Thanks, Zotero!
Via @Zotero we learn that Sean Takats, assistant professor of history at George Mason University, will be teaching with Zotero groups in his upcoming senior seminar course on the French Revolution. Prof. Stakats Takats provides a very interesting description of what he plans to do and why:
With their unprecedented collaborative functionality, Zotero groups promise to transform the way that instructors and students interact with sources, particularly in research-intensive classes. Although the Zotero groups functionality is already well-established – there are currently over 3200 public and private groups active at zotero.org – over the course of the semester I fully expect to discover areas where we could add or improve features, and I also look forward to refining how best to integrate Zotero into what passes for my pedagogy…
One of the things I like about this plan is that it requires students to show their work as the semester moves forward: as they add items to their research bibliography, the instructor and the other students are able to watch their progress. As I wrote yesterday, I believe there’s great value in having students show their work-in-progress to each other.
Because I realize that many readers might have only heard of Zotero without quite knowing what all the fuss is about, I’ve embedded this brief introductory video:
What possibilities do you see for using Zotero and Zotero groups in your courses?
Alternately, is your campus wired enough (and your students digitally savvy enough) to adopt such a teaching method?
Comments
1. Sean Takats - August 11, 2009 at 03:04 pm
Who is this Professor Stakats, anyway?
2. Dave Lester - August 11, 2009 at 03:44 pm
Looking forward to more posts about teaching with Zotero groups. Lots of possibilities.
3. George Williams - August 11, 2009 at 03:51 pm
D'oh! Sorry about that; I've corrected the spelling.
Thanks for writing up your plans! I look forward to reading more.
4. Nate Kogan - August 11, 2009 at 10:36 pm
Nice post re: Zotero. I see similar functionality for Diigo, though my audience is high school students rather that undergraduates or graduate students. See "'This topic is impossible!': Social Media as Research Panacea? (Part II)".
Nevertheless, I see the ability to make others' research transparent to be a really powerful teaching tool. Thanks for your post.
5. Adeline Koh - September 18, 2009 at 09:30 pm
Hi all. Thanks for the post. It's very helpful to see how other faculty have been using zotero groups in their teaching.
I have also been using zotero groups this semester in a class called Modernism and Empire, a senior-level English literature class at the National University of Singapore. For the group, please see: https://www.zotero.org/groups/modernism_and_empire. My students have been asked to create an annotated bibliography for their presentations based on the primary text they are using, and they are given a separate grade for this bibliography. So far things are going rather smoothly, although students have complained about some glitches in zotero.
Any comments on how to improve this assignment would be very welcome!
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