Professors Use Google Earth to Teach Literature
This week we discovered a project called Google Lit Trips that is a hugely exciting new way teachers and professors across all levels can collaborate and help students read literature in new ways. The project merges the study of classic literary pieces with Google Earth, focusing on those novels that feature journeys and long travels, and allowing students to map the areas of the world that characters in the books traversed, the historical significance of various areas and events during the course of the novel, and make notes and collaborate with classmates to discover how much history and location plays a role in literature.
The project has expanded into other areas, with professors and teachers launching similar sites where the focus is on other kinds of literature. In addition, the Google Lit Trip experiment has expanded, with a large number of contributions at a variety of learning levels, from K-5 teachers to college students and professors. In higher ed instances, the experience becomes even more interactive, and students can be integrally involved in creating the Lit Trip.
In one example, Professor Tobias Boes at the University of Notre Dame uses Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks as the point of study, and breaks his classroom into four groups. Each group is assigned tasks to either create KLM markups for specific locations mentioned in the novel or of presenting relevant background information in geospatial format. As the professor notes, the students learned a wide variety of great lessons from this exercise beyond simply absorbing and studying the text of the novel.
"The goal of this exercise, and of the class as a whole, was to show that literature can act as a kind of map and has a profound effect on the ways in which a culture imagines its place in the known world, " Boes writes. " A secondary goal of the Lit Trip assignment was to raise student awareness of intellectual copyright issues; all quotations required proper citation and all images had to be either in the public domain or had to undergo prior copyright clearance."
Google Lit Trip is a great example of how technology can play a role in significantly enhancing the classroom experience and the education of students even in liberal arts fields. Take a look at the Google Lit Trip home page for more information and to see what teachers and professors all over the country have contributed so far.
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Mike wrote on 01/11/10 5:00 PM
@JeromeThanks for the comment. I've been following the Google Lit Trip project closely, and will continue to do so in the coming months.
Combining literature with a more interactive view of geography and history will allow students to learn more effectively. It is something I wish my teachers had implemented while I was in school!