Author Archives: rings

About rings

Lana Rings is an associate professor of German in the Department of Modern Languages here at UT Arlington, specializing in intercultural communication and second language pedagogy. She likes to use open-ended questions, blogs and wikis interactively, in order to "teach deeper" and help activate the interests and mental processes of her students, as well as to draw on all the experience, knowledge, and understanding of instructor and student alike to add texture to the experience students have with "things German."

Thoughts on a Wednesday morning before classes commence

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Wednesday, September 22, 2010, 7:49 AM

Prelude

Getting away from lectures, even with 500+ students – why, and how so?

“Less is more.” “Well, they need to know it all.” “How much do they really know when they ‘learn it all,’ and in what ways do they ‘know’ it?”

Active Learning: when depth, and when breadth? For we cannot know it all, nor can we know it in all ways, in 15 weeks, 4 years, or 12 years.

Students “taking something of value” away with them

Taking learning to another level: Internalizing

Taking remembering to another level: understanding

Taking external knowledge to another level: integrating

Taking all our knowledge to another level: action

Exposition

What is in short term memory, what in long? And what do students do with what is in long-term memory? Does it sit there? Is it integrated into their own system of knowing and understanding, into their own system of truth? Is it applied? Is it connected to reality of mind or physical space? Is it judged? Is it dialogued with? Is it argued for and against? Is it interwoven into the reality that all is connected? Is it valued? Is it devalued as necessary? Is it applied to integrity, morality, and wisdom? Is it applied to honesty? Is it deeply probed? Is the question ‘why’ asked? Is the question ‘in what context’ asked? Is it applied to action, memory, philosophy? Is it connected to ego or to goals of peace or to understanding? Does it answer the question, “Why are we here?” – as teachers, as students, as living organisms, as human beings? Does it give students more than the five-minute university of Father Guido Sarducci from “Saturday Night Live,” now available on Youtube? If not, what has to change? Does it go beyond education as a commodity and actually address quality of life? Freedom? Community? Quality of life for all – people, plants, animals, the ozone layer, the air, soil, and water? Isn’t it all connected, interwoven? And if so, in what ways are we helping our students explore that, and in what ways are we using our research, scholarship, and creativity to advance this? What is the bedrock, the foundation, the underlying philosophy which drives our enterprise? Which drives our thought? Our action? Our relationships with our students? Our essence? Our truth?

What is it of true value that our students and we, too, acknowledge as true value, that our students will take away with them and that will not only stay with them, but which they will continue to explore, understand in new ways, have varying perspectives on? From poetry to electrical engineering, from philosophy to music, from physics to nanotechnology, in what ways do we go beyond “vocational school” and beyond “getting a job” to “advancing the quality of life of humans, animals, the planet,” and “ getting along?”

We as a campus are not separate from one another. As all life and ideas are intertwined, so too are we. Yes, Electrical Engineering and German do indeed have something in common, have mutual interests and understandings as well as divergent themes and goals. We are a community of seekers of truth. We are a community. We are seekers. We are here to serve – not our egos, but “truth,” even though we know truth is not a concrete static entity. Perhaps more than truth, it is our purest, humblest honesty we are here to serve. We are here to serve understanding, and we are here to serve compassion and action to the greater good, even when it is difficult to do so.  Our scholarship, research, creativity, teaching, and student learning, our action and thought, our students’ action and thought – all of this is one and the same endeavor in various manifestations.

We are community and individuality, the self and other, the individual and society, and our endeavors – no matter what they are – happen within a social and cultural context, and within goals that are complicated, mixed, and sometimes both for better and for worse. We are called upon by the greater good and the need and the truth as we see it in our most honest and purest form/selves/depths to understand, to act selflessly and with integrity, as much as possible, and to help our students, our metropolitan area, and the world to do the same. Whether Confucius said it or not, “Better to light one candle than curse the darkness.” (Which of course is very culturally loaded as well, since light is not all good and darkness not all bad. Just as too much light will kill us, so too will too much darkness. Balance. And certainly humans have egos and anxieties, … but balance.)

