Bob Heterick Memorial Lectureship - Digital Histories for the Digital Age: How Do We Teach Writing Now?

The digital environment has had an immense effect on American society, learning, and education: we have more sources available at our fingertips than any previous generation. Teaching and learning with these new sources, however, has been a challenging transition. Students are confronted with an ocean of digital objects and need skills to navigate the World Wide Web and numerous proprietary databases. Writing and disciplinary habits of mind are more important than ever in this environment, so how do we teach these in the digital age? This presentation looks at the current digital environment that humanities faculty face in their teaching and explores new tools that might support collaborative writing and digital skills development for students. In particular, Thomas will showcase a multi-agent wiki system for writing called POND (Participating Online In-Depth) that is currently being used in a large lecture and intensive writing classes at the University of Nebraska and developed as a collaborative project between History, English, and Computer Science.