Courses & Curricula 

--George Otte, Baruch College/CUNY 

Realizing that "lit" faculty often dismiss the possibility of using computers with a cry of "I have so much to cover!"-- I wondered what computers could do to address the "coverage" issue. The answer is a lot. On-line access to texts (primary and secondary) is perhaps the most obvious example, but I was actually more interested in techniques for getting students to share the burden. An example was what I did with Mary Shelley's _Frankenstein_ in a survey class that had little to zip along as lit surveys do. I decided I had no time for all the neat little contextual disclosures I might want to get into, so I went into class with a stack of notecards, each with an item like "Byron," "Prometheus," "Galvani," "Milton's Satan," etc. I shuffled them and distributed them. Each person had to post a summary of the presumed relevance of that item to the text in the Daedalus mail system. I was so impressed with the results that I printed them out and made copies to share with folks at a faculty development session. 

Coverage, however, has never been the big issue for me, even in lit surveys. I'm much more interested in what happens in discussion, and I've never felt I've got the dynamics all figured out or the ideal agenda set (or even settled the issue of how much of an agenda to have). I still haven't, but I do know that on-line discussion (I mostly use the synchronous InterChange mode in DIWE) makes for genuinely different dynamics. It tends to be much more decentered (I'm sure you'll hear that a lot), so I've felt comfortable that what gets said has much less to do with my direction-setting (especially in discussions from which I absent myself entirely) than with what is on the students' minds. It also tends, for that reason, to be more multifacted. And it tends to have more impact on the writing in the course, not least of all because, besides giving students access to transcripts, I have also shown them how to cut and paste what they like out of exchanges (and they tend to find this more useful). 

As for engagement with a text, one thing I learned as a writing teacher is that computer-mediated communication cranks up a sense of the dialogic, of how every utterance awaits a response, is also itself a response. I've played around with this idea in literature courses. One time I sent all my students an e-mail from "William Wordsworth" with the text of the message being one of his sonnets ("The World is Too Much with Us")--the idea being that they should reply to this "message." It worked beautifully, giving the poem an immediacy it would have otherwise lacked for most people, and the responses were wonderfully various. (Some commiserated, some gave advice, some also wrote back in sonnet form, etc.) And they had fun--an element I find CMC often allows me to inject into assignments without even trying. (next entry)