| Data Gathering and Synthesis This
page features examples of Web-enabled data gathering and synthesis from the fields of
 Cultural Studies
Web Site Evaluation
Virtual Exhibition Review
Debra DeRuyver, AMST 418P (Electronic Publications & Virtual Exhibitions in
American Studies), University of Maryland, College Park
In the first assignment, DeRuyver has students compare and evaluate information on
selected topics from traditional formats and from the Web. In the second assignment, the
students are asked to compare virtual and nonvirtual museums and art sites and assess
their social and cultural significance. They are asked to read Steve Dietz's essay Curating (on) the Web and apply his concepts and frameworks, as well
as those of other assigned texts. Lastly, they must turn in their papers by linking them
from their own home pages.
DeRuyver's assignments offer teachers a variety of useful questions and ideas for using
Web-based materials to analyze cultural preferences and practices. DeRuyver's course
encourages critical thinking about the nature of information found on the Web.
This example features the use of Web sites.
Human Rights
Addressing the Challenge of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM)
M.W. Conley, POLS 4883 (Human Rights: International and Comparative
Perspectives), Acadia University
Conley asks students to review a number of Web sites dealing with FGM and related human
rights issues, break into groups to discuss the issues raised through their online
research, and then collectively decide what strategies governments and nongovernment
organizations could adopt to address the challenge of FGM.
Conley's assignment offers ways students can use organizational information published
on the Web to formulate positions on human rights issues.
This course is one of eight political science courses associated with Acadia
University's Digital Agora, a multimedia resource providing extensive support for
interactive online learning. More information about the Digital Agora appears on the Collaborative Learning and Conceptual Learning pages.
This example features the use of Web sites.
Psychotherapy
Module
2: World Views
William H. McKelvie, PSYC 580 (Legal and Ethical Issues in Psychotherapy*), Bowie
State University
McKelvie asks students to combine a course reading and a Web interaction with a racial,
ethnic, or "culturally defined" group. Students are asked to examine cultural
assumptions they may bring to work and in particular to discuss the notion of cultural
competency. They are required to post their findings to the class discussion board, along
with URLs of sites they visited.
This assignment suggests ways to use the Web to engage in ethnographic inquiry and
experiential learning. The course and course
modules make many practice-oriented assignments available online and will be of
considerable interest to anyone teaching ethical problems and case studies.
*Legal and Ethical Issues in Psychotherapy is a pilot course in the Web Initiative in Teaching
(WIT) project administered by the University System of Maryland's Institute for Distance Education.
This example features the use of asynchronous
communication, synchronous communication,
and Web sites.
Women's History
Women and Social
Movements in the United States, 1830–1930
Kathryn Kish Sklar and Thomas Dublin, State University of New York at Binghamton
This Web site is organized around editorial projects completed by undergraduate and
graduate students. Each project poses a question and provides 15–20 primary source
documents that address the question.
Each question in the resource is addressed with a student overview followed by a set of
related primary source documents with student commentary for each. For example, the
section on "What Conflicts Emerged after New York Suffragists Won the Vote and
Entered Electoral Politics?" contains an introductory
essay and a list of documents, followed by document texts and annotations for
each, beginning with a story from the New York Times, 23 November 1919, entitled "Women Call
Upon Wadsworth to Quit."
This site offers a powerful example of the pedagogical uses of digitizing primary
documents and storing them on the Web. Students use the questions to frame their
understanding of the online documents and provide a guide to their content; in this way,
technology offers a means of showing how to train students to understand historical
research as an interpretive process.
This example features the use of text, images, and repositories.
This project is a joint initiative of the Center for the Virtual University and the Center for Teaching and Learning
at UMUC.
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