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DIGITIZATION OF SLIDES OWNED BY FRENCH DEPARTMENT

I created a web site for my French culture course which included "slides" of visual artifacts, historical timelines, study questions, and a simple electronic syllabus with links to these resources. Students found these pages useful, and seemed to appreciate the convenience of the electronic syllabus with links to the assignments. Web statistics showed that the syllabus was consulted often [90 times, mainly by the 13 students in the class, and probably some off-campus browsers. I found that being able to assign visual artifacts to study along with readings in French history/culture, made the assignments more meaningful and enhanced our class discussions. Report The problem addressed was that no multimedia program exists to teach French culture, and yet it is nearly impossible to teach this course well without lots of sound and images. By making slides, maps, study questions and a simple electronic syllabus available on the Web, I was able to enhance the mainly historical readings assigned with high quality digitized graphics of artifacts (paintings, sculpture, architecture, maps). In the past I have done so with traditional slides shown on a projector in class, making the links between the readings and the visual artifacts myself during a lecture. This had very little impact as students were seeing the graphics for the first and last time. It also meant more lecturing on my part and less discussion--another problem I hoped to address. Goal By assigning these slides (as the art history department has been doing), and by assigning study questions, students arrive already familiar with them, and this enhances class discussion. Hopefully, they will also see connections between the broader historico-political context covered in the readings and the art or artifacts shown in the slides. Assessment Some students skipped the slides when questions were not assigned, although they all seemed to come back to the graphics before the tests. Others looked at the slides without realing studying them. In the future, I will include study questions alongside the graphics or a quiz to ensure that everyone studies in a focused way. Having taught this course twice before, I feel that the web slides greatly improved class discussion. Sometimes it was just a matter of having more variety; when the reading was "dry" or "difficult," the slides would get our discussion started. In the future I will keeping adding to this site. Next year I will add images and sound, mainly, the text and recordings of General De Gaulle's speeches. Dissemination I have no plans for dissemination yet. But with some polishing, this site could be useful to many instructors teaching culture or "civilization" courses. Perhaps resources like this could be linked with other simlilar "culture" web sites by a common resource page. I know outside browsers have made use of the resources I have posted so far: a professor in Estonia wrote to tell me how much he appreciated the 245 timelines!

Last updated on 12/1/00;
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