Critical Reading – Teaching Hub

The Rise of ChatGPT Can Make Student Writing Better

March 8, 2023

The 5-speed gearshift pattern, which may indicate the metaphor for "shifting gears."

by Amy Dayton and Amber Buck, English On campuses across the US, faculty, administrators, and students alike are talking about ChatGPT. If you haven’t heard, ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence tool that mimics human conversation and writing using predictive text. It can expound on almost any topic, from climate change to literary criticism. It can write emails, sonnets, stories, and brochures. It can suggest revisions to specific sentences and phrases (such as resume bullet points). And it can write academic […]

Teaching how to do college: helping students read for learning

January 31, 2023

old desk with feather pen in an inkwell beside a tattered notebook.

Nathan Loewen, Department of Religious Studies Learning to read is a crucial skill for higher education. Student reading has changed due to the shift, and back, from going entirely online. When you order textbooks for your courses, are they mostly digital? (e.g. Access granted) Or, to make your course affordable and expose students to cutting-edge scholarship, do you forgo textbooks and post all your readings in Blackboard? When your students do research, are they using the Libraries e-book holdings or journal […]

Teach Your Students Active Reading: Assign Texts in Blackboard with Hypothesis

December 6, 2021

by Lauren Horn Griffin, Department of Religious Studies Your Blackboard course menu includes Hypothesis on your “build content” menu. Hypothesis works with files you add to your course. It also works with any website. Hypothesis is a teaching tool that allows you to have your students “show” how they are reading your course content. With the Hypothesis tool, anyone in the course may add annotations with text, images, websites, and LaTeX equations. Anyone in the course can reply to those […]

Discussing Readings with Hypothesis: Tips to Create Small Groups

August 4, 2021

by Nathan Loewen, A&S Faculty Technology Liaison Hypothesis is a tool in Blackboard that makes students’ reading active, visible, and social. It is quite easy to add a Hypothesis-enabled reading to a Blackboard course shell. Your students can then annotate, as well as read and reply to annotations posted by all other students in the course or section. All of this happens online. If you wish to break the class up into smaller cohorts to read and annotate in separate […]

Social Reading Supports Student Success (e.g., Hypothesis)

December 17, 2020

by Nathan Loewen, Department of Religious Studies Maintaining engagement and a sense of community is valuable no matter how strange and extenuated the conditions for teaching and learning. 24 UA courses used the new Hypothesis tool in Blackboard (found in your “build content” menu). Hypothesis allows teachers and learners to add a layer of commentary over PDF files and web pages. At UA in Fall 2020, 1004 students and 48 teachers made 11,863 annotations on 547 assignments. If you do […]

Engage Students with Socially Distant Annotation of Course Texts

June 25, 2020

by Nathan Loewen, Department of Religious Studies I hope that you and yours are keeping safe, healthy, and well this summer. With the University’s plan in place for Fall 2020, you might be taking more concrete steps in with your syllabus and course designs. Some of your planning might involve UA-supported online platforms and software. There are more than 200 faculty-written Teaching Hub blog posts, too, whose content you might adapt to your purposes. I wish to add to this list […]

Teaching Through Re-Reading

April 2, 2019

main web page view of mill marginalia online

by Albert D. Pionke, Department of English Although not specifically designed with the classroom in mind, Mill Marginalia Online offers instructors in philosophy, history, law, Classics, and English and European literature and culture the opportunity to incorporate Digital Humanities research results and methods into their courses. Each of these major subject areas is amply represented in nineteenth-century philosopher and liberal theorist John Stuart Mill’s personal library. Mill Marginalia Online seeks to digitize all of the handwritten marks and annotations found […]

Want to Help Students Annotate? Here’s a Hypothes.is

August 18, 2016

by Nathan Loewen, Department of Religious Studies How do you annotate your texts? How do you think your students annotate their texts? Among the likely answers to the former include writing marginalia and underlining with a pen or pencil. Some may answer the latter the same way. In any case, the typical method for doing close reading involves interacting with hard-copy. The situation changes when it comes to electronic formats such as PDF files and web pages. I use Blackboard to host a lot […]

Voyant Tools for Basic Text Analysis

February 24, 2016

by Jessica Porter, Office of Educational Technology (eTech) Whether you teach literature, history, or another text-heavy course, your students may benefit from the use of digital tools that enable them to dig deeper into a text and visualize its patterns and trends. Voyant Tools offers a suite of web-based tools that allow you to upload texts and perform basic text mining functions. The most popular item in the Voyant toolkit is Cirrus, a word cloud generator that displays words according to their frequency in a given text. The words that appear most often are […]

Listen: Critical Reading is a Foundational College Skill

February 22, 2016

Critical reading is a central, foundational college skill, essential to all courses. In this interview with Nathan Loewen, Catherine Roach talks about teaching critical reading and how she pushes students to “ruminate” and become better readers and thinkers. Some of the questions asked: In what classes do you emphasize this skill? How do you explain critical reading to your students? How do you teach students to read critically and make connections across texts? What challenges do you encounter while teaching critical reading […]

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Category: Critical Reading