David Hogsette, Ph.D.
Associate Professor

Department: English
School: Arts and Sciences
Campus: Old Westbury

Member of NYIT Since: 1996

David Hogsette has a knack for meshing technology and literature.

Hogsette, associate professor of English and Writing Program coordinator at the Old Westbury campus, has spent more than a decade working to integrate technology into his department's composition course curriculum. He teaches up to six different online writing and literature courses fully in Blackboard and recently designed a new way to deliver online course materials that encourages student interactivity. His efforts were recognized at this year's Convocation, where he earned a 2011 Presidential Technology Award.

"Instead of organizing the course by tool or resource, I organized the course by unit," Hogsette explains. "The student clicks on a unit folder and then finds everything needed to complete various readings and tasks for that unit."

Each unit has objectives, lecture materials/readings, literary readings, critical reading, discussion activity with a discussion board link, and a journal entry SafeAssign submission link (for writing a response to the critical reading assignment and submitting to a database that checks for plagiarism).

"My students loved the new course design," Hogsette says. "Many commented on how much easier it was to find materials and complete their tasks. Others commented on how much they liked working sequentially through the weekly units."

Hogsette, who published the books, E-mails to a Young Seeker: Exchanges in Mere Christianity (2011) and Writing That Makes Sense: Critical Thinking in College Composition (2009), is testing an online environment called Safari Live, in which students give oral PowerPoint presentations to each other via videoconferencing.

"The students serve as audience members for each other, and they will write up evaluations of each other's presentations," Hogsette says. "I'm hoping this will be an effective way for online courses to incorporate oral presentations, since giving presentations is a requirement for the new core seminars."

Finding inspiration from technology is just one of Hogsette's pursuits. His home and heart extend far beyond his roots in New York-to the other side of the world, China.

He has lived out his passion for China not only by teaching, but also through extensive travel and volunteer work. What got him hooked? In 2008, he spent a semester teaching at NYIT's campus in Nanjing.

"Most of the students I encountered in Nanjing are truly amazing individuals," Hogsette says. "They are accepting a very difficult challenge-taking NYIT courses taught totally in English. I was constantly impressed by their tenacity and perseverance."

Hogsette returned to China in July 2009 to spend two weeks volunteering at a summer camp for orphans in Kunming through a Christian organization called Bring Me Hope.

"While teaching at NYIT's Nanjing campus, I developed a love for the people and the country, and discovered this organization," says Hogsette, who documented his China experience by blogging at kingpitachinaquest.blogspot.com. "I'm divorced and never had kids, so I thought this would be a great way to contribute to the lives of children."

In summer 2010, he served as visiting volunteer professor at Yanbian University of Science and Technology in Yanji, China, where he taught British poetry, college writing, and conversational English. He blogged about his experience at Chinaexcursion.com and posted pictures in a picasa album.

Hogsette is part Renaissance man, as well. Even when on the road, he maintains perennial passions such as gothic and fantasy literature, martial arts training (he taught classes for the karate club on the Nanjing campus), and playing the electric guitar (he also jammed with a punk band while in Nanjing.) And he recently checked another personal goal off his bucket list-taking a hiking trip to Shangri-la, including the Yunnan Province and the cities of Lijiang and Zhongdian.

"The best part of my experience was living within the culture and spending time with different Chinese people," Hogsette says. "It is one thing to tour a country, and it is something entirely different to live in a country."