Going Digital: Rapid Integration of Multiple Approaches to Humanities Technology
in a Large Undergraduate Course
Elizabeth Losh
University of California, Irvine
Why Speed Matters: Teaching ‘The Humanities’ or ‘Literacy’?
Emile Durkheim once argued that education in the humanities could no longer answer ‘to
the legitimate needs of the modern world’ because it presupposed timelessness in human
experience and universality in human values. Despite accusations of ‘radical relativism’
aimed at the humanities during the culture wars of the late twentieth century, Durkheim’s
criticism continues to be relevant. University rhetoric about the great texts of Western
civilisation still emphasises the inculcation in undergraduates of eternal principles, often
in contrast to education in the sciences and social sciences where truth is constantly
subject to review and revision. Literacy, however, is explicitly conceived of as a
historical phenomenon that is contingent on innovations in technology and dependent on
changing script-forms, ciphers, and decoding processes. These two epistemologies have
fundamentally different timelines: introductions to the humanities generally emphasise a
lifetime commitment to the gradual acquisition of cultural capital, while literacy training
assumes an immediate crisis that requires a rapid remediation of skills. The very speed at
which humanities programs ‘go digital’ has implications for whether literacy training
stays in the humanities or moves into other schools, disciplines, and academic units.
Whether hypertext, as the product of the latest scriptological revolution, makes
the contrast between teaching literacy and teaching the humanities more marked or more
muted has yet to be seen. But educational policymakers now have an opportunity to
seriously integrate literacy issues into web-based humanities instruction if they act
quickly and consider multiple approaches in the transformation of the current
pedagogical culture. New hybrid genres in hypertext and hypermedia can be further
developed and funded for educational applications. Perhaps it would even be possible to
reverse the trend that consolidates traditional boundaries between research and teaching
now in ‘real’ bricks-and-mortar universities and projects them into the ‘virtual’
universities of the near future where text encoding projects for elite groups of scholars are
still separated from distance learning for the masses. But to do this will require
imagination and independence from an influential, but outdated misperception of the
wider influence of technology on corporate culture, one that has materialised in a recent
monograph ‘Improving Learning & Reducing Costs: Redesigning Large-Enrollment
Courses’ from the Pew Learning and Technology Program. The following analysis offers
one prototype that uses new genres of electronic text to challenge existing paradigms for
educational work.
Literacy education assumes that reading and writing are interrelated activities.
Since hypertext theory has adopted elements of poststructuralism that foreground
assertions that reading and writing are inseparable and even primary forms of discourse,
its theoretical apparatus is actually remarkably well-suited to pedagogical praxis. In this
imagining of hypertext, electronic writing represents the culmination of humanistic
discourse that has always been present in its fundamentally scriptological character. As
Michael Joyce argued in 1993, ‘Borrowing from the conventions of print culture, those
who view, combine, or manipulate hypertexts are commonly referred to as readers, while
those who create, gather, and arrange hypertexts are called writers. Yet hypertext
challenges and, many say, obviates these distinctions.’ Although Nancy Kaplan focuses
on hypertext as a medium for reading rather than writing, she reaches a similar
conclusion in her work on electronic literacy: ‘While readers do not literally write
anything anywhere and leave no traces that we know of, not even (as far as we can tell) in
their own brains, they do in a sense provide their own scriptures.’
The case for a hypertext theory that legitimises ‘writerly’ approaches to reading
and textual analysis has other institutional implications as well. Universities that have
banished their creative writers to the provinces of academia, in M.F.A. programs far from
the intellectual capitals of the Humanities, may want to consider the success of the
Electronic Poetry Center at SUNY Buffalo, where poets on the university faculty use a
web-based interface to create both new works and a scholarly apparatus through which to
read existing works. Regardless of program, it is clear that reading and writing overlap in
this new medium, which calls urgently for hybrid approaches to teaching and learning.
Going Fast: The Humanities Core Course at U.C. Irvine
Several departments on U.C. campuses are currently developing and publishing
hypertexts that offer traditional primary and secondary sources in HTML, scholarly
mark-up in other scripting languages, hyperlinked lexical and morphological tools, and
web-based search engines. This is not surprising, given the available institutional
resources and the international reputation of its faculty. As a result, however, university
administrators find themselves faced with challenges to both the ‘public’ character of the
U.C. system and its mission in traditional scholarship. In this new academic
environment, corporate partnerships are actively sought, lists of bibliographic ‘links’ are
not necessarily discounted as original scholarly contributions, and universities find
themselves copyrighting material with future intellectual property battles in mind. Yet
many of these same sites are only nominally connected to the course work done toward a
degree at those institutions of higher learning.
