PEDAGOGICAL OBJECTIVE
Professor Cobham-Sander’s goal was for students in the Digital Africas course to:
- strengthen their critical skills as users of social media,
- reflect on how African writers are utilizing digital forms of communication, and
- consider how shifts in writing technologies lead to shifts in genre.
ACADEMIC TECHNOLOGY TOOL
Wordpress is a platform, hosted by Amherst, to create blogs for courses and academic projects.
Featured Faculty:
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Rhonda Cobham-Sander
Description
During the Fall semester of 2019, the course Digital Africas maintained a private blog where all students posted every week. Professor Cobham Sander provided some structure with assignments and prompts that asked students to reflect on a particular reading, or share an image or article they found elsewhere. However, students also posted about ideas they generated on their own, and they commented on each other’s posts, online and in class.
Students used hyperlinks, tags, and categories to create a variety of pathways for readers to explore the blog.
This type of blogging project encourages students to become creators, and not just consumers, of digital content, and connect their learning with the wider world. The private nature of this blog gave the students space to experiment in safety, and to maintain an internal conversation with their class. This was the fourth iteration of this course taught by Cobham-Sander.
Campus Partners
- Writing Center staff worked with previous iterations of this class to think about how writing for a blog differs from traditional academic writing.
- Research and Instruction Librarians led a workshop to help students use and critique images in the social media posts they wrote and read.
How to...
Published Spring 2020 by Academic Technology Services