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.