Spotlights

Links

Newsletter Archive

Help Guides & Documentation

Having the work that students do in class have meaning beyond the end of a course is a goal many faculty members have. With the help of LTS the student work from my Fall 06 course entitled The City: Theory and Methods, lives on at the website www.citysection.org, where it is an informative and hopefully thought-provoking tool accessible over the web to anyone. This site features 350+ pages of research and analysis on the urban and suburban environments of Boston.

The City, a fourth year course in the five-year program, is composed of a series of six short assignments, each sampling the theories and methods used by different disciplines in studying the city. My initial idea was to have students prepare presentation boards of their work for a small exhibition, as is common in architecture courses. LTS suggested creating a course website that students would gradually build over the course of the semester, adding each assignment as it was due. With the addition of student Sandro Carella, an experienced web developer, to the team, the three of us collaborated on conceptualizing and building the CitySection site.

The site is composed of 45 student pages, one for each student in the course. Each student page has links to the work for each of the six assignments. Overview pages guide site visitors to geographical locations in Boston and allow visitors to move quickly from the work of one student to the next.

The CitySection site, now that it is finished, includes an impressive amount of high-quality work that is largely original field research done by students. My job as professor was to pose questions and guide research—students provided the answers. The fact that throughout the semester students in the class had access to the work of all of the other students in the class via the website certainly improved the overall quality of the work. Students collaborated constantly, both on the content of their research and in the mechanics of the site technologies.

Difficulties with the CitySection project included my own limited abilities with website construction, my struggles in adapting the assignments to the CitySection site as a medium, and the students’ difficulties with engaging the construction of their web pages and links (although for most students this was no problem). The project also took on a life of its own, expanding beyond the original conception of six assignments to include iMovies and podcasts that students made of their research areas.

Together with LTS I ran student surveys at the middle and end of the course, gauging students’ views on the course content, the CitySection site, and the interrelations of the two. We also plan to survey the students in the late spring, near the end of the urban design studio course for which The City is a pre-requisite. The surveys are available on the CitySection site.

The CitySection project has larger pedagogical goals beyond the education of the students last fall, and these are detailed on the site. Prime among them is the presentation of all of the course materials, including the syllabus, reading list, course assignments, technical information on the site, and student surveys, in addition to the student work, with the hope that faculty elsewhere may find aspects of the CitySection project applicable to their own teaching and research.