On the other hand, many traditional undergraduate and graduate courses are trying
to integrate the World Wide Web into instruction, but find themselves urged to ‘go slow’
to preserve a humanistic academic culture in resistance to the corporatisation that goes
with competing with dollars-for-diplomas distance-learning establishments. From the
perspective of the Humanities, this is particularly unfortunate because information
technology is still substantially underused, despite the fact that coursework in literature,
philosophy, history, and visual culture has tremendous potential for true problem-based
learning, even more so than many ‘skill and drill’ math and science courses.
Recently, the University of California at Irvine has tried another approach, one in
which a large freshman ‘Core’ course with almost a thousand students and a thirty-year
history of traditional instruction ‘went fast’ and integrated multiple elements of Internetbased instruction within two academic years. The benefits of delivering more
instructional technology faster in a conventional Humanities program have been
dramatic. Students have demonstrated improved computer literacy, have expressed
appreciation for both the obvious integration of course materials and the ease of access
for commuter students, and have been exposed to more advanced material than would
normally be offered in an introductory course. As a program, the web also offered us the
possibility of developing an interactive research curriculum that would otherwise be
impossible in such a large course. Now we have a ‘text’ for multiple-branching
instruction in independent research methods, a ‘library’ of web-based reference materials,
and a platform from which to co-ordinate with other programs. Most significantly, our
instructors find that our electronic ‘library’ of what would otherwise be pedagogical
ephemera recognises collaboration, fosters interdisciplinary instruction, encourages
innovative in-class work, sets program standards, integrates instructional components,
and improves communication with students and colleagues. There are also some
significant drawbacks to Internet-based instruction, but the ‘go fast’ approach can
minimise those drawbacks by capitalising on a higher profile for technological
applications with added funding and cross-campus support. The Irvine campus itself is
also, in many ways, an unusually promising place to ‘go fast.’ U.C. Irvine served as the
host of the 1999 IFIP conference on building university electronic educational
environments, several committees and working groups on campus involve faculty in
issues of web-based instruction, and -- according to recent informatics surveys -- the
student body is remarkably Internet-ready.
Of course, there is always the possibility of eroding the ethos of the student, if the
web-based interface is too impersonal. Traditional disciplinary problems that have
existed throughout the history of the Core Course with low lecture attendance,
plagiarism, and collusion can be exacerbated by the use of electronic media. This can be
ameliorated by intervention on multiple fronts, some of which in turn also involve the use
of the World Wide Web, like those that collect student work in a database and search the
web to detect plagiarism and collusion. And without personal mentorship, students can
become overwhelmed by either the triviality of repetitive virtual worksheets or the
unmanageable size of the virtual library in which they may become lost without step-bystep guidance.
The ethos of the instructor is also put at risk by new technology. Certainly the
Internet permanently transforms the pedagogical culture of a university program in
several ways that gradualists may find disturbing. This is why faculty development in
instructional technology often takes more than the traditional grant process or
departmental mechanisms for course relief. This resistance can be exacerbated by
generational differences: not only are younger students often more Internet savvy than
upperclassmen, but undergraduates are even known to utilise instructional technology
more effectively than their instructors. Many instructors, particularly non-tenure track
lecturers, fear losing more of their status as intellectual authority figures.
But faculty resistance to new technologies in the Humanities is not necessarily a
problem for the system as a whole. As Ellen Strenski writes: ‘In any case, faculty today
function quite properly as resistors in their institutions. They behave analogously by
controlling the pressures applied to these institutions. They direct, resist, and regulate the
flow of current; they create power.’ At the simplest level, I have found that the most
resistant instructors in the Core Course often make the most substantive suggestions. I
also feel that the design of the interface for instructors and students has benefited from an
attention to ‘user-friendliness’ that would have otherwise not been prioritised.
Teaching the Teachers: The Web as Collaborative Space
One fundamental point that is often missed is that new instructional technology should
not be introduced to students without including instructors in the process. Too many
distance-learning models erode the collegiality that is particularly important for an
interdisciplinary program like the Humanities Core Course by emphasising robotic
modular learning and the delivery of discrete instructional units directly to the
undergraduate user.
