ANGEL LMS @ U Manitoba
This term, we switched to Angel. Training was offered, but only to those in Manitoba; those of us who teach online, were left to sort things out for ourselves.
Right now, I have two major complaints – the length of time it takes for anything to load (seems to be very AJAX heavy, though I believe I’m right in thinking that that shouldn’t really be a problem), and the course discussion area tells me that I have one unread post, but when I click on that, it tells me it can’t find it! I hate feeling like a newb.
Oh, ok, a third complaint – if I post resources into Angel, and then later decide to delete said resource, the navigation tree keeps the deleted resource, and I start to get caught in nested loops of pages. Just like, in fact, old websites that relied on frame-based navigation, where you could navigate to a second frame-based site, and then back again, and so on, and so on, diminishing each window as you went…
I hated WebCT; I’m having doubts about Angel. At least I knew what was going on with Moodle.
On Comics
My parents rented a cottage once, when I was a kid. True confession time: I was a nerd. So I was really excited when I found some books in a back room. One of them was an Illustrated Classic. Of what, I don’t recall, but it helped whittle away the hours of what I recall as a particularly drizzly summer. I guess those are now called ‘graphic novels‘, snob appeal to raise them over my usual diet of Archies and Jugheads (…look, I took what I could get. It’s not like there’re any bookstores in this county!)
I’ve seen a couple of articles recently on the value of comics for fostering literacy (one of which is here). This stands to reason; don’t we all learn to read by first looking at the pictures, and only later graduate to all-text works? Even at University, many (if not all) Latin classes use the Cambridge books, where ‘Quintus hic puer est’ and the drawings make us feel like we really can learn the blasted language…
So comics are good for literacy, be that in English or in Latin. Where else are they turning up in academia?
Colleen has some fantastic comics for archaeological outreach. A few years ago, I remember reading about a fellow who made archaeological comics the focus of his dissertation (I would love to get my hands on a copy, if this rings any bells with anyone). And this morning I came across some comics regarding Roman History, which is what prompted this post in the first place. I’d appreciate links to any other examples, and feedback on their effectiveness.
