Go back to Case Studies menuPaul Christesen, Dartmouth College
Professor of classics Paul Christesen got involved with the Web while addressing larger issues in classical studies. The classics department at Dartmouth College, in Hanover, New Hampshire, has been rethinking its approach. "We're concerned about building a curriculum that blurs the distinction between different kinds of data. One problem that has always been an issue for classical scholars is that people tend to specialize in one particular body of information: historians are text-driven, archaeologists specialize in artifacts, literature people read a specialized subcategory of text. And there has been a general sense that we could all use the other bodies of information quite handily and that this would be better for the students because it would assemble a more complete and, I think, more entertaining picture for them. So we've been trying to encourage students to be more broadly defined in their field of information." To this end the classics department introduced Theories and Methods in Ancient History. Designed for midrange classical studies, this course exposes students to the various bodies of evidence people studying the classical world use, along with the relevant methodologies for interpreting them.
Promoting a multidimensional curriculum, however, raises basic discrepancies regarding information access. If students were supposed to be looking at multiple bodies of information, they had to have access - outside class time - to the information. Says Paul, "The literary people and the historians have tended to photocopy and hand out texts, and so it was feasible to ask students to read them before class. The archaeologists have found themselves in a more complicated position because they want students to look at artifacts, or images of artifacts, which generally students can't look at before they come to class." This deficiency has meant that classicists have had some difficulty in getting students to consider visual data to the same extent as textual data. "Here we are saying that images are 'texts' and that you can read this form of information exactly as you can read Thucydides and Herodotus, but what you're actually saying to the student is, 'You have two-and-a-half minutes to look at the slide - okay, that's it, you'll never see it again.' That's a problem; it doesn't encourage students to take images seriously."
Paul was assigned to teach this new course, and his first task was to bridge the access gap, so that when students were studying image-based texts, such as artifacts, they had easy access to high-quality images before class. Paul used the Web to distribute the images: "It was not feasible to do in any other way as far as I could tell" (the other options being grainy photocopies or a shared study slide collection). To construct the Web site, Paul used the CourseInfo courseware tool, and offered, along with course handouts and other materials, access to the image collections. In preparing the images, Paul used LivePicture technology, which allows Web users to view images at high resolution.
Having addressed the problem of access, Paul set about assembling the image collections. Because the focus of his course is interpretation rather than content, he felt that standard textbooks had too much interpretive information to be useful. For his course, he needed image collections with just enough text to allow the students to interpret the images on their own. Because he was using the Web, he decided to create custom image sets, choosing just those images that focused on what he wanted his students to see. This flexibility, however, came at a significant cost. In eschewing textbooks in favor of a custom approach, he found that he had to create supporting materials to go along with his image collections. "I had this wonderful set of images, but how was I going to link them? What I ended up doing was writing the text around the images, so that they all tied together very well, but what I had written was pretty much a chapter in a textbook, and that was shockingly time-consuming."
The demands of this endeavor proved to be too significant. The next time he creates a course Web site he will assemble an image collection, but with minimal text. And although he acknowledges that this approach is "less than optimal for the student," as a junior faculty member he has other obligations. "Academic institutions simply haven't had the time to come to terms with the Web yet. We need to figure out how writing Web content fits into existing requirements to produce publishable scholarly work. Until we figure that out, there is a disincentive to engage in this sort of behavior, because, with the institution rewarding other sorts of behavior, and with only so many hours in the day, Web course development inevitably gets short shrift."
In spite of the time demands, Paul is pleased with the results of his endeavor. The custom image collections have allowed students to make much more rapid progress since they work only with images that are directly relevant to the course. And having the images online means that it is much easier to make side-by-side comparisons. Paul has found that his students are doing much more comparison work: "You can't ask for more than that." An unanticipated benefit has been that the number of images students use in their coursework has increased. "It hadn't occurred to me to that this would have ramifications for the shape of their own work, but they've become much more interested in using images within their own work as well."
But, says Paul, the students were "a little creaky in the beginning." They weren't used to having part of their coursework be to make sure that their systems were properly configured. "I understood their complaint, which was, this is a part of the learning process with which they never really had to deal with before. This was not just having your pencils ready, but having your technology group ready to do the work you needed to do." The next time he uses the site, he will be more proactive about making sure the software requirements are clearly defined and that students have plenty of help in getting up and running. And although he acknowledges the additional challenges of using technology, he did not yield to the students' resistance. "When I talked to them, we talked about how technology gives us pedagogical possibilities that require effort on both my part and their part. They haven't done it before and I haven't done it before, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't do it, it just means we have to learn how to do it."
The pivotal moment for the students came one day during class in a technology classroom. "We were talking about a particular bird that was on one of the vases, and I asked them what the bird was and what it was doing there. One of them said, 'It's carrying something in its claws, what do you think that is?' and I said, 'Well, let's find out right now.' And on the big screen this little tiny detail on the vase can be four feet high, and they can see incredibly small details, and they said, 'Gee, we know what that is now.' And you could sort of hear the gears grinding in their heads: 'Hmm, wow, that was kind of interesting.' Things got much easier after that little incident."
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From Web Teaching Guide
Copyright 2000 Sarah Horton
Greek and Roman Studies 19: Theories and Methods in Ancient History
Copyright 2000 Trustees of Dartmouth College
dewey.dartmouth.edu/courses/GRS19