Instructional collaboration in the Humanities Core Course is facilitated in several
ways, so that faculty, lecturers, and graduate students can find the pedagogical idiom with
which they are most comfortable. The three main platforms used by the HCC are 1) a
collaborative web site for our forty to fifty instructors with over a hundred web pages of
materials, suggestions, and texts for use in-class, 2) an unmoderated electronic mailing
list for instructors to discuss pedagogical problems and issues in day to day teaching, and
3) an outline for ‘live’ staff meetings available on the web for preview and review. In
end of quarter evaluations, instructors give high praise to these resources, particularly
since the teaching load can be difficult for those teaching outside their doctoral
disciplines or who find themselves overwhelmed by the demands of a writing-intensive
course.
I would argue, however, that this web interface for instructors has been most
important for developing a pedagogical culture that challenges disciplinary boundaries
and institutional hierarchies. The use of a common electronic interface lets graduate
students debate with ladder-ranked faculty and have their statements about teaching and
scholarship ‘published’ alongside their tenured colleagues. It also means that historians,
philosophers, and cultural critics have a platform from which to challenge the curricular
assumptions of what has traditionally been a course that privileges literary interpretation
over other models for humanistic inquiry.
The World Wide Web also creates a platform for other kinds of institutional
collaborations and a general lowering of boundaries between separately funded academic
units. As a writing-intensive course, the HCC has developed web sites with the
university’s Composition program, which is part of a traditional English department, but
it has also developed web sites with the campus library and the Learning and Academic
Resources Center. In addition, the Humanities Core Course co-ordinates on pilot
programs with the department of Information and Computer Sciences. Funding for these
cross-program collaborations has come from the Division of Undergraduate Education,
the Instructional Resources Center, and the office of Networks and Academic Computing
Systems.
At this point in the development of the course, because so much instruction is
now available ‘on-line,’ HCC directors even are trying to use this interface to break down
walls that separate the university from the surrounding community. For example, many
faculty members in the Humanities Core Course, including the entire lecturing faculty for
Spring, participate in the Santa Ana teachers program, which offers seminars to primary
and secondary school teachers in the schools of a nearby low-income community.
Although U.C. Irvine may in some sense ‘compete’ with other educational institutions,
particularly two-year city colleges and Cal State universities without the research
resources of the University of California system, faculty members take the ‘public’
mission of this UC-sponsored site seriously and have sought to disseminate information
from an introductory course that prides itself on being much more than a ‘great books’
course to the public at large, sometimes at the price of not asserting their intellectual
property privileges.
Three Cases of Hybrid Pedagogy: Teaching Research, The New Close Reading, and
Lectures as Texts
The benefit of using web-based materials, however, is most obviously geared to the
undergraduate user through new hybrid forms of teaching. With the web interface
students are able to work with more challenging, more interactive, and more integrated
materials than would normally be possible to offer in an introductory freshmen course.
Teaching Research
In particular, the Humanities Core Course has prioritised teaching research skills to firstyear students that are normally not taught until the junior or senior year. Part of the
reason that these skills were not previously taught was the absence of a sufficiently
interactive ‘text’ for teaching, one that could reflect branching choices in searching and
information retrieval, varying research objectives for individual students, and evaluation
strategies during a dynamic scholarly process. The web provides an ideal opportunity to
create a teaching text that ‘shows’ rather than ‘tells’ as it simulates research environments
and fosters research mentoring that breaks down traditional institutional barriers between
research and teaching. This large-enrollment course would also otherwise tax the
physical collections of a campus library with too many users for a limited number of
relevant paper materials.
The research component of the course is promulgated with multiple approaches
that depend on collaboration: a ten-week web-based course-within-the-course ‘Virtual
Research’ designed around quizzes and worksheets with hyperlinks to scholarly
resources, six ‘Discovery Tasks’ that familiarise students with the web interface of the
campus library (often with screen mock-ups) so they can use both the main index to the
physical collections of text on paper and the electronic collections licensed from the
California Digital Library, and – because research and writing are closely integrated –
three successively more ‘independent’ research paper assignments that build on using
electronic journal collections like JSTOR. The World Wide Web also can provide a
range of supplemental resources, and the Humanities Core Course maintains a large
‘references’ section with links to many useful and significant scholarly projects in the
Humanities.
