So what did happen?
Within seconds of sending my invitation to the students, I became aware of my first mistake. Because I'd never previously included myself in the invitees' list for a Google doc, I hadn't realised -- obvious though it now seems -- that the invitation which arrived in my addressees' inboxes would have come from my own Googlemail address. I now use my Googlemail account exclusively for personal correspondence, so although students' getting access to it wasn't really a problem, it was something I would have preferred to avoid.
It took a few days for anyone to post to the Google doc, and responses, when the came, were less plentiful than I might have hoped. Out of a seminar group of twelve students, five responded to the Google doc. One of the first postings was rather disappointing: the student had some useful comments about certain aspects of the poetry, but seemed to have forgotten all the issues of textual authority we'd so painstakingly discussed in the seminar itself. At that point, I began to wonder whether this Web 2.0 exercise had been any use at all.
I wrote back to this post, without commenting on the textual issues but asking a few questions about the content of the texts. To my surprise another student posted later in the same day, raising exactly the issues of authority, accessibility and the visibility of the editing process that I'd hoped our discussion would highlight. A third student raised some biographical issues, while a fourth discussed the problems involved in preserving original features of the text and the role of the editor in shaping readers' responses. Yet another student added further biographical information about Wharton and Rochester, and even linked to a document of her own in which she'd produced a sample edition of the poem to Wharton.
At the seminar itself, we had such an animated discussion of Behn's poetry that it all but squeezed out discussion of Oroonoko. And one student subsequently wrote her assessed essay on the issue of editing women's writing. This was the first time in all the years I'd taught the course that anyone had chosen to answer the 'editing' question.
[ベスト] 雪ノ下雪乃 かわいい 176442-雪ノ下雪乃 かわいい
3 years ago
I get the impression from my own experience with Web 2.0 in teaching that just as we need to get used to using it, so do the students. Participation in such activities is not ideal, and some students just don't seem to be interested. Maybe that's just because we're in a humanities department - would be interesting to hear from more science/computing departments how they are getting on.
ReplyDeleteBut those who do participate (mostly the active/engaged students) usually find it very interesting and are pleased with it, though they also notice/realise that others don't participate at all.
It will probably take a few more years until students are really comfortable using it, but by then we need to be as well!
Yes, I agree. I was very much reminded of something Bill said in one of our early Web 2.0 meetings: namely, that we think of our students as digital natives, but actually they are not all quite as much at ease with Web 2.0 possibilities as we think.
ReplyDeleteWe do need to keep up to speed with new developments: and I'm relying on Bill to keep blogging about them on OLiA!