My students and I are working on two long-term digital projects. These are collaborative digital textbooks to accompany my two recurring undergraduate electives, ENGL3393: Chaucer and ENGL4424: Middle English Alliterative Poetry. The websites are built using Boston College’s MediaKron tool. Early in the semester, the students encounter the sites as textbooks. Later, they work in teams to contribute new content to the sites as a graded research, writing, and web design assignment.
The alliterative poetry site functions as a general introduction to this medieval poetic corpus, and to medieval manuscript studies. The Chaucer site, Mapping Chaucer, uses the Map Tour feature of MediaKron to visualize Chaucer’s literary imagination.
Financial support for these projects comes from the Boston College Office of the Provost and from the Boston College Academic Technology Advisory Board.
read more
- Eric Weiskott, “Teaching with Collaborative Digital Textbooks,” Inside Higher Ed 14 June 2017
grants
- Undergraduate Research Fellow, Boston College, 2019
- Exploratory Technology Grant, Boston College, 2016
- MediaKron Special Project Grant, Boston College, 2015–16
undergraduate research assistants
- Celia Smithmier, 2019
- Francesca Williams, 2016
presentation
- with Madeline George, “Mapping Chaucer: A Collaborative Digital Textbook with MediaKron,” Excellence in Teaching Day poster session, Chestnut Hill, MA, May 2017
