This semester I'm giving my American Lit & Culture students several semester-long projects to work on. I've warned them that they will need to be disciplined and do a little bit of work for each class, because the project requirements are simply too great to put off until the last minute.
I suspect that students may be feeling overwhelmed, so I wrote them the following message in which I encouraged them to collaborate on the courses electronic discussion board, which is part of the BlackBoard software platform used at UIC.
Use this forum to post quotes, annotations and comments related to your semester-long project "The Rhetoric of Freedom: Annotated Quotes." I encourage you to show class solidarity and to help one another on this assignment. Your annotated remarks, of course, cannot be plagiarized directly from someone else, but you can and should share ideas.
One of my research interests is new media studies, and I'm particularly interested in communicative systems that emerge in networked environments such as this. I'm curious to see whether you, as a class, harness the potential inherent in this software platform to develop an efficient collaborative system for (re)marking on the course texts.
Good luck!
Based on past teaching experiences, my sense is that most students resist using BlackBoard, which is fine with me, if that's what they choose. My primary concern is that they read the books and other texts and learn various analytic strategies. However, I do think that electronic collaboration offers them opportunities that were unavailable when I was an undergrad.
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