![]() ![]() Speaking of Structure… When we started Textlab, we gave the students minimal instruction but lots of software, with the model of the VIPs being that “students are smart. It gives the students scope to focus on their work, and once they feel they have a grasp on it, THEN they can start disseminating in really exciting and productive ways. How do you know what to focus energies on when there’s so much to address? Over time, we’ve scaled back a lot in our course expectations, which is something I think is really good. This is not to say my students are stupid – quite the opposite – but that giving them too much new stuff to do is just really overwhelming. This is a difficult class to begin with! I’m not sure how useful it is for students to have to write performatively for the public alongside getting to terms with new software, new methods, and new approaches to something they are only semifamiliar with AT BEST. But eventually that’s just too much to grapple with. Giving students lots of small tasks to do, like blogging, tweeting, recording, writing, and reading, is great because it requires time management skills and genreblending. It’s my understanding that the university is trying to hire someone whose entire job would be doing administration for the Vertically Integrated Projects and taking care of these tasks, but in the meantime, there is no structure and that’s not great for the students (or us). Furthermore, depending on which department is leading the course (this year it’s CIS previously it’s been English), at least half of the students on the course are lost at sea because the other department doesn’t know what to do with them or what their course requirements are. Though I suspect the sciences have more cross-faculty students than English and Computer Science tend to, this makes registration and ensuring all students get the appropriate number of credits, with everyone teaching affected courses aware of our system into a bit of a nightmare. We don’t currently have a general education structure in place for undergraduates. Interdisciplinary work is best done when there is an infrastructure for it. Some challenges remain challenges and some kinks have been ironed out, but here’s some things I learned from co-convening this course: Over the past three years, some things have changed quite a lot from our initial course plan and some things haven’t changed at all. Admittedly, this class is kind of a strange beast for all involved, including us. ![]() Jonathan Hope, Anouk Lang, George Weir, Richard Jason Whitt and I co-designed a course for English studies students and computer science students to collaboratively work as a microcosm of the Visualizing English Print project over the course of a term. ![]() Textlab was one of first round of projects to be launched, building off work with Visualizing English Print. This structure has been borrowed from the Georgia Institute of Technology and has been running at Strathclyde for the past three years. At the risk of repeating myself, this course is sponsored by the Vertically-Integrated Projects initiative at my university, and is one of several (currently 8, I think) projects running. I’ve written a bit about Textlab before ( here & here), but as my third time teaching it winds down, I’ve been thinking a lot about the various challenges that come with this course. ![]()
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