Student Web Projects

December 11, 2007

As the Internet challenges traditional business models from book selling to music distribution, somehow there continues to be a sense that academic work can glide through all this mostly unchanged.. or with simply the addition of a few convenient search engines. I am betting that big changes are coming. I am particularly interested in the way student work will be transformed by the new platforms for knowledge. Instead of thinking in terms of a student needing to go through years of work in order to someday write something worthy of publication, I think we should encourage students to take part immediately in online discussions and knowledge dissemination.

This term I have two projects that I can point to as examples of the way the Internet can be used by students.

The first example is an honor's project completed by Ayse Adanali. It is a website that contains photos from her trip to Sierra Leone last summer, along with a brief description of what she saw there. Consider the difference between developing photos and showing them to a handful of professors.. and posting them on the Internet in a format that allows them to be accessed by people all over the world!

The second example is a blog written by Raad Fadaak over the course of this term. The blog reflects his work on an independent study on women and gender in the Middle East. I envision requiring all of the independent studies that I direct to involve a similar blog.. thus building up a public record of student writing and thought.. and allowing for a greater level of interaction with visual culture.