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General
Report:
I wanted to create a second TakeNote! exercise, one that
would follow the first one created last year. The first exercise
taught students how to use the program. This again was done in
a hands-on workshop in the computer center. The new, second exercise
was a step-by-step homework assignment. Having learned the program,
students were required to go through a mini-version of how they
would use the program in their larger project. This involved brief
note taking from sources, integration of these notes into an established
body of text, and finally, constructing a brief bibliography.
Students were required to print out the brief text, the note cards,
and the bibliography.
One of the problems I confronted with employing TakeNote! last year was that while students quickly learned the program (more quickly than the faculty who attended the faculty workshop), they did not often employ it in their research projects. I felt they did not fully understand just how useful this program would be in their work.
This year many more students used TakeNote! in their seminar research and I think this was a result of having the homework assignment to reinforce what they learned and to show them how easy the program was to use. Not only did half the seminar use the program, several students commented that they used the program for papers in other courses, as well. The homework assignment was also written to use reading materials from the class, thus reinforcing the connection between TakeNote! and the work for the course.
This seemed to go so well I repeated the exercise with the Junior Colloquium in History and gave them a revised version of the homework assignment, tailored to that class. This did double service, because it not only taught them the program but also served as a concluding exercise for a unit they had been doing. The idea of introducing TakeNote! in the Junior Colloquium would mean that all history majors (who take the course as a first-semester junior) would know the program for their final two years, during which they will write a number of papers.
It is my intention
to continue the exercise in the Junior Colloquium and thus eliminate
the need to do it in Senior Seminar. It turns out that I will
not teach a First-Year Seminar next fall, but will offer to lead
a workshop for those FYS instructors who are interested.
The problems that remain are two.
1) Several students did not use the program because they have IBM-based PCs and we now only have a Mac program. If there is a PC version, that would solve this problem.
2) Students may need better access to the program in the library, where much research is done and where some materials cannot be taken back to their rooms.
Both of these seemed easily resolvable, especially if the software company offers a Windows version. My hope in introducing TakeNote! earlier is to have it become part of the way history students conceptualize undertaking their research assignments-from research to writing to constructing bibliographies.
Last updated
on 11/26/00; 11:55:09 AM
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