video was apparent, as was the evocative power of sound.  I’ve just started using this and have added to an introductory section of my ENG 005 Reading Improvement II some YouTube videos aboutthe Dust Bowl and the Great Depression.   Students go on to read a dense chapter from a history textbook on the New Deal, and the videos give them a clearer sense of what people were suffering than words could do.  Robert Brown’s discussion of using YouTube videos was very helpful. 

  Jennifer Ferguson’s presentation on podcasts and vodcasts also made me want to add more media to my classes and made it seem reasonably easy to do.  When I revise ENG 005 Reading Improvement II in the fall, I plan to create some vodcasts to embed in the course.  I will be demonstrating how to do some of the skills I want students to learn.

• Create more opportunities for student engagement and interaction with the course content.

   I also used the strategy that Andy Mink of the Virginia center for Digital History at the University of Virginia showed us of eliciting student curiosity to provoke active learning by having students write questions they’d like answered about the images they view in the videos.   Then they go on to do a brief research assignment to find answers to their question

  For the last year I’ve been trying to capitalize on the Web 2.0 approach to communication that our students are so comfortable with and find so engaging.  To that end I’ve made a version of ENG 112 College Composition II that is conducted entirely through groupwork.  I use Google Documents, so that students can work together synchronously or asynchronously on a document and see each other’s additions and deletions.  I can also tell which students have done particular parts of the work.  I’ve asked one of the instructional designers at ELI to create a Captivate video with instructions about how to use it, so it’s easier for my students to figure out.

• Yitna Firdyiwek’s presentation on teacher-centered software inspired me to create my own homepage with links to the websites I use most often:

 http://novaonline.nvcc.edu/eli/eng112nm/nancydesktop.htm

I’ve begun by listing just a few links, but plan to add more.  In addition to helping me use my time more productively, it gives me a way to think about the websites I use and to consider what else I should be using more often.

It’s also made me focus on what I would like my software to do for me instead of thinking only about how I can make do with what my software now does.  It’s opened up a wide range of possibilities that I have started communicating to those I work with. 

• Some of the scholars involved in creating digital resources made me aware of  the vast resources available on the web and how important it is for students to learn to cull the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, when choosing sources.  Bethany Nowviskie of the University of Virginia was particularly instructive in thinking about the indexing challenges of putting together a website and the opportunities for inter-institutional collaborations. She also provided an amazing example of the depth of material available on the web.

I plan to expand my unit on evaluating web sources in ENG 112 for the fall. I currently cover the usual kinds of material about determining the likely validity and reliability of the information provided on a website, but plan to add material about using subscription sources and comparing academic to commercial sources of information.

Matt Kirschenbaum of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland also stimulated by thinking about the opportunities the web offers for the examination of texts and the analysis of them. I had thought about the instant availability of information, but not about how the information might be better or more easily analyzed. I loved the idea of digital libraries with every book in existence preserved and accessible. I'm not sure how this information will alter the way I teach yet, but it's given me new ways to think about the web.