April 17, 2006

We started the next\text project because we think the time is right to launch some exciting initiatives in the area of digital textbooks. This meeting is part of a several-step process in which the Institute intends to play a midwife role in putting together authors, funders and new media producers/editors, hopefully giving birth to significant new works.

Our instincts are to spend a good deal of the meeting, at least through lunch, being fairly expansive and open-ended. If possible, forget constraints for a few hours and consider what you would really like to have as the components of a digital textbook. We do understand that there are serious constraints, including time, money and institutional conservatism, and that any enterprise of this sort involves compromise, but we want to be conscious of the compromises we may have to make and why.

* We'd like to begin the morning with a very quick show and tell where each of us describes one shining example of the use of computers and/or the internet in your classroom.
[If possible, please try to send a URL in advance with an illustration of your example.]

* How has the pedagogy of this field changed over the past 10-15 years. What implication does this have for the design of digital teaching materials?

* How should digital textbooks be structured so as to take advantage of the fact that they increasingly they will be located in a highly networked environment.

* To what extent and in what ways could/should a digital textbook encourage and enable collaboration between students?

After lunch we'd like to explore some concrete questions which we know we'll have to have answers to if we're going to be as innovative as possible without losing the reasonably broad acceptance necessary to make a difference.

* Should we be thinking about course-long survey texts or collections of mix and match modules? If modules, how should they be linked?

* How does student public writing - (blogs, myspace, flickr etc.) figure into the mix?

* Do we need to build in mechanisms for assessment; if so how? What's the place of Digital Portfolios?

* Should digital textbooks be "open-source" and if so, how should that be structured to be really useful?

Posted by ray cha at 6:59 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

April 14, 2006

What are the teaching objectives of the rhetoric teacher?
How do these objectives change (or perhaps they have already) with the introduction of new media?
What will the "digital textbook" be able to do in the rhetoric and composition classroom?
What differences are there in the application of multimedia to writing with rhetoric tenure track faculty versus adjunct faculty?

Posted by ray cha at 1:07 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

How should digital portfolios be used?
Are they best used to showcase a student's work, to be used as a pedagogical tool for student reflection, or to help with teacher assessment?

Posted by ray cha at 1:06 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

How is student publishing (blogging / social software / myspace) being implemented in your teaching?

How are intellectual property / plagiarism / privacy having an effect on your teaching?

What do you tell students when issues of copyright, fair use and intellectual property arise? What role is the rhetoric teaching community playing in this public debate?

Posted by ray cha at 12:51 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

How are courseware and cms systems changing your teaching?
Should all rhetoric courses include new media/ multimedia? How much technology should be used and when, for whom?
What tools and resources are still needed or would you like to see?

Posted by ray cha at 12:41 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack