Intensive assignments

Intensive AssignmentsStimulate innovative and creative education by making your students curators of Inventing Europe tours or exhibitions. By making them responsible for their own digital tours, and/or exhibitions, your students learn a complete set of academic skills combined with a full understanding of the content of your course.

The intensive assignments are a unique opportunity to provide your students with a coherent focus throughout your course, building up to the final course assessment. Teachers often make the below proposed assignments their major or sole assessment. The assignments correspond with 1,5-2 ECTS for Bachelor courses and 3 ECTS for Master courses.

MyEurope Instruction manual

 

Tour assignment

Learning objectives:

  • Students learn to construct, and engage critically with, digital heritage environments.  They explore the relations and distinctions between digital and physical environments, engage with questions of access and authority, and develop online presentation skills. 
  • Students learn to write effectively for the web. They learn to distinguish ‘web-style’ from other writing styles, and explore its uses and limits.
  • Students enhance their creative and innovative skills. They are encouraged to look differently at objects, generate new connections and develop new historical questions.
  • Students engage with the web in an academic way. This includes: contextualizing online objects and relating them to academic research and publications, developing critical understanding of metadata formats, understanding copyright issues, and engaging in digital source criticism.

Assignment suggestion:
Students create their own tour, individually or in groups. A tour consists of six stories with six objects and a general part with an introduction that brings all stories and objects together, centering around one theme. Students get a number of assignments in which they work towards an end result: the completed tour.

Assignment Part 1:
The Object contextualization assignment - Students select an object, perform critical audiovisual source reflection, learn about metadata, copyrights, and write a reflection on the object within the context asked by the teacher. Students select a topic for their end tour from a list provided by their teacher. Ideally students select an object that immediately relates to the topic of their tour.

Tip  intensive assignments on use Europeana data

 

 

Assignment Part 2:
The Writing a researched web story assignment – Students create a web story around the object selected for Assignment Part 1.

Assignment Part 3:
The Overall Tour Framework assignment – Students create the basis for their tour by selecting 6 objects, find the metadata, ask critical questions to their objects, find and read relevant literature, create a tour title, 50-word tour introduction and create a one-sentence key statement for each story they will be writing. The key sentences must clearly show the red line of the tour stories within the context of the tour. For this, students can use the Tour Input Form (see optional study material) or the “Create your tour” function within the interactive MyEurope environment on this website. Students will have to account for the literature read for the course, and the various tours on www.inventingeurope.eu.

 

 

Assignment Part 4:
Students finish and hand in their tours. If they created their tours on MyEurope, then students can export their tours as PDF and send them to the teacher.

 

 

 

Teacher material

Lessonplan Tour assignment outline
Tool Prezi on Using Sources: (Audio-visual) artefacts and their contextualization
PowerPoint on How to Write for the Web 
Tool Prezi on The Virtual Exhibit: How to create a tour? 


Student material

Inventing Europe Tour Input Form: Word, PDF
MyEurope
Manual: MyEurope
Manual: How to Create a Tour
Manual: How to Write an Academic Story for the Web
Manual: How to Contextualize an Object
The Object of History Guide
Cultural Heritage Management course literature, Bulgaria
Background reading Schot & Scranton eds., ‘Making Europe: Technology and Transformations, 1850-2000’. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013-2016.
Lecture Johan Schot ‘How to Write European History on the Web’ 
Lecture Alec Badenoch ‘How to Contextualize Museum Collections in an European and Transnational Context’

 

Exhibition assignment

Learning objectives:

  • Students learn to construct, and engage critically with, digital heritage environments.  They explore the relations and distinctions between digital and physical environments, engage with questions of access and authority, and develop  online presentation skills. 
  • Students learn to write effectively for the web. they learn to distinguish ‘web-style’ from other writing styles, and explore its uses and limits.
  • Students enhance their creative and innovative skills. They are encouraged to look differently at objects, generate new connections and develop new historical questions.
  • Students engage with the web in an academic way. This includes: contextualizing online objects and relating them to academic research and publications, developing critical understanding of metadata formats, understanding copyright issues, and engaging in digital source criticism.

Assignment suggestion:
This assignment is an extension of the above Tour Assignment and could be seen as Part 0 or Part 5. By adding this Part your students are encouraged to create an exhibition in the style of Inventing Europe, creating cohesion amongst their tours. (For an example of an exhibition please see:  https://www.inventingeurope.eu/exhibition/daily-lives). 

Assignment Part 0 or Part 5:
The different tours all need to speak to the theme of the exhibition in a coherent manner, together covering a variety of aspects of the exhibition.  Required are a theme, a title, and a 25-word description. The Assignment outline offers different approaches for adding this assignment as Part 0 or Part 5 to your course.

Teacher Material

Exhibition assignment outline


Student Material

Manual: How to Create a Digital Exhibition