English 101 is the introductory-level composition course; students write five essays and a research paper incorporating secondary sources and documenting them according to MLA formats. In the last several years, as the basis of the students' writing assignments, I have been using the novel Memories of a Pure Spring by Duong Thu Huong, a Vietnamese writer. To support the reading for this course, I created new essay topics, research assignment topics, and a variety of study activities.
The research essay is often the first such assignment that students have been asked to do, and now with the ubiquity of the Internet, that is the first (and it could be the last) place that they go to find material. Left without guidance, students use the Yahoo search engine and find websites of wildly varying quality that they cobble together to produce pastiches of ill-digested materials often of minimal value. I wanted to design a web inquiry activity that would give students practice in reading a website as they read a text, in exploring and analyzing that website, and finally evaluating it. I also wanted to take advantage of Blackboard's Discussion Board to ask them to report to each other the results of their explorations.
Before participating in the Designed for Learning project, I was conscious of being highly dissatisfied with the materials that students had found in their web searches, but I lacked the confidence that I could help them find and use better sources. We need to meet our students where they are, and after Designed for Learning, I felt much more knowledgeable about locating, reading and using effective web materials myself, and therefore more confident about giving students practice in doing the same.
Activity Overview
This class meets four hours a week, two hours of which take place in a computer lab. To prepare for the class, I did web research of my own, looking for websites that are current and well-maintained, clearly presented, with live links and several layers or sections, and with clearly-stated goals and perspectives. I chose a website created by a professor at Vassar College, "The Wars for Vietnam, 1945-1975," at http://vietnam.vassar.edu/index.html. This site includes an informative home page and an "Overview" which links to a wide variety of primary sources originating in Vietnam and America spanning the years from 1954 to 1975, and documents relating to the "American War" in Vietnam.
Students are first asked to summarize the information contained on the home page and to explain the scope and purpose of this website; they also list the parts of the website that they see enumerated on the home page. Students are then assigned to a particular section of the overview and asked to describe that section and to summarize one of the documents in the section. Directing students to another section of the website, "Other Viet Nam Links," I ask them to open the links which contain images, to choose one, and to describe that image. Finally, students are asked to evaluate this website according to criteria which we have previously discussed in class and which we develop empirically from our experiences with this website. Students post their responses-descriptions, summaries, analyses and evaluations- on the Discussion Board. They are asked to read and respond to other students' analyses and evaluations.
A second activity, which comes several weeks later in the semester and is less structured than the one I've just described, is more closely tied to their individual topics for the research paper, and is directed toward locating sources for that paper. Students go to the LaGuardia library site, http://www.lagcc.cuny.edu/main/libraries, and using CUNY+, EBSCO Host and LexisNexis, locate at least two sources that they think might be useful for their paper. Students also go to one website, "Vietnam: Yesterday and Today," at http://servercc.oakton.edu/~wittman, a faculty-created website with an extensive bibliography divided into various categories, and look at the sources enumerated at that site. Students are asked to post the results of their searches on the Discussion Board.
In both activities, students respond to each other's posts, sharing their results with each other, and I respond to their posts myself. Time management is important. I make sure that there is enough time for students to post on the Discussion Board. And we follow up in class with further evaluative discussion on the websites and the library databases. As a result of working through these activities, students can now identify and analyze the elements of a reliable, informative and substantial site, as well as the elements that might lead students to judge that a site is not reliable, informative or substantial.
I have adapted these activities to my LIB 200, Humanism, Science and Technology, course. Initially, thinking that students would have already had sufficient experience with websites, I did only the second activity with them. But I learned that they, too, could profit from an analytical reading of a website; therefore, I created five separate Discussion Board threads and linked them to five different websites corresponding to the five topics for my LIB 200. In future semesters, I plan to further refine this activity for the LIB 200 course.
Materials and Resources
The Wars for Vietnam, 1945-1975. http://vietnam.vassar.edu/index.html
Vietnam: Yesterday and Today. http://servercc.oakton.edu/~wittman
LaGuardia Community College Library. http://www.lagcc.cuny.edu/main/libraries
Duong, Thu Huong. Memories of a Pure Spring. Trans. Nina McPherson and Phan Huy Duong. New York: Penguin, 2001.
Raimes, Ann. Keys for Writers. 4th ed. Boston: Houghton, 2005.