20% Project

There are three requirements for my 20% assignment: it must be connected to course material in some way, shape or form; it  must be awesome and it must be designed to be shared.  The project should carefully reflect that it is worth 20% of the grade. I ask students to include an annotated bibliography and a one page “story” of the process through which they conceived of, researched, and executed the project, using footnotes, if appropriate.

While I think “designing to share” helps with the development of important skills, whether a student shares their work or not is, of course, completely up to them.  This blog contains a number of examples of the work of students who have given me permission to re-post their hard work.

My colleague at the College of Charleston Anton VanderZee used it to great effect last spring in his class “Writing the ‘American’ Self: From the Founding to Facebook”, with students producing personal scrapbooks, a cookbook and even a quilt. More details and examples of Anton’s implementation of the 20% idea are available here.

I have showcased some of my student’s work. Understanding that my comments, evaluations, and so forth are between myself and the creator, I present their work “as is,” and hopefully the examples are more valuable as a result.

Here is some sample work on YouTube, Prezi, and using timeline tools.

Catholic Youth Literature Project

Last year, my colleague Eric Morgan and I made a web-application called theCatholic Youth Literature Project.  It was designed as a classroom tool to offer students opportunities for close- and distant-reading of 19th-century texts and possibilities for the class as a whole to contribute to notions of Catholic identity by sharing interpretations of these texts.

Now that I am teaching both literature and composition at SUNY Canton.  I would like to adapt the project to expand to meet broader instructional needs for myself and others, forking the current code.

Getting to Know a Text: Using Technology to Explore New Dimensions of Popular Culture

Description of a talk I am giving at SUNY Potsdam’s Academic Festival Saturday, April 13th, 10:00-11:00am, Dunn 210.

Digital Humanities tools offer new, free, and incredibly powerful ways to understand the songs we listen to and the books we read (or had read to us). In this workshop, participants will have the opportunity to do “hands-on” digital humanities analysis of song lyrics, children’s stories and poems, and any other familiar texts that interest them.

In part one, participants will receive a brief presentation on the many applications of and possibilities for digital textual analysis, including a brief overview of the many tools available for analyzing text, from book-based tools (table of contents, indexes, concordances), web-based tools (Google’s Books and n-gram, word clouds), mobile tools (Catholic Youth LIterature Project) and more advanced options (JSTOR‘s Data for Research, MONK, TAPOR).

In part two, participants will select a text or texts from a collection of lyrics from well known songs, children’s poems, out-of-copyright stories, and so forth and design, build and implement a simple analytical protocol. Participants will be encouraged to develop their own plans, but some ideas could be: What is the most popular word in Winnie the Pooh? What is Dr. Seuss’ favorite color? How many times do country hits of the 90s mention pickup trucks? What is the most popular number in early hip-hop lyrics?

In part three, we will share our discoveries with the group as a whole. Laughter will ensue.

Visual Assignment for ADKLit

Here are lots of links to get my students in ENGL 219 Adirondack Life and Literature at SUNY Canton started on their visual assignments.

You are free to use charred wood, crayons, pencils or watercolor if you like.  Just make sure we can take a great picture of your work to make it sharable. Here are some lists of free web drawing tools if you want to make art using your computer.

Prezi is a great way to organize and present visuals online.

Timelines are cool. Want to do a timeline? Dipity is easy to learn and handy.

Share some photos: make a slideshow or upload, tag and provide data for your pictures on flickr.

Movies are visual: make a 2-3 minute movie, put it on youtube, if it’s great, you’ll get an “A”.

There’s a lot of information on the Adirondacks on social media. Turn twitter into a story with storify.

Craft something; a piece of a quilt, pin etchings on a mushroom, moss graffiti. As long as it connects to course content and aspires to excellence, you can do whatever you want: go absolutely bananas.

Helpful Ideas for Creative Work

Two links for aspiring creative-types.

The great Ze Frank.

The incomparable Ira Glass.

Our Press Release

Cross-Atlantic Collaboration Leads to Students Creating Website About Ancient Fort

by Kathleen Toohill

Craigavon, Co. Armagh – March 13, 2012

Students from Lurgan Junior High, Lismore Comprehensive School and the University of Notre Dame are spending the week working together to build a website to educate the community about the ancient fort on Lismore school grounds.  Lismore is hosting seven students from Notre Dame and four from Lurgan to collaborate on a comprehensive project that encompasses archaeology, cinematography, and digital technology.

