From dorothee.kocks@m.cc.utah.edu Thu Sep 11 10:49:59 1997 Date: Tue, 10 Jun 1997 17:57:39 -0600 From: "Dorothee E. Kocks" To: conference@h-net.msu.edu Subject: Ivy Project Panel Proposal: Attention Melanie Schell The Ivy Project A case study of student-generated courseware in American History Dorothee E. Kocks Assistant Professor University of Utah ABSTRACT In University of Utah's History 465, students created a multimedia museum of the modern American West in just ten weeks. The goal of this ambitious project, funded in part through internal teaching grants, was to teach by doing. And learn we all did, teacher and students alike. The main successes of the project were: countering technophobia among diehard Humanities students; realizing (not just theorizing) some new narrative forms feasible with multimedia authoring tools; offering perspective on traditional, "textbook" narratives of the West via a student-researched and student-written text; and linking personal experience with large-scale historical trends. This pilot version of the Ivy Project is stored on a CD-ROM, available for purchase from the University of Utah history department. I have attached some portions of pages from the introduction to the museum. The links won't work, as I have not put the results on the internet, but you will get a good idea of our intentions from these segments. For an outdated but still informative overview of the project, see http://www.hum.utah.edu/history/hist465/ REQUEST When I spoke to Melanie Shell on the telephone last week, she encouraged me to 'fess up to my ideal scenario: I realize that 20 minutes is the standard paper presentation time. BUT here is a panel in which we can actually report on a 21st century-style project. Yes, it has neat bells and whistles, but the really important aspect of this project is the critical skills which students acquire, not just to "see through" the narrative tradition of textbooks but also to "see through" databases that are so huge, they seem to have no authors; no subjectivity. If this weren't enough, two of my students already report getting higher paying, technical jobs on the basis of their experience in this class. Okay, not every aspect of this project is an unadulterated success story (I can wax poetic here only because I'm not now in the middle of solving all the endless technical problems. More on that at the conference). But truly, my enthusiasm for the possibilities of linked paper-writing via multimedia authoring tools is infectious. So, ahem, I invite you to take advantage of my enthusiasm and give me lots of floor time. Ideally, then, the Ivy Project would get 45 minutes and somebody among you would find money to send students with me to Michigan (it's much more effective to demonstrate this with the student authors than just with me). Ideally, we would also hog another 45 minutes for question and answer time. But of course, I can still be entertaining in 20 minutes.:-) Technical requirements: two PCs with at least 32 ram and cd-drives and speakers; two projectors and screens; internet explorer and quicktime. [Part 2, Text/HTML (charset: ISO-8859-1 "Latin 1") 237 lines] [Unable to print this part]