Digital Florilegium A High-Tech Twist on an Ancient Reading Practice

Abstract

This lesson explains an approach to engaging students in close reading of challenging texts. It introduces florilegium, an ancient reading practice utilized by copyists in medieval European monasteries. This lesson’s approach to florilegium took a digital twist: rather than hand-writing snippets of text into a copybook as medieval monks might, we used a Google form to capture the whole class’s snippets from a shared reading. These text snippets became a shared digital repository that students could use to engage the text in a variety of interactive, creative ways. In the instance described in this article, the students were graduate students taking an online Educational Technology course, but the practice is flexible and could be adapted for use in many different content areas and grade levels.