This project is intended to foster innovation and creativity as the Lurgan and Lismore students develop technical skills crucial in today’s digital age. Many of the students knew little about the fort before beginning work on the project, and hope to raise the community’s awareness about its importance. Fionntán Fields, a year 10 student from Lismore, said of the project: “I hope that it will make the school and the community come together more.”

The grounds of Lismore School, one of the few Catholic schools in the area not named after a saint, include an ancient ring fort, or rath, that likely dates between 900 A.D. and 1200 A.D. Students from the three schools have embarked on a project to help teach the community about this important piece of history and culture that gives Lismore School its name. Lismore, or “lios mor,” means “big fort.”

Clodagh Cordner, a year nine student from Lurgan Junior High School (LJHS) interested in archaeology, said, “I’ve learned about different types of forts like ring forts and stone forts, why people build them and what life was like in that time.” Cordner said of the collaborative aspects of the project: “It gives me confidence to work with others and builds friendships.”

The Lismore and Lurgan students are focusing on specific aspects of the project in order to learn and develop new skills sets.  The students aim to have the site up by the end of the week and hope to continue to add to it after the Lurgan and Notre Dame students return home.

“The schools work really well together,” said Jonathan Ginesa, a year ten student from Lismore. “The people I’ve met and worked with from Notre Dame and Lurgan have been great.”

Jonny Hunter, a year nine student from LJHS, said of his experience so far: “At the very start, it was weird because I didn’t know anyone. I thought it was going to be hard to talk to people and make friends, but it’s been good so far. I love doing the photo editing.”

Caroline Maloney, a Notre Dame student in her last year of study, said, “I think we all have a lot to learn from each other. It’s really nice to hear the cross-cultural ideas and to see how they interplay. The students we’re working with have a great sense of idealism and creativity, and it’s great to organize all the ideas and make them into a website.“

Creative Web Page Designs

Here are a few different web page designs that I found especially creative and interactive. These pictures may be useful as a guide as we start to design our own …

The one above would be an interesting approach. Perhaps using the fort as a background?

The top of this web page, and it’s use of negative space, is really intriguing.

I just really like the aesthetics of this design.

Internet by the Numbers

What do you think of sharing these with the students in County Armagh? Other suggestions?

From http://www.socialnomics.net/

And of course, the famous:

Digital Education in Northern Ireland

Student engagement with the world beyond our borders is crucial to learning both within and outside the classroom. To this end, the Keough-Naughton Institute and the Center for Social Concerns is building the Social Concerns Seminar on Digital Education in Northern Ireland.

Seven Notre Dame students will be spending their spring break on an immersion trip to Lurgan/Portadown this March to work with junior high school students. Notre Dame undergraduates will work with both Protestant and Catholic students to create a web-based multimedia project: the class will facilitate the construction of a web-based project using documentary filmmaking, web development tools, and computer assisted design telling the stories of the ancient fort on the grounds of Lismore Comprehensive School that gives the institution its name –an lios mór or great fort. Because of the broad focus of the project, students from all academic backgrounds and technology skill levels will be contributing to the project.

Prior to travelling to County Armagh, students will meet to learn about the history of County Armagh—both in ancient times and in relation to the recently ended Troubles, plan and design new media approaches to the project, and discuss how we can best prepare as a team to meet the unique challenges and opportunities of teaching in what may be the first de-segregated classroom many of the high school students have ever been in.

Students have developed individual grant applications for funding to support their travel through on-campus organizations. The Nanovic Institute for European Studies, the Center for Undergraduate Scholarly Engagement, the Kroc Instiute for International Peace Studies, the Institute for Study of the Liberal Arts,  Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program, as well as the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies, have all generously supported this groundbreaking program.

Logistical links can be found here.

The Lurgan Town Project

This sixteen-minute video was made by students at Lurgan Junior High School and serves as an excellent introduction to the community we will be spending our Spring Break with for the Digital Education in Northern Ireland Project.