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Dr Catherine Driscoll
English Studies
Background | Aims | Process | Evaluation | Contact
Background
I decided to incorporate electronic forums into my teaching and learning practices following my observation, in a previous teaching position, of an email list used for discussion of assessment tasks. Though that list was mainly administrative some discussion about the subject in general was initiated by the students, and I noted that most of the students who enjoyed and avidly used this forum were not the students who actively participated in tutorial discussions.
Another important inspiration for my continued commitment to using electronic discussion forums, even when there were points at which it didn't seem to be working as well as I'd anticipated, was the recognition that email is a cross between conversation and writing. As English Studies are largely concerned with expressing oneself in writing, the fact that email discussion gives students practice in putting their academic thoughts down as written prose, without the formality and constraints of an essay written for assessment, seems likely to be very useful. An email discussion list may appear to be simply a useful addition to traditional study methods. My experience so far is that, when it works, it can dramatically transform the students' learning practices and their understanding of the relevance of English Studies.
A discipline like English Studies, which is not clearly directed to vocational training for most of our students, must now closely consider the relevance of its core skills, and a further reason for the employment of IT in teaching and learning for English arises here. English Studies are always about accessing, evaluating and disseminating information in the forms that are most appropriate to a particular project or question. To this end it is no longer adequate for our students to only know about books and libraries; we need also to equip them for research, writing and presentation in electronic forms.
Aims
Process
My first concerted attempt at integrating email discussion lists into subject design was 20th Century American Literature in 1998. The electronic forum used to discuss the internet in this course was both a trial in teaching methods and a redirection of what English Studies courses might consider. Only those weeks in which we were focussing on the internet were offered entirely on-line, but feedback from the students indicated that they felt it would be better to offer the email discussion group element across the whole subject. Somewhat surprisingly, even those students who had difficulty adapting to the technology advocated this approach as it meant their investment in learning the necessary computer skills seemed better justified. In the following year I tried integrating an email discussion list into an honours subject. Although the students found the list useful for follow-up questions after seminars, they didn't use the forum extensively for discussion between themselves. They were a small group who already knew each other, so the idea of discussing on email didn't gel with them. However, the few who did use the list for extended discussion generated written material that was useful to them later when they were writing essays.
In the same semester I included an email discussion list as part of the 2nd/3rd year subject The Idea of Youth: Fiction, Film and Youth. In the early part of the year students used the forum to spontaneously communicate with each other about the subject content, interspersed with accounts from their lives outside of the university in references to television news and past personal experiences and so on. As this participation was not assessed in any way it seems likely that students who contributed were interested in alternative modes of 'classroom’ discussion. It was again evident that the students most active on the discussion list were usually not those most active in face-to-face tutorials.
For purely academic reasons the list was beneficial to students' understanding and application of the subject. The students were tapping into a spontaneous enthusiasm for the subject matter. They were able to make connections between study and life outside the university, and could discuss the relevance of analyses and arguments raised by the course to a range of contexts and issues.
This success proved fragile, though. The same subject also included an assessed bibliographic exercise that involved using the discussion list. Students were asked to find a text relevant to the subject and then to comment on at least one other text chosen by the other students. This bibliography and the attached comments were then placed on the subject’s website http://www.adelaide.edu.au/English/iyouth.htm (inactive, 3/4/03). While this exercise was a success in itself it had a disastrous effect on the discussion list. It seemed that once the medium was used for assessment students could no longer see it as their own, and the discussion which had previously taken place on this list died very suddenly.
Evaluation
Apart from my own observations and personal feedback, I used Student Evaluation of Teaching (SET) questionnaires. In The Idea of Youth: Fiction, Film and Youth the SET results indicated that the majority of students thought the computing aspects of the subject were useful, commenting favourably, for instance, on the bibliography exercise. However, the students only offered lukewarm endorsement for the discussion list, although they had quite actively used it in the first half of the subject. Perhaps the assessment task tarnished their opinion irrevocably, or perhaps they didn't realise the educational value of the list because the discussion seemed so informal.
I will continue to use the discussion list in the Youth subject, next time separating the bibliography exercise (using web based forms for input and response) from the discussion forum. Both are valuable, but perhaps not compatible in the one space.
Contact
Dr Catherine Driscoll can be contacted on:
Tel: +61 8 8303 5625,
Fax: +61 8 8303 4341
E-mail: catherine.driscoll@adelaide.edu.au (inactive 16/5/07)
University of Adelaide, Australia 5005
last updated 10/05/00
