Mapping Chaucer/Middle English Alliterative Poetry
English Professor Eric Weiskott used MediaKron in two undergraduate seminars in medieval English poetry to collaboratively build the textbooks for the courses. He describes his approach in an article in Inside Higher Ed:
The idea is to build an intellectual resource and then invite students to contribute. In the first half of the semester, I use the MediaKron website as a textbook to convey basic information about the subject matter. In the second half of the semester, students break up into teams of three or four, take on specialized roles, and research, write, design, and publish new pages on the site.
Read full article: “Teaching With Collaborative Digital Textbooks“
View sites:
Roma: Caput Mundi
Stephanie Leone’s interactive pedagogical tool, Roma: Caput Mundi is designed to help students visualize the significant monuments of Rome – churches, houses, villas, palaces, fountains, streets, ancient buildings and others – in their original settings between 1400 and 1700. Originally built in 2005, the project entered a new phase in 2015 when it was migrated to MediaKron, making it possible for her art history students to collaborate with her to grow the collection. The new site is now public in its new format, featuring a new georectified version of the original 1676 Falda map and contributions from students in her last two Italian Baroque Art courses.
View the Roma: Caput Mundi site
Reading Narrative Journalism
English professor Chris Wilson developed a public multimedia textbook to introduce students to the genre of “narrative journalism” — journalistic texts that tell a story. The site includes five chapters that help students develop critical methods for reading the varied traditions of journalisticnarrativenonfiction written in the U.S. over the last half-century, and it also includes resources for teachers using the textbook in the classes.
Professor Wilson makes extensive use of the annotation feature to enhance the reading experience with multimedia footnotes and a glossary of key terms that appear alongside the main text for easy reference.
View the Reading Narrative Journalism site
Podcasting the Ottomans
Prof. Dana Sajdi had her Podcasting the Ottomans(HIST2155) class create a MediaKron site investigating the material culture of specific objects from the Ottoman Empire.
- View Site: Stories Ottoman Objects Tell
- About the project
Violence Against LGBTQ People of Color in Boston
As part of her Fall 2017 “Understanding Race, Gender, and Violence” course (part of the Boston College Core Renewal initiative), professor Lauren Diamond-Brown invited one group of her students to create a digital history of violence against the LGBTQ+ community in Boston, in partnerships with the Hispanic Black Gay Coalition of Boston. With a specific focus on the experience of people of color,the students worked to identify incidents in the last 50 years and then shared the results in a public MediaKron site meant to help raise awareness of this overlooked part of Boston’s history. The students organized the site with a timeline, a map, and list of incidents in order to provide visitors several ways to understand the topic.
Visit the Violence Against LGBTQ People site
The Elizabeth Capell Cookbook
Marie Pellissier, a senior history major, used MediaKron to publish a senior honors thesis that explores seventeenth-century women’s literacy by studying a cookbook manuscript from the Burns Library at Boston College. Her site includes both her scholarly work and digitized versions of the primary material she is writing about (manuscript images and transcripts), along with interpretive material such as links to a visual glossary of terms and videos of herself cooking recipes from the cookbook.
View project: More Than A Kitchen Aid: The Elizabeth Capell Cookbook
MediaKron Demo Site
This site provides some basic examples of the various MediaKron content and their appearance options. View the demo site