Teaching Literature with Digital Technology

Part I Assignments: SOCIAL MEDIA

1. Shaking the Magic 8 Ball: Social Media for Readers and Writers

Laura Madeline Wiseman, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Adam Wagler, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Each student joins an online social network (Goodreads, LibraryThing, Red Lemonade, Twitter, Pottermore, etc.) participate as readers and writers, and conduct research on the interactions and discourse of one chosen literary author.

2. Writing on the Wall: Using Facebook’s Timeline for Literary Analysis

Jennifer Parrott, Clayton State University

Students work on a Facebook Timeline to create interactive and multimedia reading guides for the pieces of literature they are studying.

3. Wiki Critical Editions: Collaborative Learning in the Literature Classroom

Angela Laflen, Marist College

Students use a wiki to annotate a brief literary text.

4. Writing a Wiki Resource Guide for a Literature Survey Course

Rochelle Rodrigo, Old Dominion University

Instead of rushing through a bunch of readings in a literature survey course, students engage in deep, active, collaborative learning by filling in an entire empty wiki as the course textbook.

5. More Perfect Unions: Literary Studies, Blogging, and the Multigenre Essay

Eric Reimer, University of Montana

Students explore music and literature through a multi-genred, hypertextual blog essay.

6. Engaging Students with Literature in Virtual Spaces: Second Life
Johansen Quijano, University of Texas at Arlington

Students watch a live performance of a literary text in Second Life and reflect on a number of topics afterwards.

7. "Hath he not twit?": Twitter and Shakespeare
Toria Johnson, St. Andrews University

Groups of students perform a scene from a Shakespeare play via Twitter.

8. A Digital Approach to Teaching Postmodern Literature
Jason Parks, Ball State University

Students work collaboratively via Twitter to formulate interpretations of a highly enigmatic and disorienting postmodern novel.

Part II Assignments: DIGITAL TOOLS

9. 2B or n2B: Texting about Literature
Abigail G. Scheg, Elizabeth City State University
Students conduct a class discussion about a literary work, using text messaging. 　

10. Visualizing Literary Arguments with Digital Mapping Tools 　　

Kathryn E. Crowther, Georgia Perimeter

Students choose a text, or a part of a text, and "map" it in a digital format.

11. Mapping Literature, Cultural Artifacts, and Communities: Reveal the Living Map of Latin@ Letters

Charli G. Valdez, University of New Hampshire

Students tag and pin image artifacts on Google Maps, creating a meshwork of cultural resources relating to specific works being studied or larger cultural concepts in literature.

12. Text Meets Hypertext: An Online Approach to Teaching Poetry

Vicki Pallo, Virginia Commonwealth University

Students build a hyperlinked version of a poem or other literary text using research and analysis to inform their links and ideas (i.e., an in-depth annotation exercise meets multiple modalities).

13. Inventing Literary Dialogues: 　Students as Creators and Distributors of Knowledge

Debora Stefani, Georgia Perimeter College

Using goanimate.com, students invent a dialogue between two American authors of their choice and explore the connections between the authors in terms of themes, genre, or style.

14. Witness Collation and Close Textual Analysis 　

David Large, University of Sydney

Atilla Orel, University of

Using Juxta software (juxtasoftware.org), students find brief extracts from multi-versioned texts (such as Whitmanʼs Leaves of Grass or a Shakespearean play in quarto and folio editions) and then use Juxta to transcribe, collate, and discuss the texts.

15. Textual Treasure Hunting: Using Geocaching to Teach the Art of Close Reading

Jana Mathews, Rollins College

Students use geocaching—a GPS-based treasure hunt--to highlight the status of the quest in literary genealogy; the architecture of "the text;" and the role of technology in the production of literary narratives.

Part III Assignments: Podcasts

16. "We hoyd the author died somewhere around here, see": Repurposing Radio Genres

as Digital Literary Criticism Podcasts

Liberty Kohn, Winona State University

Students use podcast recording technology, and, through a popular aural genre of their choice (a form of radio show, for example) script a podcast that puts literacy or literary theories in dialogue with each other.

17. Podcasts, Rebellion, and Into the Wild — Engaging Students in the tale of Chris McCandless via the Podcast News & Talk Show

Christina Braid, University of Toronto

Students increase their critical reading and creative composing skills when they respond to biographical non-fiction by co-writing podcast transcripts.