The questions I have posed are in a way “universal” questions, and while in a way they have “universal” answers, yet each person’s exploration, answers, and resulting actions are individual manifestations of those themes. What we do here at the University is a symphony, and each of us produces variations on a theme, not by Mozart, but by us. So while my answer is not your answer, and no true answers are truly alike, yet we are playing the symphony, the symphony by us, each and every moment of the day, and at night in our dreams as well.

And a caveat: we must always remember that “language is the semblance of communication,” whether dealing with our research, scholarship, and creativity, each other, our students, international negotiations, or something else. If we keep that in mind, perhaps we will not kill each other so easily. (That caveat was the didactic part of this essay.)

So, then, in what ways does all of the above intersect, interact, communicate with those forces that have been put into play, also for better and for worse, which ask us to think about students’ modes of thinking, about outcomes, about assessment which is not grading but can use the same means, about active learning, about lecturing, about large classes, about small classes, about the use of technology as a tool to do what pencils, pens, and books cannot? I believe if we forget to constantly address all the above questions – and maybe you can think of more – we are not doing our ecstatic duty to ourselves and to others. Our highest calling is our purest, deepest honesty, that space within us which seems truly wise, that space where our fears and anxieties do not reside, where insight and the aha moment preside. And it is not eradicating ego; rather, it is going beyond ego to another space, in which we allow ourselves to feel safe – and dare I say happy, so that we can get on with our truest calling that does not monitor ourselves and others, but, like the meteor, is on its own trajectory, going where it will go.

So what does all of this have to do with best practices in teaching with technology? Most probably, everything.

Learning with the Web

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You are right, Matt, that the web is the place/space for much learning to take place. In modern languages, for example, there is nothing in our classrooms and hardcover books that can replace some of what the web can do. Conversely, some of what is done in hardcover, physical books and in our classrooms cannot be found elsewhere. The task is to be clear on what’s what – on what the web allows us and our students to do/explore/learn/think about that we could not in any other way in the past and what the “older” tools and materials and spaces allow us to do as well.

The web has fulfilled the thirst and yearning of some language teaching professionals for access – access to languages and their cultures and subcultures and regional and national and extra-national cultures, to the sounds and sites of those cultures, to the public and private spaces in those cultures to which we have access through the web, to ancient parchments and old architectural sites, to manuscripts and books and pictures of the authors and their families and friends and spaces and penmanship and so forth and so on, to the ways in which current generations of human beings are accessing those ancient to current communications and verbal interactions and responding to and speaking with them – through print, online print, visuals, video, sound, and talk, translation and interpretation. The web provides all human beings access to worlds of cultures, if they only know 1) how to access them and 2) how to interpret them in effective and productive ways.

The web provides context. It provides food for our ears, eyes. Two of the senses are stimulated, as is the cognitive sphere, and perhaps the emotional as well. Maybe even the physical, as body changes occur depending on our emotional states. It does not provide taste, touch, or smell – yet (:-)?). It is not exactly like “being there.” On the other hand, it is breadth – lots of possibilities for accessing things and people that “are there.”

For modern language students it can – and it is coming – be the portal for getting to know people from the places where the language is spoken, for speaking face-to-face with those people, for developing networks with those people – for personal satisfaction and also for positive change – groups working together across the world on sustainability, for example.

If used well, the web can help us do simple, yet profound, things. Take, for example the images sites on search engines. If you plug into a search engine in other cultures and languages, type in a word or phrase in that language, you will see what visual concepts the native speakers in those cultures have in their heads. You will see what comes to mind. Take, for example, sitzen (‘to sit’). If you go to google.de and click on Bilder (‘Images’), you will see how German speakers visualize sitzen, and in what contexts they publicize those ways of seeing the concept. You can see nuances that are culture-specific in the German word for ‘youth,’ Jugend. You can type in a word or phrase in the regular web search portal and find out how that word or phrase is used in written, maybe even spoken discourse, at least some of the time. You can hear how real native speakers use the language in various regions and various contexts.