The New Close Reading
However, the instructional applications of the World Wide Web should not focus
exclusively on ‘context’ at the expense of analysis of the ‘text’ itself. Instructional
hypertexts can serve ‘intra-textual’ as well as ‘extra-textual’ purposes. In the Humanities
Core Course close reading is considered foundational and taught for several practical
reasons: 1) to encourage students to link very specific claims to very specific pieces of
textual evidence, 2) to provide a way to highlight methodological differences between
philosophy, literature, and history as approaches to humanistic inquiry, 3) to discourage
plagiarism by making section-specific assignments, 4) to foster sentence-level literacy,
and 5) to teach basic college-level reading skills while promulgating the integration of
reading and writing as discursive activities.
The Humanities Core Course has been developing pedagogy for a ‘New Close
Reading’ that is very unlike New Critical paradigms, because it redefines the ‘text’ as an
object of study. Web-based close reading is particularly well-adapted to ‘texts’ that are
difficult to close read using traditional media. For example, close reading film stills is
not the same as actual scene analysis, because the framed image is very different from the
diachronic shot. And texts originally written in ancient or modern foreign languages
should not be analysed word-by-word without consideration of the problems of
translation to English (lost connotation and multiple denotation) and – for writing
instructors – the theoretical implications of translation theory for practice by novices.
By using streaming video and a bilingual scholarly hypertext, students are able to ‘close
read’ what would normally be considered to be too ‘unstable’ for close reading as a
discursive activity.
Our two web-based close reading essay assignments focus on two different
pedagogical goals: the development of visual literacy and the development of critical
thinking about literary analysis of texts in translation. In the first case, students were
asked to write about film clips from the movie Rebecca. In order to emphasise particular
images in the activity of the students’ close ‘reading,’ sequences were edited into groups
(female costume, shots of the ocean, shots of food, etc.) and made available in passwordprotected form via the essay prompt on the Web. In the second, students were assigned a
close reading of a passage from the Odyssey with the option of using the web-based
Perseus project at Tufts University to follow ‘morphological hyperlinks’ in the text to
words in the original ancient Greek and supplemental information about etymology and
connotation. Both assignments use web-based media to teach close reading as a genre in
academic writing and foster the integration of essential undergraduate reading and
writing skills. It also seems appropriate as a way to prepare students and their instructors
for the next wave of academic discourse in which ‘close reading’ and ‘text encoding’
merge, so that scholars do not merely see academic writing as the act of generating
secondary sources, but also as the act of providing mark-up to primary sources.
Lectures as Texts
Students are also trained in ‘reading’ lectures when they are presented as HTML texts.
The use of the World Wide Web in the Humanities Core Course has transformed its
lecture presentations, many which are now available with hyperlinks for preview and
review by students. A finished ‘live’ rhetorical performance is embodied in print,
pictures, sound files, and video files for student analysis. Although this presents
numerous intellectual property problems for instructors, it can be a boon to students’
understanding of rhetorical models.
Students can even use these hybrid texts to consider how the World Wide Web
functions with its own set of rhetorical conventions. Richard Lanham has asserted that
electronic text is much more explicitly rhetorical than print in that it can be ‘considered
as an information system that functions economically, that allocates emphasis and
attention.’ For example, students can be surprisingly perceptive about the rhetorical
effect of what would seem to be relatively minor choices about size and type of print and
placement of images in the lecture-hypertext. As hypertext becomes a more widespread
delivery system, hermeneutic skills that are medium-specific will also become more
important for our students’ self-consciousness as interpreters and then as producers of
hypertexts themselves. The opportunity to teach the distinctions between the ‘live’
performance and the hypertextual rendering of that performance and to consider how
hypertext, in turn, serves as ‘script’ for the lecture can make the rhetorical character of
digital media much more explicit for analytical inquiry.
Why Not To Go Digital: Misrepresentations in a Recent Monograph
In ‘The Question Concerning Technology,’ Martin Heidegger attacks the instrumental
view of technology in which techne serves as ‘mere means’ to effect change.
Technology, for Heidegger, is inextricable from our humanity in that it serves as a ‘way
of knowing’ to both ‘unconceal’ and ‘enframe.’ The hypertext window allegorises
Heidegger’s claims as it serves both as an opening to penetrate layers in cyberspace and
constricts our subjective experience in the confines of a computer screen. When
considering technological applications, web-based platforms should never be considered
mere instruments of instruction, especially if we consider to what degree the humanities
always have been constituted by technological questions and ways of knowing.
