Educators today teach in a range of formats, from traditional
face-to-face courses to Web-assisted courses in physical classrooms to
entirely online courses in which the teacher and students never meet in
person. The pressure to integrate teaching with information technology
is strong, and more and more educational institutions are offering
blended courses and distance-education learning options.The essays in
this collection illuminate the realities of teaching language and
literature courses online. Contributors present snapshots of their
experiences with online pedagogies, realizing that, just as this year's
technology writes over last year's, the approaches and teaching tools
they have pioneered will also be obscured by future innovations. At the
same time, the volume describes models that first-time teachers of
online courses will find useful and provides extensive insights into
online education for those who are experienced in teaching blended and
open-source courses.The volume begins with an overview of online
education in the fields of literature and language and then offers case
studies of particular technologies used in specific courses. Subjects
extend from Old English and ancient world literature to Shakespeare and
modern poetry, and languages include Aymara, Chinese, English as a
second language, French, German, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish.
Contributors describe using multimedia Web sites, cyberplay and gaming,
bulletin boards, chat rooms, blogs, wikis, natural language processing,
podcasting, course management systems, annotated electronic editions,
text-analysis tools, and open-source applications. They show that online
pedagogies often have surprising capabilities--such as transforming a
Web-based environment into an intimate social community spanning
institutions and oceans, saving endangered languages, and rescuing
isolated communities and individuals who have no other educational
lifeline.
