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Gladstone's Digital Commons in Wordpress Supports Students' Engagement with Texts

CU Boulder Department of English Instructor Jason Gladstone enrolled in ASSETT's Spring 2015 Teaching with TechnologySeminar to learn how to better support his students' engagement with texts in theirContemporary Environmental Literature and Media course. Gladstone created a Digital Commons spacein Wordpressfor hisstudents to explicate various texts, and examine them more critically.

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Problem. One of the major aims of an environmental literature course is for students to learn how differenttypes of texts and media engagewitha rangeofenvironmentalconcerns. An immediate goal of such a course is to introduce a range of such engagements to students. A longer term goal ofsuchacourseis to providestudentswith thecapacity to assesssuch engagements outside of the classroom--­­in other words, to provide students with the capacity to ascertainhowtexts and media theyencounter, “inthereal world,”engage withspecific environments and particular environmental concerns.

Accordingly,oneofthekey thingsanenvironmentalliteraturecoursecandoistofacilitate student’s active engagement in and collaborative responsibility for establishing, producing, and making use of the environmental contexts for the texts and media they encounter in the class. The “problem” I decided to take on in this ASSETT seminar was to think about how I could use technology to accomplish this goal.

The components of this problem are as follows:

  • Students search for information related to course texts/media.
  • Students compile and curate information related to course texts/media.
  • Students engage with information related to course texts/media.
  • Students engage with one another in relation to information on course texts/media.
  • Students build and share archive of information on course texts/media.

Implementation. The particular course type I decided to design a solution for is a 3000 or 4000level topicscoursein English. Itwouldmostlikelybefocusedon“Contemporary Environmental Literature and Media” and would feature an enrollment from 20­40 students. I will be using WordPress to produce a “digital commons” for the course. This digital commons will be an actively maintained online archive of student­-produced “environmental contexts” for a set of the assigned course texts and media. I anticipate that the commons will be organized into three levels: (1) a single “commons” for the course consisting of links to (2) individual “sites” dedicated to the environmental contexts of individual course texts and/or media. Each of these sites will consist of (3) areas organized according either to the kind of information provided (i.e. historical, land­use,biographical,etc)ortothe specific media­type of the information (i.e. video,audio, text, organizational site, etc.). These areas will also include spaces for student annotations of the information they compile, and student conversation and about the compiled information.

AssessmentStructure. Inordertoassessstudentparticipationintheproductionofthe course’s digital commons, I plan to incorporate that participation into the assessment structure of the course. At the start of the semester students will be assigned groups, and each group will be assignedto a particular course text. Each groupwill thenberesponsible for building, maintaining,andpresentingasite for their assignedtext. Thegradedcomponentsofthis assignment will have three parts (each designedto assessa different component of the problem).

  1. Inorderto assessindividualstudents'active engagementin establishingan environmentalcontextforthecourse,eachindividual studentwillbe responsiblefor uploading and/or linking to a designated number of sources (1­3?). Students will also be responsible for annotating and/or presenting these sources on their site.
  2. In order to assess students collaborative responsibility in maintaining an environmental context,each student groupwillbe requiredtopresent theirsitetotheentireclass duringadesignated class session. Ideally, these presentations will occur before the class sessions dedicated to a particular text.
  3. In order to assess individual students ability to use the contexts they have generated, eachindividual student will be required to drawon the course’s “digital commons”to produce a final inquiry-­based paper or project for the course.

Indicators. In order to assess whether or not the above problem has been addressed by my implementation oftechnology,Iwill needtowork out a way of measuringstudents’active engagementin andcollaborativeresponsibilityfor establishing, maintaining,andusing the environmental contexts for the course. In order to do so, I will need to:

  1. Monitor and assess students searching, compiling, and curating of information related to course texts/media.
  2. Monitor and assess students collaboration and interaction with each other in relation to the compilation and curation of information related to course texts/media.
  3. Monitor and assessstudents' use ofcompiled andcurated information in both in ­class conversations and out­-of­-class inquiry­-based projects.

Overall, then, I will need to find ways of measuring and assessing the development of students’ dispositionstowardsandcapacitiestogeneratetheenvironmental contexts for texts and media.