And that is only a small bit of what students can do. What we need to teach them is how to navigate, and to be sensitive to possible intention and how to interpret that on the web – just as we do when we teach them to analyze older or newer language, literature, texts of other sorts, etc.

Online Translators

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Online translation is quite different from traditional translation. I note the tools I am using: Google Translator Toolkit (you need a gmail account to get on), Google Translator in two forms, Leo, the online dictionary containing a grammar site, dictionary definitions, and a corpus that I am using, and http://www.google.de (to see how certain words and phrases are used when embedded in text). Searches also take me to synonym dictionaries and even images on German and English websites. I could even envision using German Youtube. So, unlike a translator in the past, I have much more than my knowledge and my dictionaries of various kinds and my thesaurus at hand. I have those, as well as all these other tools. (And I know that there are even more tools available to which I’ve been exposed, but which I do not yet use.)

But what am I learning? I am learning what Google, for example, offers when one types a word into the search engine: more words, more phrases, depending on how you enter it. Take the word ‘Hospiz,’ for example (‘hospice’). I type the word in Google, and I get phrases (Hospizbewegung, Hospizarbeit, Hospize, Hospiz Stuttgart), but I note if I type in Hospizd,’ I get words like ‘Hospizdienst’ (‘hospice service’), whereas if I type ‘Hospiz d’ I get phrases like ‘Hospiz Detmold’ (‘hospice in the city Detmold’).

I note when I’m translating my short story from English into German, that I’m changing it as I go. I feel very free, since I am the original author of the English version. But I also think of things that never occurred to me when writing the English original, things like the fact that Germans would not easily say ‘I love you’ to their doctor as they were dying, but at the same time I can imagine that they might, if they were in the state that many patients seem to arrive at, if they are not on machines: an unusual state of bliss that transcends some cultural customs. Even in the U.S. people don’t normally tell their doctors “I love you,” but in the German culture, I would think that norms of respectful distance would even more strongly come into play here.

So when I’m translating, I actually address that, and thus I translate it to say: “I love you, Dr. Gomez. One wouldn’t normally say that. But that didn’t matter. She could. She did, because a deep feeling of well-being flooded her soul.” (I notice that even as I’m translating back into English I’m changing the English to accommodate the slight differences in the German from the original! It can become a never-ending loop of meaning making!) The other issue is the title, not ‘Dr. Gomez,’ as in the U.S., but ‘Herr Doktor Gomez’ (‘Mr. Dr. Gomez’), which has an even more formal feel, a feeling of distance, rank, and respect, which would make saying “I love you” even more profound.

I notice when I’m translating that I’m thinking of sentence length (probably partly because of Pete Smith’s words in his localization/translation course I’m a part of). In the original the sentences are often short. There are many sentence fragments. And I’m reminded that standard formal German sentences can tend to be quite long. And yet this is a short story. And sometimes short stories contain shorter sentences, but often to obtain a certain effect. It got me to thinking about whether formatting my translation like a prose poem might more successfully convey the tone I’m trying to effect.

Anyway, these are some of the thoughts I’m having as I’m translating. The tools are wonderful. They really help non-native speakers, maybe even native speakers, easily get beyond the starting point and save a lot of time looking up words that one has in one’s passive repertoire (so one knows it’s appropriate), and words that one thinks might work and that get one looking in the right direction for the appropriate word. After that it does take some time rewriting what the machine translator has written, but time has been tremendously saved on the first go round. I find not only am I thinking about syntax and vocabulary on the sentence level, but I’m thinking about tone, about cultural meanings of words, syntax, length, and I’m thinking about impact on the reader.

I also realize how my knowledge and background in German are helping me out. It goes more slowly when I’m working on French, for I have to question more.

As we go into the future, I think we will begin changing our minds about translation tools on the internet. Right now, as educators we’re afraid of their abuse by students as tools for cheating. As we become more knowledgeable about them ourselves, I foresee teaching students how to use them effectively and productively from the beginning. If they know how to use these tools, they will be able to access information and ideas from around the world in many languages. If they know the limitations as well as the freeing aspects of these online tools, they will be better able to navigate ideas and information in other languages. Just as we teach students how to “read” language in literary texts, in oral discourse, in prose discourse of various non-literary kinds, we will, I believe, in the future teach students how to critically “read” machine translation.

