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In an undergraduate course on Romantic period literature in spring 97, EN405, I decided to use the archive as research tool only, in addition to a lengthy bibliography of Web resources for learning, research, and interactive exploration on Romanticism, 19th-century history, maps, listservs, and so forth. I made this choice in part because of the large size of the class, another determinant factor in Web project design, but one which I now see should not have deterred me from designing the course around my Web site. I want to take this opportunity to think about why using the Web as a resouce guide resulted in missed opportunities and a temporary failure of the Bluestocking Archive project.
I decided to teach the course as a standard lecture and discussion course based on an anthology with supplementation from the Web with texts not included in the course book. However, because I did not provide class instruction on how to use the Web, those students not yet conversant with internet use resisted learning how to do so on their own time (mostly out of fear of the new, but also out of time deficit) and in the end never engaged this part of the course. These students prepared their oral presentations on an author or poet, as well as their research papers, using hard copy materials from the library stacks only. Those students already familiar with the Web were able to prepare their oral presentations using Web materials, but because they found this easier to do than using library materials, their presentations were extremely unbalanced and based on whatever they were able to find on the Web.
This combination of resistance (the difficulty technology imposes) and fudging (the facility it brings) contributed to a temporary death of the Bluestocking Archive. I was unable to think my way out of the tangle the course had brought to the project and to its goals. Although the students' term research papers were happier combinations of Web and library materials, they still fell short of what I had hoped students could accomplish with very little guidance from me. I am convinced now that this was because the resources I provided students with superceded the Bluestocking Archive for them; in fact, they visited the Web site very little throughout the semester. When I asked students to contribute one short text to the Web site, only a handful of students were interested in doing so (this was not a requirement of the course), and even fewer actually did so.
Furthermore, because I was not thinking of the Web site as central to the course, there were many missed opportunities for constructivism. I remember in particular an extremely interesting oral presentation on slavery in which the student had discovered some fascinating Web sites on the subject. But because of the setup of the course, she had to print the sites out and use them as hard copy. Not only did I fail to see the potential for this presentation as a page off the archive site at the time, but students reacted to what she had done as if she had simply read a book and was reporting someone else's research. I missed the chance to feed their excitement, but more importantly, I failed to translate her own excitement into a constructive interaction with the Web site. I believe that had I done so, many more of the presentations would have proved equally stimulating and educative. (back)Copyright © Michael Eberle-Sinatra 1998-2002 - All rights reserved