Christy Desmet, Department of English
Graduate Student Association
May 16, 1997
This is an Instructional Improvement Grant at the University of Georgia to produce specific units for a web-based course in English literature at the sophomore level. The grant asked for money for computer equipment. The following is the actual copy for the grant.
The aim of this grant is to develop teaching resources on the World Wide Web for one of these large lecture classes: English 231, "English Literature, Beowulf to Paradise Lost." For the class Web site, I will construct instructional modul es thatoffer background information, visual "tours" of important persons and places, and exercises in literary interpretation.
The English Department offers five introductory classes in English and American literature that students can take to satisfy their core requirement in literature. In addition to smaller classes, nine sections of sophomore literature are offered every y ear in classes of 150 students. The English Department therefore reaches more students with these introductoryliterature classes than it does with any other course besides Freshman Composition. The aim of this grant is to develop teaching resources on th e World Wide Web for one of these large lecture classes: English 231, "English Literature, Beowulf to Paradise Lost." For the class Web site, I will construct instructional modules that offer background information, visual "tours" of importa nt persons and places, and exercises inliterary interpretation. These modules may be used not only by other faculty teaching the large sections, but also by Teaching Assistants who are assigned their own sections of English 231. The proposal has both a h istory and a pedagogic rationale.
In 1994-95 I received an Instructional Improvement Grant to develop ways of teaching creative interpretation of literature through visual literacy in the large lecture classroom. With that grant, one of my Teaching Assistants, a student from Instructio nal Technology and I developed three extensive visual presentations using Aldus Persuasion and Microsoft Powerpoint in order to exploit visual learning in the lecture class. As a result of that grant, I also have a cache of over 100 scanned images on a CD that I will use this year to make further slide-type presentations linking visual and verbal representations.
The materials created from that project will serve me well in English 231 for a long time to come. One of the students in the class, however, pointed out to me one missing piece of a successful pedagogy centered around critical reading and thinking. Th e student said that she wished we had exercises to practice interpretation, the literary equivalent of calculus problems. It occurred to me that I might achieve this aim by constructing an English 231 Web site, involving a series of modules that are desig ned for use outside of class lecture.
In this grant, I ask for upgraded equipment that will allow me and my Teaching Assistants for the next two years to build the Web site and its instructional modules. In the last grant I hired others to do the work of scanning images and constructing th e slide shows, work that I can now do on my own. The computer in my faculty office, however, is insufficient either for constructing Web sites or for working with scanned images. The CPU is a 486 processor (33MHZ, 16MB RAM, with a 210MB hard drive) that o perates with Windows 3.1. The processing speed is slow, and the videocard insufficient for this kind of work. Furthermore, Java applications (for simple interactive exercises) cannot be used with Netscape in Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 will not run on my c urrent machine. Wordperfect 7, which contains a good HTML converter, requires Windows 95. This would greatly facilitate the building of my web site. The resolution and color depth of the monitor are too small and Adobe Photoshop, which would be essential to modules involving images, requires Windows 95. I would also like a sound card in order to begin work on exercises that teach skills of poetic interpretation, which would involve sound. Finally, the CD ROM reader is important to using the scanned images that I already possess. In addition, the computer in my office is at least partially incompatible with that used in Park 265, the classroom in which I will teach this course. The list of equipment on the Budget page was constructed with the help of David Gants, Academic Professional in Computers for the English Department.
For this grant, the English Department would contribute its computer lab facilities, particularly for scanning images. It will also contribute the substantial skills of David Gants, Academic Professional. I have already taken two workshops with him and he is helping me with this project on a regular basis.
I envision these instructional modules as satisfying five aims:
Last year I had a English 231 Usenet group that I used primarily as a bulletin board, to post information that I wanted the students to know. One of the TA's noted that the students would learn anything if it was posted on the Usenet. Based on this evidence, I would like to use the Web site to provide background information that will expand the students' understanding of the texts we read. To give just one example, when I teach Shakespeare in an upper-division class, I spend one entire period going over the succession of Lancastrian and Yorkist monarchs. For English 231, where class time is more limited, I would like to develop a royal genealogy for teaching 1 Henry IV.
Every year several students say in the course evaluations that they like my "travel stories," which I take as a sign not that I reminisce too much in class but that concrete information about places and persons is helpful to understanding the literature. I have, in addition to the images we collected two years ago, a series of slides taken at key locations in England, particularly Canterbury and Penshurst. I would like to make these available to the students on our Web site to reinforce the le ctures on these subjects.
I have already begun working on some exercises of this nature, but am starting to realize that this kind of work is particularly timeİconsuming. This is the most important part of the project, creating modules that will help the students devel op their skills at analysis and synthesis within the context of particular works of English literature. For instance, I have been working on a module that asks students to generalize about the dramatic endings of Doctor Faustus, as provided by the firs two quartos of that play. The possibility that the Main Library will in the near future create an on-line electronic text server that makes available standard texts of Chaucer and Shakespeare ex pands significantly the possibilities for useful exercises.
A group of faculty in the English Department have been discussing the possibility of putting together a set of resources for all teachers of the sophomore classes. I would like to use the materials I develop for my own course to construct an a rchive of resources on the Web for all prospective teachers and students of the course, excluding those items that raise problems of copyright infringement. Passwords would be used to allow only teachers and students of English 231 access to this archive.
Last year, I invited students to do extra-credit projects that enhanced their visual learning and were enjoyable in their own right. I found that the students were very willing to use technology in pursuit of these extraİcredit projects. I wou ld like to structure a series of such projects in which the students themselves construct instructional modules for future classes.