Perusall: Building Community and Confidence in an Online Classroom through Annotation, Part 2

By Kendra Slayton (Continued from Part 1) Closing Distances In addition to helping students close the distance between the premodern and the modern, Perusall has been an invaluable tool for building a sense of community in my remote classroom. Students quickly begin to form comment chains, debating the meaning of… Continue reading

Perusall: Building Community and Confidence in an Online Classroom through Annotation, Part 1

By Kendra Slayton As a medievalist, I have always felt moved by Chaucer’s optimism in the General Prologue of the Canterbury Tales when he describes how into a inn came “nyne and twenty in a compaignye / Of sondry folk, by aventure yfalle / In felaweship” (“nine and twenty in… Continue reading

Attaining the Text?: Teaching Annotated Video Essays in the Multimodal Classroom

Writing in 1975, the French film theorist Raymond Bellour characterized film analysis as a writing activity “carr[ied] out in fear and trembling, threatened continually with dispossession of the object” (19). Much of this owed to the technological limitations that then made it all but impossible for critics and scholars (save the… Continue reading

Untouchable E-Books: Mulk Raj Anand, Modernism, and Technology

My English 1102 “Modernism: Technology and Communication” course last spring asked how people around the world communicated before the internet. Starting with the advent of the telegraph, we addressed written, oral, visual, electronic, and nonverbal forms of communication through the nineteen thirties. We began the course with Tom Standage’s The… Continue reading