Event Title
Session B Lightning Talks - Teaching with Digital Collections: Witches, Vagabonds, Plots, and Plagues: Engaging First-Year Students with EEBO
Location
Library Seminar Room
Start Date
18-3-2016 1:00 PM
End Date
18-3-2016 2:00 PM
Description
Scholars of the early modern period often refer to Early English Books Online (EEBO) as game-changing for their own research, but they are much more hesitant about using this rich collection in undergraduate teaching. They fear that students may be intimidated with the unfamiliar script and language and may give up before even starting. This paper reports on a successful approach to engaging first-year students who have no special linguistic or subject background in primary research using EEBO. Working in consultation with the course professor, a librarian designed a fun and non-threatening 80-minute session for first-year students that introduced them to written and spoken English of the sixteenth-century and demystified the contents and search mechanisms of the EEBO database. The session served to make the students more comfortable using EEBO on their own, and indeed, their final papers made use of a wide variety of non-canonical texts discovered through EEBO. This approach is likely to be useful not only with EEBO-based assignments, but also with any kind of primary source project that immediately plunges novice students into an unfamiliar milieu.
Session B Lightning Talks - Teaching with Digital Collections: Witches, Vagabonds, Plots, and Plagues: Engaging First-Year Students with EEBO
Library Seminar Room
Scholars of the early modern period often refer to Early English Books Online (EEBO) as game-changing for their own research, but they are much more hesitant about using this rich collection in undergraduate teaching. They fear that students may be intimidated with the unfamiliar script and language and may give up before even starting. This paper reports on a successful approach to engaging first-year students who have no special linguistic or subject background in primary research using EEBO. Working in consultation with the course professor, a librarian designed a fun and non-threatening 80-minute session for first-year students that introduced them to written and spoken English of the sixteenth-century and demystified the contents and search mechanisms of the EEBO database. The session served to make the students more comfortable using EEBO on their own, and indeed, their final papers made use of a wide variety of non-canonical texts discovered through EEBO. This approach is likely to be useful not only with EEBO-based assignments, but also with any kind of primary source project that immediately plunges novice students into an unfamiliar milieu.