Week 7: Early China retrospective; Pressbooks and Open Education

Check you have completed your end of week 6 assignments by the start of class on Tue.!

IMPORTANT: PASSWORD ACCESS TO PDFs:

Username and password can be found on the Canvas Homepage

Use the Pad for all your anonymous questions and concerns.

Tue Feb. 25: Early China in retrospect

We have covered a lot of ground in the past 6 weeks, and it is time to consolidate our knowledge about Early China’s magical creatures (and locations), before heading into a new historical phase. After the break, we will learn how the introduction of Buddhism influenced the Chinese world view, and conceptions of strange and uncanny experiences, but also how Buddhism was changed as a result.To prepare for this session: refresh your memory on the topics and primary sources we covered.

• Go back through the course materials from week 2 onwards.
  • • • • Some stood out, but likely you have forgotten others: refresh your memory, by going over your notes, the slides, and re-acquainting yourself with the primary sources and main ideas from the secondary studies.
        • For each session, jot down 2-3 ideas that you associate with it.
          • If you want to go into more detail, you can do this for each primary source (texts, objects,…).
• Read through the list of ideas you generated in the previous step: what are the big themes and topics that are starting to emerge? What are the connections you can draw between different materials?
  • • • • Note that this may be different for every student!
• Determine what you think the key points are a student should remember from what we covered in this course so far:
  • • • • This will serve as a touch stone for future weeks: having a solid understanding of Early China’s world view will allow us to track what changes, and what stays the same.

In class we will use small group work and various activities to come to a collective interpretation of Early China’s (up to 220CE) cultural history of the strange.

Thu. Feb. 27: Pressbooks, and Open Education Resources

Did you know that with this class you are part of the Open Education Resources (OER)movement? Your end of semester project will not disappear into a (digital or physical) drawer to gather dust, before hitting the shredder a few years later. Instead, it will live on in the second edition of the China’s Magical Creatures textbook for future students to learn, and the work with.

In this session we have two special guests: Tim Clarke (Digital Learning) and Tina Hertel (Director of Trexler Library) to lead a conversation about OER and giving you some insights in Pressbooks, the format we use for our project.

To prepare for the conversation, please read the following:

• Kaitlyn Vitez, Open 101: An Action Plan for Affordable Textbooks. Student PIRGS, Jan. 25, 2018.  https://studentpirgs.org/2018/01/25/open-101-action-plan-affordable-textbooks/
  • • • Read and annotate the PDF or take notes: what is surprising? do you agree with the points made? What is your experience with learning materials (including, but not limited to textbooks)?
• “What Open Education Taught Me: A Keene State College undergraduate reflects on her experiences with Open Education”
  • • • A student’s point of view on participating in courses with OER texts, and with putting your work out there. What’s your view?
• The student’s perspective on writing the first edition of the textbook: https://open.muhlenberg.pub/chinasmagicalcreatures/front-matter/the-students-perspective/
• “Against “Product-Based Learning”: Open Texts are Never Finished”
  • • • A professor’s experience with guiding students through the creation of a textbook: it’s not all perfect, and that’s ok.