My friend Jentery is featured in a recent UW Daily article on approaching reading from a digital perspective. It is interesting how the English dept. is incorporating digital humanities into their curriculum, especially if you remember your intro composition courses!

Photo by Steven Byeon.

UW English Ph.D. candidate Jentery Sayers, right, critiques a student project on the exploration of sound in electronic literature during his Designing Literature class at Cornish College of the Arts. Sayers’ ultimate goal for the class is to create a digital book with each student contributing an original work for a chapter.

Reading 2.0
By Sara Grimes
November 25, 2009

Jenterey Sayers can pin his growth as a teacher on one specific book.

Silence by John Cage is the work that inspired the English doctoral candidate to use collaborative teaching methods in his English 111 classroom. Sayers never comes to class prepared for a lengthy lecture anymore. Instead, he comes equipped with an open mind, ready to engage with students in an interactive setting.

“Cage says: ‘There is no such thing as silence. Something is always happening that makes a sound,’” Sayers said. “With those two sentences in mind, I’ve tried to listen to students more and talk at them less.”

With the advent of electronic books, or e-books, such collaborative teaching methods may become more the norm. Informatics professor Matt Saxton anticipates that more advanced e-book technologies will allow students to sift through and annotate the texts in a more thorough fashion. Some current Web tools, such as Zotero, allow students to annotate texts digitally. Saxton expects e-books to incorporate this type of technology and fuse the reading and writing experiences.

Professors often expect students to search through books to find particular themes and ideas and then incorporate them into a paper. Saxton argued that e-books will enhance students’ ability to fulfill these criteria.

http://dailyuw.com/2009/11/25/reading-20/

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