We are still at the point that calculators were a few decades ago: we do not allow them in the classroom. But as we finally realized with calculators, they can be a very useful tool and serve our needs. I use one every time I want to know how much money I have left in the bank! Our goal: to keep every single student, even the one who takes one semester of foreign language, connected not only to cultures of the language we are teaching, but, even more, to the world’s cultures.

This reminds me, once again, of Father Guido Sarducci’s “Five Minute University,” and that is, essentially, what we are combating. (It’s wonderful, while sobering, because that is the mindset of many folks in our country, and I understand that mindset fully.) The “Five Minute University” was a comedy skit about university learning, first airing on “Saturday Night Live,” and it is an important comedy skit for me as an educator, for it reminds to take the long view, to remember all the students with whom I interact, and to ask myself: How can even one semester of a foreign language really and truly have a major beneficial impact on each and every student? How can we get beyond what people still say when we say we teach a language at the university: “Oh, I had Language X, and I don’t remember a thing”?

Wrapping back around to online translators: In the future this will be one way in which we will encourage students to stay connected to the non-native-language world. We will teach them not only how to applied their “critical reading” of literature to the web, but also how to use these translation tools to critically read the world and its cultures.

And my translation in the end? I left it in prose format. It just seemed to have longer sentences, too, that made it more like prose. And I thought of the short stories again and realized that the short sentences, the sentence fragments, as well as the longer fragments, created an acceptable tone and feel in prose format.

(You can access both versions of the story/vignette, the English and the German, at this blog.)

Broadcasting comes to Modern Languages

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Broadcasting major Patrick Modrovsky, who happens to be minoring in German, asked if he could create a video news item about German at UT Arlington for utanews, a website showcasing broadcasting students’ work. Of course, I said yes, and he did an excellent job of showing how we are trying to incorporate technology and active learning into upper level German classes here at UTA. We liked the video clip so much that it is now on the German homepage under

UTANews Interview with Dr. Lana Rings.

(The original is located under March 11, 2010 at http://utanews.com/page/2/.)

Thanks, Patrick, for believing German needs to be publicized more at UT Arlington!

I continued down the blog tonight and this was the result …

Well, after reading Ivan Illich off of Jim Groom’s blog, a bit of Stephen Downes, also off of Jim Groom’s blog, and finding Clark Adrich’s blog from somewhere I was reading, I am overwhelmed and back to my original question that I asked in graduate school: why are we here? And I think we cannot ask that question in a blanket way about the curriculum, but rather we have to ask it about each individual course (even about each individual student), because there are some students who will take only that course and not our whole curriculum. What, of value, will the student really take away? I am reminded, daily, of Father Guido Carducci’s Five Minute University, asking myself how I am or am not replicating the professors who people that university. To my mind, these are the questions I want to affirm, to remember, to center myself when I get sidetracked by this or that, these or those, others’ ideas of what it is we are doing, that are not my core values about our enterprise.

Gardner Campbell’s ideas on Web 2.0 and Assessment

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Lana Rings

Lana Rings

Since my comment to Matt’s post of March 15, as well as his comment regarding Moodle, is awaiting moderation, I’ll just go ahead and make it a post:

Wow. If Moodle can facilitate all that interaction, then that really connects to what Gardner Campbell was saying in his podcast (see below). I remember years ago when my California friend Peter Bach, who already had a doctorate in Ed, and was getting a second one in German, was talking about having students involved in their own grading… But back to this idea — I think that Matt and Gardner are sending out similar ideas….

