Monthly Archives: July 2016

In 1999, I was teaching at the University of Minnesota, Crookston.  It was a great time to be there because it was *the* first laptop campus in the nation, aided by IBM.  Each student had a laptop issued to them, and we were all required to use the web and the laptop technology in class.

I was teaching literature there, and I was puzzled how to make the pedagogy fit with the technology, because just looking stuff up on the internet back then was silly (not a lot of content) and boring.  Instead, I had an idea to send students out into the community to capture the stories of the elders, transcribe them, and “frame” them as  a digital telling for the whole world to see.  We did so, we got the permission slips from each elder, and we crunched out HTML pages for each project. Mind you, there were no real website editors back then; this was handcoding.  The students struggled and made smart decisions about the stories to tell, dealing with quotes, how to represent the often heavy accent of the elders, and how  and when to incorporate photos and/or video.

So, if you want to see some old-time classroom work, look to Kairos!  That student project was highlighted there and is still “live” because of Kairos’ dedication to keeping their digital files alive.

http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/7.2/binder.html?sectiontwo/kelly/FRONT.HTM