ALA Conference 2014 Handout

‘The simple, compact, well join’d scheme’: Creating Multimodal Experiences for Students of Early American Literature Using Web-based Resources

Jeff Everhart
Longwood University

Websites as References and Archives

The Library of Congress: http://www.loc.gov

The Walt Whitman Archive: http://www.whitmanarchive.org/

The William Gilmore Simms Digital Edition: http://library.sc.edu/digital/collections/simms.html

Documenting the American South: http://docsouth.unc.edu/support/about/

Emily Dickinson Archive: http://www.edickinson.org/

 

Websites to Create

Google Cultural Institute: https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/home?view=grid

The Google Cultural Project brings together digitized cultural artifacts from museums and archives around the world. As a teaching tools it also lets users, either teachers or students, to curate individual galleries.

Text 2 Mind Map: https://www.text2mindmap.com/
Coggle: https://coggle.it/

Both Coggle and Text2MindMap are free mind mapping tools that students can use to visualize conceptual relationships.

Wordle: http://www.wordle.net/

Wordle allows users to create word clouds. On a basic level, this application uses word frequency to create visual representations of text samples. This is an interesting technique to visualize certain literary techniques like repetition, refrain, and tone.

 

Creating Websites to Learn

American Romanticism Online: http://www.americanromanticismonline.com/

American Romanticism Online was created as a part of my Master’s Thesis project. It was created as an open educational resource for K-12 students and teachers. It combines edited full texts from period authors with open source multimedia and interactive lesson plans that incorporate technology.

As an academic exercise, this project combined elements of textual scholarship, web design and development, instructional design, and both academic and non-academic writing.

Since May of 2013, the site has attracted over 13,500 visitors and over 1000 downloads from K-12 and higher education institutions in over ten different states. The site has been accepted into the MERLOT (http://www.merlot.org/merlot/index.htm) collection of OER and was nominated for an Award for Innovative Application of Digital Technology to Scholarhisp in a Master’s Thesis from the Conference of Southern Graduate Schools.

Although I pay to maintain the domain name, the site was built entirely off of open source software, in particular the WordPress platform.

WordPress: http://wordpress.com/

WordPress.com lets users create free sites using the WordPress software. This is a very intuitive and easy to use web authoring environment that lets users determine their technical comfort level. There is a highly regarded plug-in ecosystem that allows users to extend the functionality of their sites.

Questions? Contact Me

Email: everhartjc@longwood.edu, jeffeverhart383@gmail.com
Twitter: @J_Everhart383
Website: http://jeffreyeverhart.com

Link to presentation handout: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1opdOjI1KdMqF0PB4QnN7G40fnERQ3hiyyBCwgxQR5Cg/edit?usp=sharing

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