Net.Create Higher-Ed Activities

College Classroom Joint Reading Activity

Have a complex text students struggle to understand? This activity uses a co-reading activity to help individual students in a large classroom engage with 1 or 2 pages of unfamiliar text. Net.Create helps the whole class take their new familiarity with a short excerpt and combine that expertise into a whole-class generated set of interactions and notes that students can use as an entry point to independent reading of the whole text.

Co-Reading a Complex Source In A Large Lecture Classroom

This two-day activity sets students up to read a long historical source (primary or secondary) more effectively.

  • Day 1
    • Divide students into groups of 3-5 (3 in a fixed-seating lecture hall; 5 if you have tables).
    • Divide a long source that the students haven’t read yet into shorter excerpts and give each group 1 excerpt.
    • Guide students through entering nodes and edges.
    • End class with a discussion about betweenness and centrality as guides for helping identify and understand historical significance.
    • Give students a short reading from the source between days 1 and 2 (12-15 pages max)
  • Day 2
    • Divide students into the same groups, but give them a different excerpt.
    • Ask them to revise, correct, and add to their classmates’ entries for that set of pages.
    • End class with a discussion about networks as both note-taking and analysis tools for historians.

After both days, students leave class equipped with a historical framework they built–with all of the notes they took and Net.Create’s visualization of the interactions in the source you assigned–that serve as a reference while they read the remainder of the source.