Over the Thanksgiving holiday, I made a small series of new handouts on the topic of source citation for my Composition class and, among them, attached a page of a sampling of cited sources from an older handout to the batch. As I looked over the sources, I realized that all of the samples were from the 90's...and I wondered: at what point do these examples become self-evidently outdated? While it's true that a good old source is still a good source, and that "dated" research is not a necessary condition for poor research, there will soon come a time -- if it hasn't come already -- when the post-Millenial generation will see EVERY reference that begins 19xx as foreign, alien and other. I wonder if we're there yet. And I wonder if I need to update my handout just to keep it contemporary and invisibly relevant to today's world.

I used to think that the handouts I made in preparation for a course were valuable because I would have them done -- and ready to pull out as preformulated tools for the next time I taught the class (and thereby also saving me prep time). But now I'm starting to realize that revising a handout is like revising an article: it not only improves the original, but also renews its pertinence to the mind. Working on these same handouts over and over again, refining them each time I utilize them, is a way to keep me integrated in the present class and in tune with the students' developmental process, rather than tethered to the content alone. I never want to become one of those crusty old professors who lecture off of even crustier yellowed notepaper. Updating (literally, bringing them up to date) handouts helps keep the teaching vital, even though it sounds like 'extra' work; running a class is a lot like composing a long essay and revision is a necessary part of the process.

This is why it may actually be a bad idea to, say, ask a workstudy student or a teaching assistant to update the handouts for you. A handout isn't just a matter of administrative work; it's a way of processing a body of knowledge. However, sharing a handout with an assistant or even a colleague in your department might allow you to catch things you've missed. They can function as editors do. Students often do this anyway -- I know that I've had students catch mistakes in handouts "live" in class, and I appreciate it, but I've forgotten to make the changes they recommended because I get so caught up in the moment that I neglect to jot down a note or memo.

One frequent update I have to make in my handouts is in page numbers that reference the course textbook. I often try, for example, to point students to the page in the book where I am getting a quiz question, by appending the page number to the question in the quiz itself. When I reformat the quiz, I have to remember to look up the new page numbers if the book has gone into a new edition.

Naturally, this is also one of the benefits of integrating electronic handouts into your curriculum. You can make updates and edits "on the fly" to keep a handout current at any given time. But I've found that sometimes this can lead to problems, because students will print out handouts to bring to class, and if I've made many changes, they will all have different handouts. It's important to mark the date of the update somewhere on the document when going this route.

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