Plans for more Streamlined Assignments
As the Spring 2015 semester draws to a close, I’m thinking about what I’d like to do further in our active learning classroom, particularly in keeping with my modus operandi of streamlining the class. My fellow lecturer here at Auburn, Dr. Kathryn Olsen Wickman, has begun using wiki assignments in Canvas as a way for her students to work collaboratively on assembling information and context for the literature they study. Additionally this semester, with help from my students, we have begun using the Barco ClickShare Buttons in the EASL classroom to share the information on their laptops and Ipads with the entire class from their individual tables. Putting the online and the classroom technology together, this would be an ideal way for groups of students to research topics that provide cultural context to illuminate the texts we read. Days could be scheduled for sharing this graded work and the wiki page in Canvas would remain as a study aid, supplemented ideally by any notes students may have taken in the initial presentation. Drawing partly on Dr. Wickman’s approach, here’s how an assignment might work.
I would present the groups with a list of topics to research. If, for example, we were about to look at European Romantic or American Transcendentalist literature, then I might offer these topics.
Landscape painting
German idealism
British imperialism
Beethoven symphonies
The Napoleonic Wars
Wordsworth's “Ode: Intimations of Immortality”
Gothicism
Theories of the Sublime
New technologies
The groups would select from these items a topic to develop as a wiki, that is, a visible page, within the class online Canvas space. The wiki would allow them to arrange text, images, embedded videos, internet links, pdfs, audio files, or other media that would aid their class presentation. Using an appropriate mobile device at its table, hooked up with a ClickShare Button to the classroom’s screens around the room, each group could then guide the other students through the wiki page, explaining its topic, how it chose the assembled information, and how the information applies to the literature at that point of the semester. Ideally such an assignment would not only promote collaboration and creativity, but also a deeper understanding of cultural complexity.