Here’s what I wrote to the Modern Languages and the Active Learning Committee listservs:

W. Gardner Campbell from Baylor (Gardner’s research interests: English Literature, Science Fiction, Technology, Literature and Music, Renaissance Literature, Technology, Critical Theory, …) is Director of the Academy for Teaching and Learning at Baylor University, where he also serves as Assoc. Prof. of Literature, Media, and Learning in the Honors College. His ideas are highly thought-provoking. I’m quoting here from his podcast. (He was at one point at Mary Washington, where Jim Groom, who visited UTA recently, is Technology Specialist.)

These comments below are from my notes made upon hearing the podcast:

A one-kind fits-all curriculum is likely to take children away from the objects that compel them. A one-kind fits all mode of assessment is going to ensure that we miss the richest opportunities for bonding for the deepest kind of learning.

Web 2.0, learning, and assessment: thoughts by Gardner. If any of this intrigues you, here is the audio:
http://www.gardnercampbell.net/podcast/assessment.mp3
and here is the blog post:
http://www.gardnercampbell.net/blog1/?p=1231

1. User-generated content makes the web richly interactive and helps us co-create the web. … Interesting comment: Wikipedia, a “thing that will never work in theory; it will only work in practice.” Look at it carefully. Look at the way the community presents itself. Look at the discussion page. Look at the user page where the people who have contributed to the discussion have accumulated a lot of interaction on their own. … Think what that would be like if we had pages for our best teachers, … testimonials. Appreciative inquiry in a collection of rich layered narratives of outstanding teaching? … How inspiring would it be to read that stuff, to find out over many decades how these teachers have made a difference in students’ lives. … A startling demonstration to the world of the magic that happens.
2. Idea of network effects: can scale at the point of the reader, at the point of the student. The more you have in the mix, the richer the experiences. … Lifelong learning online environment.
3. The idea of the long tale. Much value emerges slowly over time.
4. Perpetual beta, … meaning subject to improvement at any time. Not a contract, but a starting place. Idea of syllabus as contract anathema to the idea of a learning experience. … Students come up with their own learning objectives; that’s their assignment at the beginning of the semester. (a la Barbara Sawhill!) Frightening, because it means that “all the targets are moving. Of course they are. Anybody ever been in a relationship before? The relationship changes the people in the relationship. Oh, dear. What if you adjust to your spouse, and your spouse adjusts to you, and now you have to adjust to the adjustment? You work at it.

Teaching and Technology in German

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One of my students, Patrick Modrovsky, is majoring in broadcasting and minoring in German. He thought that interviewing me and talking about the way I use technology in the classroom to teach German language and culture might be newsworthy. Here is the link:

http://utanews.com/ March 11, 2010 (The date is important, because as time goes by, older news items “are scrolled” down to the bottom of the page.)

I understand from Pete Smith that Peggy Semingson does a lot with video. I couldn’t find what you have your students do with video, Peggy (I need to go back to your post), but found your blog and your youtube site again, Electronica and Literacy (http://www.youtube.com/user/peggysemingson). Students must be thinking, judging, involved, and engaged when producing something that could be used as a portfolio piece.

It seems there are two areas where technology can intersect with active learning: 1) instructor methods and materials and 2) student interactive learning and demonstration of learning/thinking.

Ego, Passion, Desire, Love, Respect, Relationship, and Attention Span

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My reading of the posts in this blog, and the links posted by the writers, got me to thinking and wondering about attention span.

What is the research on long attention span? I find we talk a lot about short attention spans when dealing with lectures. However, people of many ages seem to be able to attend for long periods of time when involved in other tasks: games, sports, creative writing, other kinds of writing, conversation, falling in love and obsessing on the person of one’s focus, mulling over an unsolvable situation – constantly and continually, obsessing on an idea — reading, writing, and talking about it, telling one’s own stories over and over … and over, watching a movie, playing guitar, doing research, partaking of an exciting discussion where we want to jump in.

So what is it about education that puts students to sleep and bores them?

I understand those who state that students do not listen to and absorb ideas in greater than 10-15 minute segments, when those ideas are produced in the form of a lecture. Most of us have experienced students’ nodding off or their attention wandering, as we closely watch what they are taking in when we are talking.

