ETI Presentation

Thom Parkhill and Russ Hunt
St. Thomas University

Teaching with
Online Text and Image
In a Digital Age

UNB/STU Effective Teaching Institute
13 April 2000

We went to the Dalhousie Realizing Text and Image in a Digital Age conference because we're working on interactive Web sites for classes and we hoped to get some insight into better ways of doing this. But it didn't quite work out that way, though what we learned is, we believe, of value. Here's some of what we learned about:

[Many of the links offered here have changed or expired since 2000. We're sorry.]

The Dalhousie Electronic Text Center
David Seaman and the Virginia Electronic Text Center, including

Some background on SGML and what it lets you do
What's available at the ETC

The UNB Electronic Text Centre
John Barnstead's site on Mikhail Kuzmin
David Jaffee at CCNY and his course on The Historian and the Computer
Ronald Tetreau'scourse on Electronic Texts and Textual Criticism, and his site for the 200th anniversary of Lyrical Ballads

Other sites used in the presentations:

The demonstration Halifax Explosion site
The room we met in, as it looked in December 1917
The Jefferson Village site on "The Valley of the Shadow"
The Mark Twain Project

Web based teaching materials like these are useful as enhancements of, and possibly substitutes for, textbook and lectures, and it's clear that teachers might find much of this very useful. What we'd hoped to find, though, was more of the sort of thing David Jaffee's CCNY course offered -- opportunities for students to use the Web for themselves. What we want to explore here are even more interactive uses of the Web -- uses which are more like substitutes for class discussion, essay assignments, and research projects.

There are some local Web sites which are of interest, and from which we have things to learn, and which invite students to participate in the construction of the site.

Roger Moore's Spanish courses
Doug McKenzie-Mohr's Fostering Sustainable behavior site.

But our own interest is primarily in ways in which we can use the Web and related technologies to create situations in which students share information and ideas, in which student work and student writing has as its primary audience other students and in some cases an external public with a real interest in what they're learning and finding. Here are some examples of what we're working on and how we're doing it in courses like the current Truth in Society section of our first year Aquinas Program, and Russ' Restoration and Eighteenth Century Theatre and Drama course from the fall term.

A student Web site on a Japanese short story called "Tattoo"
A student Web site on an excerpt from Darwin in the Norton Anthology of English Literature
A student Web site on Frost's "The Road Not Taken"
The resource site on Restoration and Eighteenth Century Drama created by the English 3236 class

To Russ's Web site
To Thom's Web site