After several years teaching this course, I decided
to try something different in the spring of 2002. I renamed my version
of the course (which is taught by several others as well) "Information
Wars," and set out to focus both its content and its practices on the
ways that information moves in contemporary society. I asked students to
read several primary texts, including James Juhnke and Carol Hunter's unconventional
American history text The Missing Peace, the novels The Color
Purple by Alice Walker and War Memorials by Clint McCown, Dalton
Conley's memoir Honky, and to view the films Platoon, Roger and
Me, and Do the Right Thing. But I reduced the usual amount of
readings somewhat, in order to ask students to respond actively to the
readings--both by writing responses and by searching the internet for related
information and materials. A quarter of the students sent their discoveries
and journals to me before class each day, giving us a rich set of responses
and material to work with in class. I compiled their responses and web
links into daily
lesson plans which were also small anthologies, and accumulated into
a significant body of opinion and research. The
home page for the course also included links to many research and reference
sites. Exams were connected to these materials, and students were encouraged
to make use of the resources that they and their classmates had discovered.
In class I often asked students to talk about ideas from their journals
and the web sites they had visited. Throughout the course I tried to emphasize
two ideas that exist, at best, in tension: first, that a great deal of
pretty good information is available to us in the modern world, and second,
that whatever our opinions and values we must weigh and evaluate the information
that we receive carefully.
Lauren Selleck, a member of our TLC group, helped considerably in organizing the course and the materials we gathered. Her web site with the student journals and web pages is (I think) considerably better organized and more attractive than mine--but mine was done first! The final exam will ask students to go back into the materials we have gathered and to reflect on what they have learned from each other as well as from other course materials and from me.
It is too soon, and the end of the semester is too rushed, to say a great deal more about the results of this experiment now. A mid-term evaluation by students was mainly positive, and my sense is that the course did keep students engaged and thinking about the materials and the questions that they raised. Regarding the use of technology in the course, I can say two things with some confidence. First, it was very helpful to me as teacher to have student responses before class, as I shaped what and how we might discuss that day. Second, it was time-consuming to manage all that data; I often spent the better part of four hours organizing one 75-minute class. My schedule this semester allowed me to invest that much time, and teaching the class again I would be somewhat more efficient at it. But while I believe this sort of communication technology enhances teaching and learning, it does not "save time."
[I plan to extend this commentary when the course is complete, the course evaluations are in, and I have had time to reflect more carefully on what went on.]
Jeff Gundy
4/22/02