The focus of this module is to explore the wide variety of assignments that are possible using Internet technologies. These activities include enhancing already effective face-to-face activities in cyberspace; enhancing classroom materials; expanding classroom boundaries; expanding the type and scope of research in a wide range of disciplines; facilitating peer-response; teaching visual literacy; and teaching digital and electronic rhetoric.
When developing online assignments for your specific discipline, keep in mind how the Internet facilitates these educational goals and values:
In Integrating Educational Technology into Teaching(2000), M.D. Roblyer and Jack Edwards give these rationales for incorporating technology into education:
The evolution of information technologies allows instructors to post materials for their students to the Internet. This, along with the proliferation of online archives, galleries, and libraries, has allowed online course sites to become a wealth of resources for students to use when engaging class materials. Using the Internet, instructors can give students instant access to primary sources and class materials that would be prohibitively expensive and time-consuming to reproduce with print technologies.
Teachers are using the Internet to publish:
Examples of Class Sites:
Teachers are using the Internet for Class Resources:
The Internet gives all teachers and students access to resources that haven't been accessible to students. Access to these resources on the Internet gives students
Example Sites:
Instructors often like the idea of having students create publications (newsletters, newspapers, magazines, and such), but often find it prohibitively expensive and time consuming to create multiple copies (particularly if color and images are used). Web publishing allows students to do collaborative projects that include multimedia and do multiple drafts at little cost.
Developing their own web publications also offers students opportunities to polish and shape their writing for real audiences. When students move to publication, they learn to:
A place where students can collect ideas from class readings. Students can collect quotes or paraphrases that they find important, interesting, or well said. It is important to direct students to introduce the text fragment so a student who has not done the readings could understand what it is about. Ask students to add at least two passages a week to their commonplace site for the remainder of the course.
Students do two imitations of one passage selected from the readings. The first imitation keeps the same topic but is rewritten as if it were written by a student in class talking while eating at Taco Bell. The second imitation keeps the same level of formality and structure but focuses on a different topic. Beginning with an introductory page, students create links between the different imitations to form one hypertext.
Working in groups of three, students choose one of several cultural critiques found on the Internet to analyze. Using hypertext links, they annotate the essay, explaining its rhetorical situation (PRESS): purpose, audience, evidence, structure, and style. They also define any difficult or key terms.
The goal of this assignment is to ask students to consider the different types of rhetorical strategies involved when writing for a traditional environment versus a digital environment. When creating an electronic text, issues to consider include chunking and bulleting information; the rhetoric of hypertext linking; visual rhetoric; and page layout, color schemes, and design.
Who Killed William Robinson?- Presents a complete collection of historical documents (newspaper stories, inquests, trial documents, private correspondence, diaries, paintings, artist's reconstructions and photographs) that relate to the death of William Robinson and the other two Blacks killed in the British Colony of British Columbia in 1868. Altogether there is a whole archive here: hundreds of pages of documents and nearly a hundred different images. By selecting different documents to review, the reader arrives at different conclusions about who killed William Robinson. Therefore, this web site is also about historical understanding. It allows you to look at the same documents that professional researchers look at to build their accounts. It allows you to interpret the raw material of the past and to ask the larger questions like, how do we know what happened in the past?
List of AHA Conference Papers - Incorporating Internet Technologies into the History Classroom
Leander, Kevin M. "The Craft of Teaching and the World Wide Web." In Weaving a Virtual Web: Practical Approaches to New Information Technologies. Ed. Sibylle Gruber. Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English. 279-304.
Rehberger, Dean. "Living Texts on the Web." In Weaving a Virtual Web: Practical Approaches to New Information Technologies. Ed. Sibylle Gruber. Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English. 193-206.
Sommers, Elizabeth. "Can Anybody Play? Using the World Wide Web to Develop Multidisciplinary Research and Writing Skills." In Weaving a Virtual Web: Practical Approaches to New Information Technologies. Ed. Sibylle Gruber. Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English. 59-77.
Warschauer, Mark. "Conclusion: Striving Toward Multiliteracies." In Electronic Literacies: Language, Culture, and Power in Online Education. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers. 155-178.