30 March 2019
12:15–13:15
Moataz Al Alfi Hall
This initiative involved collaboration among faculty, students, and technologists to promote innovative pedagogy where scrutinizing sources was central to the learning outcomes. The project culminated with students presenting digital narratives of their annotated bibliographies from a historical lens, thus providing insight into the historiography of thought concerning the subject matter.
This pilot project is situated within an interdisciplinary digital humanities framework with peer-to-peer components to foster innovative, interactive, and engaging solutions for first-year writing-intensive courses. Trained undergraduate writing center tutors with emerging expertise in various digital tools assisted in creating inventive, learner-centric spaces that cultivated enhancing critical thinking strategies while finding and scrutinizing a wide array of research materials in the university’s online library system; many of such items were later incorporated into extended writing assignments (an annotated bibliography to accompany a research paper) and persuasive speeches. Utilizing the given digital software solutions (e.g. Timeline JS), participating students were required to orally present digital narratives of their annotated bibliographies through historical optics, highlighting the various research items that had been integrated into – as well as excluded from – the final versions of the aforementioned written and oral coursework.
The lessons learned from this initiative involving the triangulation of students, faculty, and technologists will be considered when weaving other digital elements (Voyant Tools and Palladio) into iterations of these and other courses in the near future given the particular learning outcomes. Collaboration with other AMICAL-affiliated institutions where similar digital components have been explored is an asset in pursuing innovative solutions in pedagogy.
