XplanaZine

Okay, back to yesterday’s topic: the fact that university students are often much more aware of the university bookstore than they are of the university library. They get books for their classes in the bookstore - with library books in second place, a temporary and often individual appendage to the books required for classes. As a result, for many faculty members, the availability of books - books that are in-print, books that are affordable - is a major factor in drawing up the syllabus for a class. When I taught my Mythology-Folklore class in a traditional classroom setting, I relied heavily on inexpensive Dover Books which provide some excellent folklore titles at a low cost. Still, I knew students were not especially happy about this - the Myth-Folklore class at OU is a general education course, so the students often had no particular interest in acquiring these books, no matter how cheaply, and the bookstore was also unlikely to buy them back since every teacher had a different reading list for this course.
But the worse problem was this: I had a lot of trouble - a lot of trouble - with students completing the assigned reading and being actively engaged with the reading. I was rarely very happy about how well it seemed that the students were doing the reading - great students, but something was still not working quite right.
Partly it is the inevitable disconnect caused by the absurdities of synchronous learning scenarios: if they did the reading over the weekend, and we didn’t have class until Tuesday afternoon, the reading was not fresh in their minds. I am very spoiled by my online course experience where they do their assignments right away after doing the reading (which is great: the students write better responses, and the act of responding reinforces the reading).
Yet I also got the feeling that what was a normal amount of reading in my mind (100-150 pages of folktale texts) was somehow too much for the students. They were clearly racing through the reading, not retaining very much of it, and feeling bewildered a good deal of the time. Not good.
So I made a very radical change when I moved the Mythology-Folklore class online. I ordered no books for the course at all, and instead drew the material from the abundant folktale and mythology texts available in the public domain. I then cut back on the reading, and reformatted the texts in order to suit my needs as an instructor. Good digital libraries can supply you with texts that can be reformatted for specific needs. And I had a very particular goal: reformat the texts to increase the level of active reading by my students.
This was a dramatic change in the course, and it was a total success. By reading less, the students are actually reading more - because they complete the readings, they enjoy what they read, and they can put their new knowledge to good use, with great discussions and creative re-tellings of the stories. Here are some of the specific strategies I used when selecting texts from digital libraries and reformatting them for my course:
1. Work with public domain texts. There are some texts available online that are not in the public domain - the fabulous resources at bartleby.com are a good example. You can point to pages at bartleby, but you cannot take the pages and reformat them without permission from the publishers. Luckily, sticking to public domain texts is easy for Mythology and Folklore. I’m not happy about the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, but there is already a superabundance of public domain materials, already digitized, that I can use to build my course materials. (Tomorrow, I’ll review some of the sites that I rely heavily on for finding these texts.)
2. Abridge creatively and count your words. I shamelessly abridge on my students’ behalf - and the nice thing about offering your students an abridged version of the digital text is that the full version of the text is available just one click away. So if we are reading only selected chapters of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, they can read the entire version online if they are so inclined. Basically, I think in terms of two hours of time. Why? Well, movies are two hours long. That’s a kind of arbitrary but oddly consistent fact of modern life: we are used to giving up two hours of our time to watch a movie on TV or go see one at the cinema. So, the commitment I make to my students each week is that the core required readings can be read out loud in two hours or less. Do they actually read the texts out loud? I wish! It’s the best kind of active reading. One student once told me that her dog loved the fact that she read to him every week for my class! In any case, that is the commitment I make to them: two hours reading out loud, if they choose to read out loud. It works out to around 20,000 words per week, less for more difficult texts, such as poetry or dialect texts - here’s a sample week’s readings.
3. Break it up… and interrogate: ask questions! After I’ve decided on the text selections for the week, I break them up into meaningful chunks - and I do this by reading the text out loud myself (great way also to look for typos which digital texts often contain in some abundance). Each webpage contains text that takes between 3 minutes and 9 minutes to read out loud. At the bottom of each page there are some reading comprehension questions which are designed to help the students check whether they were paying attention to the reading, and whether they are ready to move on to the next page. These are very basic questions, which are meant more than anything to get the student to slow down and think about what they are reading as the story unfolds.
4. Illustrate the readings. Although it can take some time on the instructor’s part, providing illustrations for the readings is very useful. I’ve written some other articles here at XPLANA about images and image editing, so I won’t go into detail here. My basic strategy is to put images up on their own webpages, and to create 100×100 pixel crops of those images which can be used to illustrate text pages without interfering with the text; students can then click on the image to see a full view and learn more about it if they are interested. I started adding more images to the texts at the students’ request - they were quite clear about the extremely high value that they placed on having illustrated texts. Again, the freedom to illustrate is a virtue of the digital format - color illustrations for printed books are always at a premium.
And that’s really all there is to it - once you realize the freedom that you enjoy working with digital texts, it’s easy to do all kinds of things that would never be possible with printed books. And as often, the assumption that there is something “impersonal” about digital texts turns out to be dead wrong: there is nothing mechanical about working with these computerized versions of the human word. If anything, you are able to make these digital texts much more personal by crafting your version of the text precisely for your students’ needs. Working with printed books was always a struggle, but since I switched to these “custom-built” digital texts online, I’ve never felt any disappointment or frustration in the quality of my students’ engagement with the texts. Week after week, they read all the readings, and they read them well. As one student wrote in an assessment of the workload for this class: “The reading takes an hour or two, but it is entertaining and interesting– unlike the reading that is assigned in many other courses. Even though there was more course work than I expected, I would still recommend it to anyone.”
What more can you ask for…? Reading less really can be reading more.