This week was less active than the three of us - Dr. Snyder, Stephen, and I - expected (i.e., less active for me and Stephen and busier for Dr. Snyder) because there was a campus-wide issue with UCF Webcourses enrollments, so Stephen and I are still waiting for our enrollments into the classes we will be helping with to be confirmed. This week, we were planning to familiarize ourselves with our respective classes’ layouts, deadlines, and prepare ourselves for the upcoming tutoring requests, but unfortunately, we could not do so because of the issues with Canvas - the learning management system behind UCF Webcourses. Dr. Snyder is in contact with the support team and is trying to enroll us as soon as possible.
On the bright side, we could dedicate more time to content creation, so I continued developing the Sutori page I started working on last week. My first draft received positive feedback from both Dr. Snyder and Stephen: Stephen found the quizzes to be creative, and Dr. Snyder especially appreciated the use of media and colors. Their response encouraged me, and I am trying to incorporate more of the elements they deemed helpful.
Since my Sutori “story” is focused on historical sources, I also attempted to address the changing status of a source. For a general definition, I relied on A Pocket Guide to Writing in History by Mary Lynn Rampolla, but I also wanted to illustrate it with specific examples. Because I try to center all the page’s examples around one theme - the American Civil War - so that students can also make connections between multiple examples, I looked for the sources related to the American Civil War. Although this topic is extremely rich in evidence and scholarship dedicated to it, I struggled to find a clear example, so I resorted to a different period in history. I temporarily created the timeline that you can see above and moved on to another section, but I plan to return to it once I find an appropriate couple of sources. On Sutori, one can also leave comments under each section, so I may even leave a note asking students to propose their own example.
On the side note, my final research paper for Patricia Farless’s AMH 3560 Women, Law, and Society in American History focused on General Benjamin Butler’s “Women’s Order,” and Professor Farless suggested to use my paper as a foundation and present my research at the next year’s Florida Conference of Historians. Initially, I was not very sure if I could develop that paper into a bigger work. However, this week, as I was searching for primary source examples for the Sutori “story,” for which I used the American Civil War as an accessible theme, I have stumbled upon so many interesting sources related to my argument that I felt inspired to try presenting it. I decided to share this because this story is one example of how different academic experiences can be so instrumental to one another.