In the first unit for the Spring 2018 semester, “Dangerous Knowledge,” students were introduced to Kit Marlowe by embarking on a Scavenger Hunt that used content designed by the Fall 2017 Rogues as a starting point (the plural “rogues” has evolved into our class team name). As the unit progressed, students learned about early modern print culture before editing the Bibliography and our Excel collection of Ographies (a growing database of person names, place names, and titles that we are currently editing and will link to the works students have encoded). At the unit’s end, students combed the Encyclopedia for London locations and linked them to The Map of Early Modern London’s Agas Map.
The “Ographies” activities helped students learn how to perform intensive scholarly research and cite sources correctly, skills that would be critical when they built their Works exhibits in Unit 2. Students were frequently frustrated when they realized how much digital digging was required to find good information, and when their citations were marked “revise and resubmit.” When I designed this sequence of activities, I’d hoped that closing with the MoEML activity would be fun and take some of the sting out of our rigorous editing workshops – I think it did.
Sample Student Reflections
But I’ll let the students speak for themselves. At the end of each unit, students are required to write a metacognitive essay about how they met the learning objectives set out in the syllabus.
Move your cursor over the tiles below to read samples of the Spring 2018 Rogues’ reflections on Unit 1.
Kristen Abbott Bennett, 8 March 2018