I have also noticed in my German Media on the Web class, taught in a computer classroom, that the computer seems to hypnotize students, and they must literally be pulled away in order to, as a group, attend to small group discussion, or to listen to anything I have to say, or to do a task like providing me with ideas about stereotypes of Switzerland which I can then put on the board for all to see. (My ideal German media on the web classroom: computers, break-out areas for small group or whole class interaction, chalk/white board for brainstorming, and screen for examples and shots of critical websites — also a latte machine.)

So what happens in the brain that makes students nod off or lose the thread when listening to lectures? What makes me nod off when listening to someone? What is it about a computer that hypnotizes students in a face-to-face class with computers in the classroom? And, on the other hand, what makes me attend again to a lecture (if the lecturer is not someone like the great Hans Kellner, who I understand mesmerized students when he was here)?

I’m coming to the conclusion that it has to do with what is happening in the brain and how the brain is processing ideas. It may have to do with tapping in to “expertise” and “experience,” and what we ourselves are bringing to the table. It may have to do with passive reception of authoritative knowledge versus bringing an attitude, an interest, a motivation, an agenda, or previous knowledge and understanding to the task of “listening to a lecture” – or a different frame of reference – different from that of the instructor – SCARY, or doing a different kind of task. It may have to do with choice. It may have to do with having a real reason for attending to ideas. A real reason for attending a face-to-face class. A real reason for attending an online course.

The following story is an example of what I’m talking about:
I recently attended a lecture, and I sat next to a student who was nodding off. I realized that the speaker was very knowledgeable, but that there wasn’t much that students without background knowledge in the field could grasp onto. I realized that I too was a bit bored by it all, until – until I heard the speaker say something that tapped into my understanding and previous knowledge, and that tapped into a new idea (for me) that I began having about the subject matter – an “aha” experience. After that, and for the rest of the lecture, I listened attentively, because I wanted to see if what he said continued to fit into this new framework or frame of reference that was happening in my mind. There was now a reason for listening to the lecture that far surpassed “getting information” from him or “politely thinking about the topic” – a real reason, my reason. The reason for attending had to do with me – not with him. I was having a new thought separate from him, I was enjoying that experience, and I was gleaning the “confidence” fallout from having what I considered a good idea, and I was enjoying making connections! Pleasure!

How do we get away from the fear and the “knowing” that students have about us – that if they say something we do not like, it will affect their grade? Some students don’t care. Others are quiet because of this. How do we avoid being the professor who said, “I don’t know what you think about this poem, [or theory or factoid], and I don’t care”? Even when students frustrate the heck out of us?

So learning theorists and scholars, am I on the right track? Is engagement something much more than attending and “being there” mentally? Is it passion-, desire-, even ego-driven? Is true learning perhaps totally passion-driven? Think of people like Einstein who let everything go in order to think all the time. Is it relationship? Do we hate to interact with profs who disdain us and therefore leave their content behind? Do we love to interact with profs who respect us and become energized and we change our majors because of them? Do we know the difference? (Yes, of course.) Do we as profs love to interact with students where there is mutual respect – they for us and we for them? If we disdain our students, do we sabotage learning? If they disdain us or are afraid of our grading them, how do we change that?

We guide them, compassionately, to the challenge. It is our prompts, our thinking, our interventions that make the difference. But it’s not the punitive and rigid intervention of the past. It has to be something different. Or?

Are these ideas too “affective?” I don’t think so, if we go beyond the surface of what is being said. After all, we are not organisms that are made up of three separate parts: body, mind, and emotions/spirit. We are whole organisms, whose affect plays a great part in our intellectual endeavor: what we choose, why, with whom we interact, and the environment in which we either develop our capacities or kill them, or something in between. “Create an environment in which people can thrive.” How do we do that for all students who are willing, no matter what their background?

