Published on 3 January 2017
As mentioned before, the cooperation with the students of the Masaryk University started due to the positive feedback to the lectures given within the introduction of our project at Czech universities. This is why in the winter semester of the academic year 2016/2017, we got involved in the course dedicated to information sources, which is intended for students in their second year of bachelor’s programmes. Within their exams, the students were to prepare multimedia profiles describing the stories of the original owners of the books that we catalogued during the project. Altogether, 19 profiles were created.
At the beginning of the academic year, Tomáš Foltýn, the principle project realizer, and Marcela Strouhalová, the project historian, went to Brno to show the students sample profiles, to inform them about our expectations for their outputs and to answer possible questions. We were available to the students during the semester and answered their questions. At the end of the semester, Nina Wančová and Tomáš Foltýn went to Brno again to assess the student’s works.
After the works were submitted, they were evaluated by the whole team of the Books Discovered Once Again project and the lecturer Martin Krčál from KISK. At the beginning of the meeting, Nina Wančová showed the students a model example of a multimedia profile – Infographics for the Women’s’ Manufacturing Society. Subsequently, we selected five best works whose authors then presented these to the other students and evaluated the tool they used to create them.
Overall, the students approached their tasks very responsibly. In the majority of cases, they found other sources of information and added some historical context to their works, making them richer and giving them another dimension. It was clear that the student’s work was not easy, because for many of the topics there was a lack of visual material that would lighten up the text and the students also had to consider authorship rights. The student got the maximum out of their topics and we hope that the work gave them something, too.
One of the tools frequently used by the students was Prezi, which allows creation of a dynamic presentation. Often, however, these were only moving slides with text. Timelines were also frequently used, for the creation of which the students used various tools. The timelines were mostly well prepared, some included rich visual material in addition to interesting information. Timelines are clear and really suitable for historical topics. Two groups of student prepared a video. Unfortunately, the potential of this medium was not fully utilized in these works, as in the majority of cases, these involved only text and photographs accompanied by background music and were too long. Several other groups used Piktochart o create clear infographics and in some cases, the result was really good. One of the groups created period newspaper.