Well, it is Friday night, and over the weekend many of my students will be writing introductions to their website Storybook Projects. Some of them will be re-writing the introduction that they first wrote for the project eight weeks ago. Other students will be largely starting from scratch, since their projects have sometimes turned out very differently than expected. Let’s say that those students are writing their re-introductions this weekend. In any case, all of the students will be in the wonderful land of RE - revising, rewriting, reflecting. And for me: it’s so rewarding! Continue reading ‘Writing - and Revising - for the Web’
Archive for April, 2003
The nice folks from WebCT came to our campus today (University of Oklahoma) to make a presentation on WebCT 4.0. WebCT has always had the reputation of being the “smarter” course management system, and after a year spent in the persistent vegetative state that is Blackboard, I was curious what WebCT would offer. The major change from the version of WebCT that I have worked with is the introduction of a WebDAV utility. This means that I can drag-and-drop materials from my desktop into my folder on the WebCT server. So there is a seamless connection between my computer desktop and the WebCT server on our campus. Continue reading ‘Desperately Seeking Hrabanus Maurus: WebCT and the Web’
Complexity is everywhere and, most agree, technology is the driving force. I was at the NECTFL conference last weekend and overheard a teacher from Maine say to her colleague, “I just got the old program figured out and now we’re switching to a new one. I guess I’ll never get to use any of this with my students.” That’s complexity in a nutshell — change that is so rapid it is difficult for individuals or communities to adapt effectively. Continue reading ‘Dealing with Complexity in Technology and Education’
Hyperlinks are what the web is all about: making connections. This is the piece of web publishing that is truly new technology in the history of writing. The monks of the Middle Ages had beautiful images to decorate their manuscripts but they were stumped when it came to creating hyperlinks; even just making an index for a text in the Middle Ages was a struggle because the page numbers would change based on the size of somebody’s handwriting! But now with the Internet, we can crosslink, index and refer to other documents with a simple single click. Everything on the web has an address, and you can connect to it… you should connect to it. This is what makes the web strong. Continue reading ‘Helping Students Get Hyper about Hyperlinks’
The NY Times ran an article last fall on the use of story and fiction by educators to make learning more palpable and successful for their students. It’s a great idea — and one we’ve all used in the actual classroom — but how can story and narrative make the biggest impact in online learning?
Early on in the history of the Web, story and narrative we used actively in hypertext experiments like Becomings, The Neverending Tale, and The Jews Daughter. It was also seen as a teaching tool to help students understand the possibilities of collaborative work. Continue reading ‘Integrating Narrative into Online Learning Materials’
Here is Alice, just before she goes down the rabbit-hole, “What is the use of a book,” thought Alice “without pictures or conversation?” I agree with Alice. Books with pictures and conversation are the best possible books, because they help us to remember that writing is a way for a person to share their presence with us. Voices. Bodies. And the web, at its best, is also a place for conversations and pictures. Today, in fact, I want to talk about pictures and how the web can allow students to interweave their writing with images in a way that was almost impossible for most of the 20th century. (As for conversation, why not submit a comment on this article when you are done reading it…? The “Discuss Button” wants to be clicked, really!)
About pictures: my first “wow” moment with the web was a demonstration of Mosaic in the offices of the University of Chicago Press in 1993. Was that only ten years ago? It was a long day of wrestling with a DOS application written in dBaseIII Plus, staring at screens with black backgrounds and appalling green and violet text, and then - in a moment of pure diversion - someone was showing us a Library of Congress Vatican Museum book exhibit o n l i n e . . . ! ! ! I can still remember feeling a little shiver. To tell the truth, I really didn’t even understand how it was possible. But there they were: pictures, gorgeous pictures, that arrived as if by magic. (You can still take a look at Herodotus’s Histories in this ten-year old online exhibit.) Continue reading ‘Pictures and Conversation: Images on the Web’
In the mid-nineties I was traveling in Brazil and, one day, I was invited to a birthday party by a friend of a friend of a friend. Not having anything better to do that evening, I borrowed a car and set out for the other side of Campinas. I had been told that the house I was looking for was on the city’s outskirts, but no one mentioned that it was also beyond the boundary where there were any street signs. Continue reading ‘Why Search Matters — How to Help People Find Their Way in the Community’
FIRST VODKA, NOW MADONNA:
CHE GUEVARA IMAGE STILL SELLS
or
Using Pop Culture Images to Teach Students to Relocate the Dislocated Referent
by Susan Smith Nash
Helping students become more aware of how images shape meaning is one of the primary objectives of media and popular culture courses. Online courses provide excellent opportunities to help students begin to understand how images create meaning. Such knowledge can empower students and help them learn to use images in conjunction with their own work.
An example drawn from popular culture is Madonna’s 2003 release, American Life. Continue reading ‘Madonna in Che Guevara’s Beret’
Writing on the web changes everything. It gives the students an audience with the possibility of immediate feedback from both the instructor and fellow students. The revision process is a natural part of how web publishing works. Plus there is ample opportunity to work not just with words but also with images, and to hyperlink one text to another. Continue reading ‘Writing for Real Audiences on the Web’
BODY:
One of the technologies we track here at Xplana is wireless broadband. Not to be left out of that discussion, of course, is broadband in general. The advent of cable and DSL have given users more bandwidth at home and that increased speed has translated to the use of more rich media in our Web interactions. Continue reading ‘What if High-Speed Internet Access Were a Utility as Common as Electricity?’
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