Digital Content and Course Materials:
A workshop sponsored by the The Loudoun Digital Humanities Project
Charlie Evans

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The Intro Video (no longer available)

First, let's quickly review "why you should put your course materials on the web."

So, why do it?

Second, what kind of materials should you consider putting on the web?

Third, your course materials can be in a variety of formats.

Finally, here are some ideas for putting your text materials on the web.

a Word document on the web. For example, here is a student paper example (*.doc) from one of my courses. But there are some problems doing this.

a *.PDF version of a document on the web. There are pros and cons to doing this. You can create a *.PDF from Word, Wordperfect, Acrobat, etc. You can also use a scanner to copy and create a *.PDF.

a Google document can be published to the web. These can be created by uploading something from your computer or by composing right in Google. See screen shot 2. Images and some formatting options are available. There is also an ability to collaborate on these documents. Screen shot 1. Note that you can also create a spreadsheet, drawing, presentation as a google doc, and there are templates that you can use.

a blog, such as Wordpress or blogspot/blogger (that requires a gmail account). These are pretty simple to set up if you choose a template, and they can be easy to customize. What is nifty is that with a little know-how you can turn a blog into a pretty-good looking website (w/o blog posts, etc). See the Udvar-Házy example.

a social-networking tool such as Ning, used by Michael Krimmer for GIS

web pages, HTML documents.

Remember there is a wide range of web pages

Create web pages with:

As noted above, your web pages can include:

Get your web pages onto the web

A warning from Project Pedagogy: Some Ideas for Better Teaching, 2nd ed

"As with everything else that you do with your teaching, from developing your syllabus, to planning your lectures, to grading student work, you should plan on investing some time if you wish to use technology effectively in teaching your courses.  If you are going to spend hours on creating a great syllabus, then you need to be aware that it is going to take some time to make technology work for you and your students."

A caveat

Note that in the past few years the web has evolved from web 1.0 (a static information site that many faculty are still trying to master ) to web 2.0 (an increasingly socially interactive location) that is dominated by the widespread use of social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, blogs and even YouTube.

PS. There was no notice of Blackboard in this presentation.