18. Reviving an Oral Tradition: Using Podcasting to Teach Ancient Literature

Christine Tulley, The University of Findlay

Students make audio podcasts of short passages from Plato, Cicero, etc. and then broadcast them on college radio stations, ITunes, or PodcastAlley.

19. Dialogism in the Classroom: Creating Digital Audio Books to Teach Literary Theory

Jenne Powers, Wheelock College

Students digitally record a group audiobook or podcast. They then listen to the book and, using their experience as narrators and listeners, compose an essay on the question of whether or not this extended first-person narrative was essentially dialogic or monologic.

Part IV Assignments: MULTIMODALITIES

20. Lit Recipes: Creating Recipes for Literary Characters

Amanda Hill, University of Central Florida

Students create a "Literary Recipe" by identifying personal traits of a character from literature; they then organize and present those traits in the form of a multimodal digital recipe.

21. Multimodal Anthology Foreword Assignment

Lisa Whalen, North Hennepin Community College

Students create a multimodal foreword to a literature anthology.

22. Exploring Multimodality through Film and Textual Analysis

Andrew Bourelle, University of New Mexico

Tiffany Bourelle, University of New Mexico

Students conduct research on a book and a movie and then create a multimodal project discussing the two texts.

23. 　From Page to Stage: Using Technology to Demonstrate an Understanding of Literature

Melissa Vosen Callens, North Dakota State University

In groups of 3-4, students take a short story studied earlier in the semester and turn it into a play or dramatic scene. 　They write, perform, and record their work.

24. Restaging Shakespeare through Multimodal Composing

Jacob Hughes, Washington State University

Tim Hetland, North Seattle Community College

Students prepare a digital performance of a key scene from Shakespeare by using multimodal compositional and interpretive strategies.

25. Remapping World Literature through Multimodality

Clay Kinchen Smith, Santa Fe College

Students create a 2-3 minute audio/video media project that could be disseminated to large,

nontraditional audiences through social and/or broadcast media (e.g. Facebook, YouTube, Website, radio program, or other non-paper venues).

26 Digital Research and the Public Performance of Scholarship: 　

Web Site Creation within the Literature Classroom

Miranda Garno Nesler, Ball State University

Students create a website by engaging in a semester-long project composed of smaller assignments that are spaced and assessed throughout the term.

27. Beyond Fanfiction: Creating Remixes in an Advanced Literature Course

Emily Wierszewski, Seton Hill University

Students arrive at an understanding at what "literature" is, and the implications of technology and literature by reading literature and literary remixes, and then creating their own literary remix. 　

28. Hybrid Bodies and New Media Narratives: Critical Media Literacy in the Literature Classroom

Rochelle Gold, University of California, Riverside

Kimberly Hall, University of California, Riverside

Students explore a specific cultural ideology, anxiety, or norm by piecing together a hybrid body. They can use a gaming platform, Photoshop, or digital drawing software as well as collage or bricolage practices to develop a narrative that gives the body a voice. Then, they write a critical reflection on their processes.

29. Student as Critic in the Classroom: 　Arguing about Literature, Conducting Peer Review, and Presenting in a Digital Environment 　
Lesley Broder, Kingsborough Community College – CUNY

Students choose a literary author or text and make case for their significance. 　In an online setting, they draft, and based on feedback, revise a persuasive, which they then remix into a persuasive webcast.

Part V 　Assignments: ARCHIVES

30. 　Special Collections for All: Open, Digital Archives to Public Writing in the Literature Classroom

Ryan Cordell, Northeastern University

Students use The History Machine archives to research and write an episode that springs from a historical observation drawn from their reading of a literary text.

31. Reading With Your Ears: Using Poetry Sound Archives 　

Corey Frost, New Jersey City University

Karen Weingarten, Queens College, CUNY

Students explore how using sound archives, especially those related to poetry, can help them interrogate texts by writers including Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman.

32. Into the Archives: Using Early English Books Online in the Early Modern Literature

Classroom

Nichole DeWal, McKendree University

Using the Early English Books Online (EEBO), students search, select, transcribe, and write about one archival text that seems to participate in the same conversation as an assigned canonical text.

33. Thinking Through Making: Curating a Victorian Poem in the Context of its Cultural Moment

Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, Ryerson University

Students select a Victorian poem and analyze it in relation to a visual/material object and/or cultural practice, using the Networked Interface for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship

(NINES; www.nines.org).