Title: Action, Connection,Communication:The Honors Classroom in theDigital Age
Abstract: For more than a decade, the two of us, an historian and a literature professor, have co-taught a 12-credit European Civilization sequence for first-year honors students. Last year Grand Valley inaugurated an impressive new living and learning center, which includes two innovative classrooms dubbed Labs, Steelcase's effort to bring twenty-first century design to traditional classrooms that may have met the needs of the nineteenth century but have lingered long beyond their usefulness. In the Learn Lab, five conference tables, arranged in a star shape, supplant regimented rows of desks. At the head of each table, pillars provide electrical and projector connections. Three large screens placed around the room can project a monitor from anyone's laptop or from the instructor's station tucked in a corner. We can walk around the room and still operate the interactive Walk and Talk board. Document cameras allow us to save the day's work by recording marker-board scribblings or individual documents. The Learn Labs' impressive array of technology and design symbolize well the promise of the digital age along with its challenges. As the philosopher and mathematician Seymour Papert argues, merely adopting technology into old models of education is akin to strapping a new, powerful jet engine to the horse and buggy and then expecting great accomplishments. The Learn Lab provides an environment where we can easily dispense with old educational models as we implement three main principles that guide honors education in the digital age: learning should be active, connected, and communicated. ACTIVE LEARNING One of the hallmarks of honors education is course work that challenges students to engage materials and methods directly and substantively; many new technologies make this more possible today. As Professor Mariz notes, newer electronic tools for researchers provide unprecedented access. Just a few years ago we would need a trip to a scholarly archive to see unique primary documents that can now be in the hands of undergraduates with a mouse click. When we build assignments leading to these sources, students experience the thrill of scholarly exploration and discovery. To introduce the Victorian era, we distribute contemporary artifacts--toys, images, announcements of events, accounts of accidents or notable inventions, prints or articles, some satirical, others serious, from nineteenth-century publications--sending students to find information and situate the artifacts in their historical context. Electronic resources--sites such as the Victorian Web; digital archives of magazines like Punch or Godey's Ladies Book; accounts in historical newspapers--are invaluable as students construct proposals for an exhibition on Victorian England and present their discoveries to the class. In the classroom, new web technologies help students discover for themselves what we might in decades past have described for them. For instance, a site called Wordle lets users input a text, and with the click of a button a word cloud emerges which renders the passage visually with the more frequently used words represented by bolder and larger fonts. Wordle is a useful starting point for discussing tone, style, or symbolic patterns in poetry or prose. A computer coding program called Scratch allows students easily to create multimedia animations and games. Developed at MIT to teach younger students about object-oriented coding, the free online program works well as an illustration tool. Within an hour, our students worked in teams to create impressive illustrations of assigned scenes from Isak Dineson's Out of Africa. In the process of grappling with the novel and the historical context in order to create their multimedia animations, the students learned much more than if we had just discussed the scenes or lectured about them. As we teach writing, we use a free online program called Calibrated Peer Review (CPR) for draft workshops. …
Publication Year: 2009
Publication Date: 2009-09-22
Language: en
Type: article
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