NUTSHELL NOTES "Teaching tips in a nutshell" - The University of Colorado at Denver's One-page Newsletter for Teaching Excellence

There are plenty of uses for e-mail lists. (A) Keeping yourself informed—you can often find places where your students will be excited, stimulated, and instructed. (B) Introducing your graduate students to the buzzing world of discourse in an important field—writing messages to such a list is a good way for grad students to begin to "speak up" in scholarly conversation, make relatively non-toxic mistakes, get yelled at, learn from those mistakes, and try again. (C) Showing undergraduates the excitement of discourse—they can listen in on the ongoing conversations of more senior scholars and begin to be aware of current issues .

Learning to manage e-mail relations with students is much like learning, as a junior instructor, how to manage relations with live students. The challenge comes when the new medium seems to shift the balance toward informality, intimacy, and play. Luckily, it is easy to ignore the inappropriate message, and your students will soon enough get a sense of how often you can be expected to respond, at what hours, and in what tone.

If you require students to have accounts and participate, you can then think of ways to transfer some discussion from the classroom to the e-mail list. This can be particularly useful in very large courses where discussion in the classroom is hard to begin and sustain.

Several faculty have found it useful to require students to submit written work to be read by the whole class, designing such exercises into the term schedule. Written exercises that respond to other students' writing are particularly valuable. In this way, the act of "writing a paper" becomes a real exercise in communicating with one's peers. If a respondent misreads a student's paper, the author of the original paper then has a precious new motivation for improving his or her work—to get through to a real live audience. The teacher in this situation becomes a collaborator, not a judge.

Bringing some discussions onto the network makes it possible to link different classrooms of students. If a Shakespeare literature course and a drama course were going on simultaneously, those two groups of students could be reading similar material and discussing it by e-mail.

Instructors with TA's can use e-mail for management and coordination. Each TA in a large course could have his/her own list for contact with students; but there should also be one large list common to the course. The senior instructor can monitor the list, see the most frequently asked questions, and adjust plans for spending class time accordingly.

There are thousands of discussion lists all over the world, covering a myriad of topics. Some are of quite high quality and interest. One of author Jim O' Donnell's favorites is CLASSICS, MEDTEXTL (medieval literary/textual studies). For Renaissance students, there's FICINO, for French literature BALZAC-L; there are many history lists. There's a list associated with the ongoing on-line collection of ancient and medieval texts dealing with music and music theory run by Thomas Mathiesen at Indiana. Explore the options!

*Because I'm lazy on a foggy day, for the first time I decided to largely steal a Nutshell Note from the World Wide Web rather than write one from scratch. I can morally justify this through the excuse I'm demonstrating the value of the net and web—the theme of this issue!

This is the first Nutshell Note with an assignment! To learn a lot from the professor whom I stole this from, visit http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/jod/jod.html, and look at New Tools for Teaching. Are you able to provide your students with resources comparable to those in the courses of this Professor of Classics? Now, if you've read this small print, turn over this page to learn how you can win a prize.