Community and Creativity Online: Student-Constructed Webfolios and Webtexts as Learning Spaces in Undergraduate Humanities Classes

Community and Creativity Online: Student-Constructed
Webfolios and Webtexts as Learning Spaces in Undergraduate Humanities
Classes

Donna
Reiss
Department of English-Humanities Tidewater
Community College
tcreisd@tc.cc.va.us

1999

University of Virginia

Charlottesville, VA

ACH/ALLC 1999

editor

encoder

Sara
A.
Schmidt

In Engines of Inquiry: Teaching, Technology, and
Learner-Centered Approaches to Culture and History, Randy Bass
identifies "six kinds of quality learning" that "information technologies can
serve to enhance": distributive learning, authentic tasks and complex inquiry,
dialogic learning, constructive learning, public accountability, and reflective
and critical thinking. Providing all six of these experiences is a challenge for
a state community college like mine, Tidewater Community College, Virginia
Beach, Virginia.
Nonetheless, using the resources of the community as well as free and low-cost
Internet applications, an online class can incorporate quality computer-mediated
learning, as this poster presentation will demonstrate with several
undergraduate projects from an open-admissions online humanities elective,
Technology and the Liberal Arts: Man, Woman,
Machine <>.
Students typically are drawn to this class not by the "arts" in the title but by
the "technology." By the end of the term, students have used technology as one
approach to understanding some of the fine arts, have reflected on the
technologies used in creating and maintaining works of art, and have constructed
their own works of art and electronic portfolios.