Click here to view data on the effectiveness of the CD-ROM for improving students’ grades
Description
We have created an interactive electronic book on CD-ROM to accompany the Introduction to Politics course. The course material centers around classical political texts, including Sophocles'Antigone, Plato's Apology and Crito, Aristotle's Politics, Melville's Billy Budd, Tocqueville's Democracy in America, the Declaration of Independence, and The Federalist Papers. The core of the electronic book is a detailed analysis of each of these major works and of the political issues that they raise. The analysis makes extensive use of hypertext, connecting issues and points throughout the course, demonstrating the implications of arguments. It also makes extensive use of graphics, video, sound and animation to demonstrate points and to clarify concepts. Students can navigate the book in a number of ways: following an analysis from beginning to end, going to particular topics from tables of contents, moving from a list of study topics to the places where those topics are addressed, or following links between material. The book includes the actual texts under discussion, and permits those texts to be accessed from anywhere in the commentary. Frequently, passages from the original source are highlighted for in-depth analysis. The book includes a large number of quiz questions, permitting a student to test his or her understanding of issues through true/false, multiple choice, or sometimes open-ended questions. The book demonstrates the effective use of hypertext and multimedia for clarifying difficult conceptual arguments and issues by working through arguments in stages that require the student's activity and by using examples and demonstrations that make issues plain.
The electronic text was developed at the Multimedia Teaching and Learning Center at The University of Texas at El Paso . It is available for purchase at the University Book Store and also available for use on campus at the Bell Hall Technology Center and at LACIT.
The electronic text is developed by Cesar
Torres and Robert Webking.
Menu
send questions or comments to rwebking@utep.edu