English 4600a: Beowulf (Spring 2021)
Posted: January 11, 2021 Filed under: spring-2021, Teaching Leave a comment »About this course
In this course we will read the poem Beowulf in the original Old English. The principal focus of the course will be reading the poem above all else: it can be difficult to read the entire poem in a semester, though every class I’ve taught has managed in the end.
Because we will be reading Beowulf in the original Old English, the course has a mandatory prerequisite: English 3450 (Introduction to Old English) or an equivalent course or preparation. You must already know how to read Old English in order to take this course.
Learning goals
The goal of the course is to read Beowulf. By the end of the course you should be
- familiar with this early medieval poem
- an accomplished and quick reader of Old English poetry Read the rest of this entry »
Various remote work guides and tips
Posted: March 17, 2020 Filed under: Computers, Teaching Leave a comment »Here’s a place where I’m collecting various tips and tricks for remote work in light of the University of Lethbridge moving to “alternate methods of delivery.” I’ll update this as I go.
Contents
Some Zoom tips.
The university is encouraging us to use Zoom for meetings, office hours, and classes. Read the rest of this entry »
Zoom in the time of COVID-19: Setting up Zoom for classes and office hours at the U of L
Posted: March 17, 2020 Filed under: Computers, technology Leave a comment »The University of Lethbridge is moving to an ‘alternate delivery model’ for classes as of Wednesday March 18. Mostly, this seems to me subscribing to Zoom, a widely-used teleconferencing system, and encouraging faculty to use it. Since the University of Lethbridge has not previously subscribed to Zoom, this means that a lot of faculty members will be doing two new things starting on Wednesday: using Zoom and teaching on Zoom.
I’ve used Zoom a lot in the last couple of years for my research (in fact my lab has a subscription of its own). The following are some tips and hints for faculty that are using it for the first time to teach. They are based on my experience running workshops and meetings, rather than teaching. I’ll update them as I get tips and experience. They are not meant to replace online guides to using Zoom (such as this one from UC San Diego). Just things you might not think about or see in such guides. Read the rest of this entry »
Some tips on getting answers to email
Posted: December 13, 2016 Filed under: journal-incubator, Teaching Leave a comment »Email is the bane of academic life. All of us hate it; most of us are very bad at answering it. If you edit a journal, it is even worse, since you need people to answer their email in a timely fashion.
At the Centre for the Study of Scholarly Communication Journal Incubator, getting people to answer email is what we do. Here are some tips we’ve found useful.
Contents
Lyrics for annotation
Posted: September 13, 2016 Filed under: exercises, Teaching | Tags: a god and yet a man, fleumaticus, good medicine for sore eyen, hypothes.is, i have a gentil cok, i have a newe gardin, levedy fortune, lyric 112, lyric 115, lyric 117, lyric 188, lyric 197, lyric 77, lyric 78, lyric 8, lyrics, medicina, middle english, upon a lady Leave a comment »These are lyrics for the annotation exercises.
Contents
Phonetic spelling exercise
Posted: September 10, 2016 Filed under: Moodle, Teaching 1 Comment »This exercise is an experiment in “phonetic” spelling, that is to say the use of orthography to capture sound.
In doing this, we are trying to get a sense for how people in previous eras might have used one spelling system to transcribe another language—e.g. use French spelling to write Middle English, or adapt Latin letters to spell Germanic languages.
This is not an exercise in the use of modern Phonetic Alphabets (e.g. IPA). If you know phonetic transcription, try to ignore that knowledge here. Read the rest of this entry »
More on KISS and Tell Grading
Posted: June 3, 2016 Filed under: Methodology, Teaching Leave a comment »I’ve now implemented my ideas about a modified version of Specifications-based grading and Standards-Based grading, as I discussed in an earlier blog posting.
I also have a much better understanding of the economics of it. This blog posting is a note about how it works.
A reminder of the problem
First a reminder of the basic issue: I believe that students tend to seize up from traditional grading mechanisms that rate them from Excellent to Poor. At the University of Lethbridge, this method causes students to become intellectually defensive and conservative to an extend I consider an academic offence: they are so scared of bad grades that they would rather do what they think you want than what they think is interesting, correct, or advances knowledge—an approach that I find difficult to distinguish from plagiarism in terms of its effect on the advancement of knowledge.
There is at least some research that shows that students do better work when they are graded pass/ Read the rest of this entry »
Harpers on the wonders of the telegraph and typewriter… and the rightful place of philologists.
