Having talked about today’s class in the previous post, I thought I’d write about what I’m going to do tomorrow as follow-up.
I’ll start with a two-question survey sometimes used in large college lecture courses (that I’ve occasionally used in the past without having found it terribly useful):
- What major point(s) did you take home from yesterday’s class?
- What unresolved questions do you have from yesterday’s class?
Then we’ll move on to the assignment below:
Two things that came out of yesterday’s class discussion were the ideas of
- How do you evaluate the responses to your web-search questions?
- How do you decide which questions to ask?
This exercise addresses both questions though primarily the first one
Let’s say you are asked (by a friend you want to impress, by a teacher whose respect you want, or by a teacher in whose class you want a good grade) to talk about existentialism tomorrow.
- What question do you enter and into what search engine/web site?
- Print to a pdf file and attach to an email to me the first page of search results.
- Look quickly over the search results and rank them by usefulness.
- If you decide the results weren’t what you want/need, pick a different question and repeat steps 1-4.
- Spend the rest of the period preparing your talk. Email me an outline (bullet points in order are fine), with references where applicable, to what you’ll say. Write you’re your first couple and last couple of sentences, but in between, short bullets are fine.
Students will, I assume, take the assignment more or less at face value (which would be a worthwhile assignment even so). But, like ogres and onions, I have layers. So a handful of kids will get a different (albeit related) assignment. On their assignment (I may make them work outside to avoid revealing the nature of the layer to their peers), I will give them one of the two questions below instead of letting/making them choose their own question:
quel est l’existentialisme?
¿cuál es el existencialismo?
If for no other reason (though there are some) than French and Spanish Wikipedias are different articles, not simply translations, from the English articles on the same topics, there will be differences in the results obtained from the three questions (the “What is existentialism?” and its translations)–I know because I have checked.
So, discussion the following day will evolve from the results of tomorrow’s exercise. An easy extension would be to point out the feature of Google searches that lets you see what the results would have been had the searches been conducted in another country (even in English).
A second extension would be to give the Spanish and French questions as is to students not familiar with the languages so that they’d have to have their browser translate (or use some other online translator) as an intermediate research step.
Lots of potential, eh?