Go back to Case Studies menuMegan Williams, Mount Holyoke College
Megan Williams took a different approach when she taught Magic and Astrology in the Greek and Roman World at Mount Holyoke College, in South Hadley, Massachusetts. In Religion 212, students look at ancient literary texts that discuss magic and at remnants of spells and handbooks on magic written on lead and papyrus, all with a focus on understanding religious and philosophical attitudes toward magic. "I was nervous about teaching the course because the materials are difficult: hundreds of pages of incomprehensible gobbledygook. I wanted my students to learn how to read these weird old texts and try to see what they reveal about the social context in which they were produced." Instead of asking the students to write traditional research papers, she assigned one major project for the semester: to create a Web site. "I wanted to get the students to engage a topic closely in a small compass." She had each student select from a list of topics and then created small project groups at the beginning of the semester.
The students' first step was to create an outline and assign each person in the group a separate task. The second step was for each group member to write text for the site. Each student submitted a "polished draft," and Megan responded with detailed feedback. Then the group worked together to produce a "skeleton" of the Web site containing the graphics and structure of the pages but no content. At this stage, Megan worked at length with the students to help them refine both their writing and their site design. "I kept saying I wanted the sites to look really good. They didn't have to be complicated, but they did have to work, and they couldn't have spelling errors. In fact, one goal I did accomplish using the Web was that they revised their papers with much more care." In the final step, students added their text and image content to the site framework to complete their Web site.
The students' readiness for this type of coursework varied. "At the beginning of the semester about 30 percent of the students already had the basic tools they needed to do this project. Another 30 percent were enthusiastic about the idea, and were saying, 'I'm glad you're making us do this because I really need to learn it.' And the remaining students were grumbling. By the end of the semester at least 60 percent had a favorable response to the whole thing." Megan tried to assign at least one person with previous Web programming experience to each group. And as for those students who had little or no experience with the Web, Megan saw this project as an opportunity for them to learn essential skills. "Having to use this technology in the classroom setting is useful because it's going to become a basic feature of functioning cultural literacy over the next ten years, and somebody has to help them learn." With strong Web programming and design skills, Megan is unusually "techie" for a humanities professor, and she was able to guide her students not only with the content aspects of the project but also with the technical challenges.
Yet even though they were ultimately positive about the approach, the students uniformly agreed that the project was demanding: "They could probably have written three five-page papers in the amount of time and energy it took them to do these Web sites." But, says Megan, "Mount Holyoke students are very hardworking, so you can be demanding and they're not going to whine - at least, not too much."
Megan would approach two aspects of the project differently next time. First, she would structure the projects to be more collaborative. Megan wanted to limit the interdependence of the group, so that less productive individuals did not sour group dynamics. As a result, however, the projects were much less collaborative than she had hoped. Because each student was responsible for an aspect of the project, they weren't required to interact enough to pull together as a group. "The cool thing about the Web is that it provides a tool where people can do collaborative work and see it coming together in a way that is strong and graphic. I'd like to keep exploring how to make that work better." Another area of focus next time around would be to help students use images effectively in their scholarly work. "I should have figured in time to gather images and to define text-image relationships." Megan still views the project work as successful, however. "Though I didn't get as much of the collaborative, multi-approach view on the topics as I would have liked, and I didn't get as much use of images and interpretation of material culture as I would have liked, I definitely got a lot more of each than if I had just assigned papers."
Megan has been using a Web site in every course she teaches. "I started out writing course materials in Word and then converting the documents to HTML for the course Web site, and then I thought, this is pointless. Now I write all my course materials as Web pages only." Megan got her technical foundation by attending a seminar on New Technologies for Teaching and Research at Princeton University. Funded by the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation and run by Professor Will Howarth of Princeton's English department, this intensive seminar is for budding educators who want to learn Web development for instructional purposes. The participants meet for two full days a week for six weeks. "I went into the seminar with a vague and poorly articulated sense of how to create a basic Web page using Netscape Composer and came out knowing a little bit of UNIX, feeling comfortable working with HTML, ready to try a little Perl programming...." Megan also participated in a weeklong Web development course at Mount Holyoke, sponsored by the Mellon Foundation, where she learned more Web design and basic Javascript programming. Her course sites contain the standard course materials - syllabus, list of readings, course requirements, descriptions of assignments. Megan found that even this elementary use of the Web has been advantageous. At Mount Holyoke, for example, she had little time to prepare her courses, and because she had never taught these courses before, placing her syllabi on the Web allowed her to start with general outlines and fill in details as the semester progressed.
Megan hopes to work on more ambitious Web projects in the future, including adding more interactivity on her sites and building a database of images. "There's such a huge gap between the simple text-and-image level I'm at now and creating something that's technically innovative. I feel as if I'm stuck using the Web as a substitute for paper rather than using it to do things you can't do on paper. I want a chance to bring the 'bells and whistles' of the technology together with well-defined pedagogical goals and generate really interesting and effective teaching tools." Megan Williams is representative of a new generation of educators who take for granted the use of the Web in the classroom. Her embrace of technology and enthusiasm about its potential may well be a catalyst for instructional innovation.
Page information
From Web Teaching Guide
Copyright 2000 Sarah Horton
Religion 212: Magic and Astrology in the Greek and Roman World
Copyright 2000 Megan Williams
www.mtholyoke.edu/courses/meganw/rel212