I have been pulling up the blog in class so that the questions are available during discussion. However, because the question list is too long and we often have other material up on screen, they have not had the effect of spontaneously directing classroom discussion.
Readings:
- Kelly, Teaching History in the Digital Age, chapter 4
- Leah Wright, “Tweet Me a Story,” in Web Writing: Why & How for Liberal Arts Teaching & Learning, edited by Jack Dougherty et al., http://webwriting.trincoll.edu/engagement/wright-2013/
- Shannon Chistine Mattern, “Evaluating Multimodal Work, Revisited,” Journal of Digital Humanities 1 (4): http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-4/evaluating-multimodal-work-revisited-by-shannon-mattern/
- Cohen and Rosenzweig, chapter 6
Overriding question: The internet
offers us so many options for presenting and gaining historical information. How
do we know which ones to use? Goal of class discussion: develop criteria for
thinking about how to answer this question.
Cohen and
Rosenzweig, chapter 6
- What methods can you use to figure out what research collection approaches match your intent?
- What questions should we be asking about the reliability of witness testimony collected through online sites? Are such questions any different than those we would ask about oral histories or archived documentary history?
- What are the takeaways in terms of advice about when you build your own digital collecting project?
Tweet Me a Story
- What did you learn about how Twitter works from this essay? What are the strengths and weaknesses of how Twitter works?
- Why did one student in the class refer to the essay as a blog? What’s the difference between a blog and an essay?
- What are the strengths and weaknesses of Twitter as a platform for telling a longer story?
- Does carefully organizing tweets into a story, perhaps with posts from other media included, undermine the instant-gratification effects of Twitter?
- What role might Twitter, and storytelling through Twitter, have in history in particular?
- What effect does the author gain by invoking the historical practice of serialization of novels in magazines before being sold in book format?
Kelly, chapter 4
- In this age of so many possibilities for presenting your historical information and ideas, how do you know which one (or sequence) to use?
- Should we be asking students to write in a variety of forms (such as Tweeting) or should we defend the value of the traditional linear essay? What have you gained from the traditional linear, analytical essay? What are its essential virtues? Can we make a comparison to practicing your scales if you are a piano player—you shouldn’t venture out into these other formats unless you have the basic approach down?
- Why are/were grades private? Is public feedback on a work in progress more motivating? Is my reluctance to share work in progress born from a perfectionism characteristic of those very people who go on to become professors? Should student projects have a life after the end of a class?
- Have I made the goals of the class blogs sufficiently clear? What are the pros and cons of the blogging platforms that you have started up your blogs on?
Evaluating Multimodal Work
- Would you feel comfortable using these criteria to, say, assess the work of students in Mills Kelly’s class?
- Do all of these criteria seem to apply to student work? What kind of student work is she talking about?
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