Furthermore, university personnel often poorly understand the intellectual
property and privacy issues involved in putting courses on the World Wide Web. The
mass-replication of commodified products from our university ‘culture industry’ – to use
the language of Frankfurt School theorist Theodor Adorno – also raises more complex
aesthetic, cultural, and philosophical questions about the cut-and-paste reception of the
digital arts. Unlike Adorno, Benjamin sees the subject of his essay ‘The Work of Art in
the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ in largely positive terms: ‘The mass is a matrix
from which all traditional behaviour toward works of art issues today in a new form.
Quantity has been transmuted into quantity. The greatly increased mass of participants
has produced a change in the mode of participation.’ But the ‘distracted’ spectator of
Benjamin’s essay may be praised for his or her political freedom by utopian cybercritics,
but such students may be poorly suited to the demands of concentration obliged by the
humanities classroom.
There are many other practical reasons to delay ‘going digital’ from the
standpoint of institutional politics. Web-based instruction that undermines writing
instruction and face-to-face teaching is probably the most significant current threat to the
humanities. In particular, a monograph from the Pew Learning and Technology Program,
published last year, has troubling implications for web-based teaching. Its argument for
educational interactivity and the meaningful evaluation of instructional technology may
initially appear admirable. However insidious assumptions in this document devalue
students’ participation in the rhetorical community of the university and discount the
importance of hybrid teaching forms.
Misperception #1
The monograph asserts that large writing-intensive courses should not be prioritised in
the allocation of technological resources:
Large size per se does not necessarily make a course a good candidate.
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, for example, offers an
introductory comparative literature course that enrolls about 250 students
a semester. It is writing intensive and satisfies the campus composition
requirement. In spite of the course size, the possibility for capital
substitution is limited. Competent evaluators must assess the students'
written work that is contextually based, thus limiting the possibility of
capital-for-labor substitution.
The assumption that writing-intensive courses are inferior candidates for instructional
technology resources is fundamentally problematic on many levels. Certainly, there are
great difficulties implementing such technology if the paradigm is automated
computerised feedback and assessment. Even relatively simple ‘grammar checkers’ with
years of testing and capital investment have a level of accuracy that cannot compare to a
human editor, and automated feedback on conceptual and organisational features of
student writing will require several revolutions in AI technology. But resources should
be allocated to writing-intensive classes first, which perform double duty for the
university, particularly if the theoreticians of hypertext are correct about the overlap of
reading and writing in this new medium.
Misperception #2
The Pew Monograph also attacks lecture presentations, to which students in the
Humanities Core Course give higher numerical evaluations to than almost any other
course element.
After determining that the institution is ready and selecting an appropriate
course, the next planning step is to identify the academic problems that the
redesign intends to address. Most of the weaknesses attributed to large
introductory courses are generic in nature and have as their source the
limitations of the predominant form of instruction in our nation's colleges
and universities, the didactic lecture. The overwhelming body of research
tells us that students do not learn effectively from lectures (Halloun &
Hestenes 1985; Thornton 1990; McNeal & D'Avanzo 1997; Mazur 1997;
Seymour & Hewitt 1997; NISE 1999.)
This monograph certainly underestimates the importance of lectures as rhetorical and
discursive models to teach students basic communication skills and academic norms. In
other words, in talking about lectures as the ‘presentation of information,’ the monograph
may focus only on ‘information’ as learned material rather than considering
‘presentation’ skills to be valuable in and of themselves.
At a time when universities are being encouraged to emulate state-of-the-art
corporate culture, the Pew Monograph is actually pushing educational institutions to
adopt an outmoded pre-Internet business model that emphasises mechanical automation
as a way to achieve efficiency. Yet, as Michael Schrage has pointed out in Serious Play,
computers have fostered a new corporate culture. Contemporary corporate culture
promulgates ‘quick and dirty’ design with multiple prototypes, simulations, and rhetorical
conventions. As Richard Lanham has pointed out, this ‘fictionalized modeling’
characterizes a range of ‘real’ simulations outside of academia: ‘All kinds of situations
are being modeled – a literary critic might say dramatized – interactively.’ Multiple
stagings of new instructional technology under the direction of a rapid-response
pedagogy will create better educational hypertexts than those created with an emphasis
on cost-conscious consolidation and a ‘downsizing’ of live teaching.
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