DH in the Classroom at MacEwan
Classics: Primary Sources Digital Exhibition. Using PBworks as a platform, first and second year students design a digital exhibition on a topic related to Greek or Roman civilization in a wiki-format. The assignment encourages students to consider artifacts such as coins, vases, architecture, and paintings as primary sources and to use images of these to support and illustrate a discussion of their topic. In order to successfully complete the assignment, students must combine digital images, an analytical discussion, and a bibliography into a miniature website consisting of several pages.
English: Digital Media and Cultural Literacy, Exploring Poets and Poetry in Digital Media (reading assignments and group discussions analysing different kinds of existing online resources that are related to courses’ topics and print subjects; students are challenged to consider the content, structure, production, and reception of all resources).
History: An upper level course on theories of time in the ancient world using podcasts and apps. Peter Adamson's History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps podcast gave students a way to add to their understanding of difficult authors from antiquity, ranging from Plato and Aristotle to Plotinus and Augustine. Asking students to write a short reflection on how the podcast altered their approach to these classical texts allowed our class to (once again) bring together writing, critical thinking, and digital skills. We also included a similar assignment that asked students to reflect on the degree to which Villanova University's app-version of Augustine's Confessions helped them make sense of a rather large and unwieldy masterwork.