lacuna stories

Introduc)on to Chemical Engineering (ENGR/CHEMENG 20) Online Textbook

Learning Ac)vity: Students view lab demo videos before class

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SITE MOCKUPS If a student clicks “9/11/2001”, the first event/topic for Lacuna Stories, she is directed to four sub-topics concerning the event. The list here is provisional, and may be added to based on student interest:

1. Official Reports, including the digitized 9/11

Commission Report, responses to the report in journalism, scholarship, and the graphic novel version, a forum with questions about the report, and student-submitted stories. 2. Fiction, including short stories and selections

of novels about 9/11, such as DeLillo’s Falling Man, Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, scholarship about this fiction and book reviews, questions about the fiction, and student-submitted stories. 3. Truth Movement, including transcripts from

the official Truth Movement, scholarship about 9/11 conspiracy theories, forums with questions, and student-submitted stories. 4. “Clash of Civilizations”? including

selections from Lewis and Huntington, critical responses, forum discussions and student-submitted fiction or nonfiction about the topic.

Once the student selects a given theme, each page (Official Reports, Fiction, Truth Movement, and “Clash of Civilizations”?) has a sidebar with the same five categories, representing different kinds of online platforms that she will be familiar with in various degrees:

1) Documents, including primary documents on the subject. For fiction, the digitized works; for official reports, the digital reports; for “clash of civilizations,” selections from Lewis and Huntington as the first proponents to use the term, etc. 2) Responses, a repository of literary, artistic, governmental, historical, or academic responses to the sub-topic of the event. 3) Wiki, a student-generated wiki about the event sub-topic. 4) Forum, a forum-based discussion platform where students and instructors can provide general questions or questions pertaining to any information added to their ‘sewing kits’ as they explore the site. In thread-style, students and instructors can then respond to, share, and link to other items. 5) Your Story, a platform where students create their own non/fictional stories, blogs, or short essays concerning the chosen theme.

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Figure 1. Example of the “Responses” sidebar selection under Figure 2. The student has selected a text from the list of resources topic “Truth Movement.” The student has the ability here to filter in Figure 1, and can now read and annotate the text, highlight resources by date, media type, or topic, in this instance to browse selections for her sewing kit, and easily link them to the most recent academic and popular press texts on the 9/11 Truth Movement. items she has placed in her sewing kit with the pop-up footer bar.

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Figure 3. When the student selects a text, we have enhanced the Annotation Studio functionality to allow categories that encourage the student to employ four different historical and literary criticism skills - sourcing, context, close reading, and corroboration with other sources. These advances to existing annotation practices allow this student’s instructor to track and assess her engagement as well as her ability to utilize critical skills. An annotation may have notes on one or all four of these categories, and instructors may ask that students fulfill a certain amount of categories per assessment, such as 10 annotations on “context,” 30 annotations using the “close reading” tab, etc.

Figure 4. Close-up of the sewing kit footer bar, which pops up each time the student makes an annotation or adds a resource to her sewing kit. The sewing kit can also be viewed on a separate page (Figure 6), with the ability to add and edit existing annotations, change their viewer permissions, and select multiple annotations and resources to do the following: 1) “Annotate”: to add or edit the annotation; 2) “Label”: to add a student-defined label, distinguishing between multiple annotations in a single source that shares the same icon with other annotations from that source; 3) “Stitch Together” to connect two annotations or sources and, importantly, to annotate and nature of their connection; 4) “Remove”: to remove the annotation or object from the student’s sewing kit.

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Figure 5. Example of the “Wiki” sidebar selection under topic Figure 6. Full Sewing Kit functionality also includes the “Fiction.” Here the student can also highlight and annotate passages, ability for the student to change her visibility for each item’s add them to her sewing kit, or edit the wiki and contribute. annotation to personal, shared with instructor, shared with

the class or registered group, or shared publicly.

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Figure 7. Visualizations of annotation data that show instructors and students how course texts are being read and where ‘hot spots’ for discussion and analysis are arising. The heat map (left) indicates frequency of annotations around different locations in the text. The annotation frequency and location visualization (right), illustrates how different students engaged with the text based on the ordering of their annotations in line with locations in the text. For instructors and researchers, these tools allow, for the first time, a tracking and visualization of reading practices, annotation, and the cognitive work that develops between a student’s first experience with the text and all subsequent engagement that leads to final assessment products like essays or final examinations. Visualizations were created by Filip Goc

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TYPE OF WRITING Option 1 Option 2 Option 3 Option 4 Option 5

Annotations 30

annotations each week.

35 annotations each week.




Blogs

Write 3 blog posts;

respond to 3 blog posts.

Write 5 blog posts;


Write 7 blog posts;


Write 10 blog posts;


Write 12 blog posts; respond

to 15 blog posts.

Wiki Edit or create 1 wiki page

Edit or create 2 wiki pages

Edit or create 3 wiki

pages



Forum

Create one forum thread; Respond to three forum

threads.

Create two forum

threads; Respond to five forum

threads.

Create three forum

threads; Respond to eight forum

threads.

Create four forum

threads; Respond to eight forum

threads.

Create five forum threads; Respond to six forum threads.

Essay

(or approved project)

10-18 pg essay, posted

in Lacuna Stories

“Community Stories” by March 19th.

6-8 page essay, posted

in Lacuna Stories

“Community Stories” by March 19th.

15 hours of creative

development of digital tools, or similar.

10 hours of creative

development of digital tools, or similar.

none

Figure 8. Example of various assessments possible with Lacuna Stories and the myriad ways of knowing that it fosters. These flexible options created a dynamic range of student engagement in our pilot course, “Futurity: Why the Past Matters,” and allowed students to choose methods of inquiry and ways of knowing that they are familiar with, while challenging them to try different forms of knowledge production in the humanities. Our syllabus for the Futurity course prompted students from within or outside the humanities to choose one of these five options or to suggest a novel assessment: “As this class promotes ways of knowing from multiple types of information, media, and platforms, we are open to new and alternative forms of assessment that may not be included here. If you would like to explore other ways of engaging with the course material for assessment, please get approval from instructors by January 31st. We want this course to be as useful as possible for your personal, academic, and professional goals.

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Figure 9. Multiliteracies required of 21st century students. Compiled by Tanya Clement (2012), this graph outlines five recent publications that call for the teaching of new literacies, which the digital humanities are well-suited to provide. Henry Jenkins and his researchers generated a list of the kinds of skills that participatory practices generally engage in Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. HASTAC founder and English professor Cathy Davidson designates twenty “interrelated skills (literacies) that were defined in a specific way for over a century and that beg redefinition.” James Paul Gee in What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy argues that multiliteracies are formed in relation to specific semiotic domains such as videogames. The fourth column is a list of “Habits of Mind,” developed by education scholars Arthur L. Costa and Bena Kallick to encourage educators to consider “a composite of many skills, attitudes, cues, past experiences and proclivities” when creating curricul