Many Goals for a Course and a Tool That Made Them Happen

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lanaringsHow do you “cover” 800 years of thought, writing, and history in medieval and early modern Europe in a fifteen-week course, and create an environment in which students will take away some breadth and depth, that will have a long-term effect on them? How do you use a wonderful new book of essays (56 in the medieval and early modern period!) by individual scholars who situate Latin and German language texts of the times in those times, so that readers understand why those texts were written, especially when that book presumes much more background knowledge (e.g. St. Boniface in Fulda, Charlemagne at Aachen, goliad poetry), scholarly English proficiency (e.g. vocabulary like ‘peregrinations’), and literary terms (e.g. “alliterative verse”) than many undergraduate students already possess? How do you help students deal with 56 difficult essays in fifteen weeks?

The above is only the tip of the iceberg of goals I had for a literature-in-translation course titled Medieval and Early Modern German Studies, a course conceived as part of the new UT Arlington minor in Medieval and Early Modern Studies. I wanted students to have as complete an experience as possible, of that world, through experiencing the sights and sounds, the spaces of the times, the manuscripts and books themselves, and the authors/people. I wanted them to walk back in time and space, intellectually, sensually (especially through visual images), and even emotionally. I wanted them to read excerpts of the texts that were written in the Latin and German dialects of the time, even if in English translation, and I wanted them to experience the parchment and the illustrations, the handwritten letters and words – the texts themselves. I wanted their understanding to be an amalgam of thought, intellectual endeavor, of seeing and hearing, and of virtually “being” in ninth century Aachen or sixteenth century Wittenberg. In addition, I wanted them to practice writing and various modes of thinking: description, evaluation, speculation, comparison/contrast, and creativity. I wanted them to relate the thought and texts of the times to their own world, and to see if those texts were reverberating in their own time and space. Through all of this I wanted students to demonstrate an understanding for the times that they hadn’t before.

Finally, I wanted students pro-active in their learning: free to choose and follow their interests, within the parameters of the course, motivated, involved, engaged – learning actively.

What was it that allowed all of the above to happen? There was only one way in which the above could occur, and that was through an online tool: the wiki, a space where students could write and share ideas, links, and images, and other students could read that writing, It was also a space to bring back links to the web, which became a virtual reality of experiencing medieval and early modern Europe in text, video, and visual.

I took a “divide-and-conquer” approach. The seventeen students in the course chose three of the 56 essays each. They were to become the “experts” on those essays. They were to provide the missing context and background information, explain the ideas and teach their fellow students through their own writing what they “as the expert” now understood. They were to do this by going out on the web to find explanations, pictures, video of current practices regarding the texts (for example, there are medieval metal rock bands who currently sing the Merseburg charms from the ninth century on youtube). This was the depth portion of the course, the thinking, experiencing, and writing portion. Of course, these endeavors also led to great opportunities to educate students to “critically read” the web.

Then, each time they all wrote about an essay in the textbook, they were to read all essays by all seventeen other students and choose ten which they would think about further. This was the breadth portion of the course. They were to read the student wikis, click on the links, and look at the pictures and videos that their fellow students had brought back as links or copyright-free images.

But students won’t always do this. So they were asked to take those ten student writings and use them to create a story – an imaginary family history story, in which they told the tales of their imaginary ancestors and the ways in which those ancestors were or were not affected by the thought, texts, or authors during the times in which they lived.

The course was a success, and all of the course goals were accomplished to greater and lesser degrees. There was texturing, layering, breadth, depth, and understanding, as well as knowing there was so much more out there that they didn’t understand. Students did as well in this course as in others: some were outstanding, others very good, some good, and some mediocre and not good – as in other courses. But what was different was the experience: a cross between “being there” and the intellectual endeavor of the academy, an experience that I think (and hope) may last a lifetime.

One student, in a process piece, summed up what I had hoped would be the effect of the course, and I quote him here:

“This class is completely unlike any class I have taken here. It is what I consider true education to be at this level…a discourse between professor and students, as well as between oneself and the other students. I felt like my education was in my hands and I loved it. …

I suppose that says it all, and the wiki helped it happened. (Sample wikis are available at https://wiki.uta.edu/display/~rings/1027%2C+August.+Monastic+Scriptoria and https://wiki.uta.edu/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=39690153. Simply log in at wiki.uta.edu and paste in these URLs.)