Simonides: A Student-Centered Humanities Learning Tool
FAIN: HD-50461-08
New York University (New York, NY 10012-1019)
Robert Squillace (Project Director: April 2008 to December 2009)
The development of a collaborative e-portfolio software tool intended to support a liberal arts curriculum and built on the Sakai Open Source Portfolio platform.
The General Studies Program at New York University (NYU), an interdisciplinary two-year liberal arts program, seeks a Level II Start-up grant to finish a prototype and begin implementation of Simonides, a hybrid tool that combines the collaborative capabilities of blogs and wikis with the repository features of an e-portfolio. This tool will provide students with a flexible electronic palette for storing and annotating digital humanities materials from their coursework, as well as for building and sharing their own multimedia documents created with these materials. The Simonides project will re-center instructional technology on the educational experience of the individual student, making the way a student understands the connections between his or her work in the humanities the pedagogical focus. The result will be an instrument of dynamic learning that will embody the spirit of our liberal arts program: to give students a personal stake in the cultural traditions investigated by our curriculum.