Posted: January 30, 2016 Filed under: digital-humanities, technology | Tags: darwinism, history, impact of technology, journalism, nineteenth century, philology, positivism, science, telegraph, typewriter, united states Leave a comment »From the conclusion of a great article in Harper’s on the Telegraph :
The immense extension of the general telegraphic system, and its common use for business and social correspondence and the dissemination of public intelligence, are far more important to the community than any of these incidental applications of the system. The telegraph system is extending much more rapidly than the railroad system, and is probably exerting even a greater influence upon the mental development of the people than the railroad is exerting in respect to the material and physical prosperity of the country. It has penetrated almost every mind with a new sense of the vastnessof distance and the value of time. It is commonly said that it has annihilated time and space—and this is true in a sense; but in a deeper sense it has magnified both, for it has been the means of expanding vastly the inadequate conceptions which we form of space and distance, and of giving a significance to the idea Read the rest of this entry »
Emailing previous semester classes
Posted: January 3, 2016 Filed under: Computers, Teaching | Tags: aliases, mailing lists, university of lethbridge Leave a comment »In a previous post, I discussed how to customise your class space and class mailing lists at the U of L. Something I didn’t mention there is that you can email previous semester classes as well, if you know how the mailing list aliases work.
Every current semester class can be emailed by the instructor and his/her delegates at an address in the following format: SUBJNNNNSuleth.ca@, where SUBJ is the four letter subject code for the class (e.g. in most of my cases, engl for English), NNNN is the four digit number (e.g. 3450 in the case of Old English), and S is the section letter (usually a, but could be n for evening classes, or a latter between a and n for additional sections). So in semesters when I am teaching Old English, for example, I can email the class using the address engl3450auleth. Read the rest of this entry »
English 3450a: Old English (Spring 2015)
Posted: August 17, 2015 Filed under: fall-2015, Teaching Leave a comment »Note: This was published to the wrong URL. See http://people.uleth.ca/~daniel.odonnell/Teaching/english-3450a-old-english-fall-2015 for the updated syllabus.
A “Thought Piece” on Digital Space as Simulation and the Loss of the Original
Posted: February 11, 2015 Filed under: Research-and-comment, Teaching | Tags: digital humanities, student blogs, Teaching Leave a comment »In beginning to think about how I could integrate theory into my final project, I recalled Kim Brown, the DH Maker-Bus, and how she spoke about how her workshops with children have prompted kids to ask “big questions”. It occurred to me that the way in which humanists approach their own work is often very dependent on the ways humanity and culture are defined. It also occurred to me that now, more than ever, humanity and technology are converging. In this paper I want to explore the ways technology and the digital are seen as “copies” of an “original”. Drawing on theories post-humanism and post-modernism I will discuss technology and the internet as simulation. This paper will examine technophobia in the humanities and look to Jean Baudrillard’s theories of simulacra, si Read the rest of this entry »
Some quick notes on citation practice for undergraduates
Posted: February 4, 2015 Filed under: Methodology, Teaching | Tags: citation, citation practice, Methodology, plagiarism, quotation, Tutorials Leave a comment »Students seem always to get very nervous about citation… and, interestingly, perhaps through that nervousness, end up doing it in ways that professional scholars don’t.
Contents
Here are some tips that pros use for citation that undergraduates tend not to know:
Plagiarism is not a property crime.
Many students treat citations as, in essence, payment for ideas. Read the rest of this entry »
English 3401: What I did/did not know about medieval English culture (revised assignment)
Posted: January 12, 2015 Filed under: Policies, Teaching Leave a comment »Contents
Instructions
Read J. A. Burrow, Medieval writers and their work: Middle English literature and its background 1100-1500 and write a brief essay discussing some aspect of high Medieval English life, art, or culture that intrigues you. This might involve
- something that you already knew something about but have a deeper knowledge of after reading Burrow’s book Read the rest of this entry »
About posters
Posted: January 4, 2015 Filed under: Current-Interest, Teaching Leave a comment »I increasingly use posters in my classes as a way of encouraging collaboration and the development of a research community.
Although posters have long been used in the Natural Sciences, some Social Sciences, and the Digital Humanities, they are only beginning to appear in more traditional humanities disciplines.
This post provides some resources for discovering how to design posters and explains my general policies.
How to make posters
Although students make posters throughout Grade School, Middle School, and High School, research posters of the kind used at University are slightly different in format and design. Read the rest of this entry »
If there’s such a thing as “computing for humanists” is there also such a thing as “humanities for computer scientists?” On implementing interdisciplinarity in the Digital Humanities
Posted: July 16, 2015 | Author: dpod | Filed under: Research-and-comment, Teaching | Tags: digital humanities, graduate education, interdisciplinarity | Leave a comment »This is a just a brief initial thought piece on a question I’ve been asking colleagues about, from whom I’ve not heard the answer I want.
The Digital Humanities is an interdisciplinary field that involves the intersection of computation and the humanities. That means, amongst other things, that neither computation nor humanities is primary to the discipline but both must be present in some way or another. In this way, the Digital Humanities is different from, say, the “History of Science” (History is primary) or “Cognitive approaches to cultural understanding” (Cognitive science is primary).
In actual practice, for most of its life as DH and in its earlier form, Humanities Computing, DH has been mostly the domain of humanists. The people have been located in Humanities departments and the projects have in many ways been developments from and extensions of humanities research. So while Digital Humanities, in terms of content, is more “digit Read the rest of this entry »