Developing Internet Courseware [POETICA]

Developing Internet Courseware to Create Freedom and Flexibility for Learners in University English Studies

Charlie Mansfield and Suzanne Robertson, The University of Sunderland, UK
(1996)

Abstract

This paper examines the design and implementation of new Internet learning materials in the teaching of English Literature to first-level undergraduates in higher education. It discusses the reactions of learners using these materials and the changes experienced by the designers of the courseware. This paper attempts to relate telematics and hypertext learning experiences to post-modern ideas of knowledge, (after Lyotard). Finally, by exploring the notion of ordering knowledge and how this ordering process is linked to the use and manipulation of hypertext pages on the Internet the paper suggests a re-usable model for staff involved in designing Internet-based course materials.

POETICA - Programme for Orientation, Education and Telematics Implementation in Critical Analysis

Students in the areas of English, the humanities and the arts have traditionally been neglected as more technologically-oriented departments have forged ahead with their own developments on the Internet.

Work by Suzanne Robertson and Helen Milner in 1994 evolved a model for designing and writing open learning print-based materials in conjunction with academic staff at the University of Sunderland. This model was extended by the introduction of a new member of staff with experience in industrial and commercial systems development, Charlie Mansfield. The resulting approach to developing new course materials follows the lines of systems analysis, prototyping and building a re- usable model. The course materials developed for English Studies are based entirely upon the Internet and use the World Wide Web browser, Netscape, for access and use.

Early Discussions

A period of very careful systems analysis took place. This ensured that the application of new technology was carried out in a way sensitive to the needs of those staff and students who had never used telematics technology before.

POETICA - The Features

1. English students learn their way around the Internet as they study.
2. The electronic courseware is available telematically anywhere on campus.
3. The courseware is available anywhere in the world which means it is available to students on placement in Europe, to school pupils and FE-students considering their degree options and to partner universities planning to share course materials
4. Students avoid problems of waiting for set books at the library when 120 undergraduates are all on the same module.
5. New work can quickly be added to update the course, for example, new poetry, new essays, new course notes, new assignment questions.
6. Continuous, computer-marked formative assessment is available to every student at all times. This saves the lecturers' time for marking longer essays and for giving smaller seminars and one-to-one tutorials.
7. A local user newsgroup is established to stimulate computer-mediated e-mail conferencing and peer-group interaction.
8. Students are empowered by being able to study when they like and to be able to communicate more freely with each other and their lecturers via e-mail.

POETICA - Poetry on the Web

Excitingly, too, it offers an whole new way of viewing and publishing contemporary literary texts within the constraints of copyright. This will enliven the literary scene and more closely link academic life with the world of literary reviewing breathing fresh life into contemporary poetry. Undergraduates, too, will be able to witness the debates surrounding the work of practising writers. This proximity to the creative process will highlight for them the relevance of new poetry and help them to understand the role of the poet in today's society.

Life Long Learning Skills

Although the teaching team were clear in their aims in that they were attempting to encourage learners to explore contemporary English prosody along with the additional benefit of allowing learners to acquire electronic text manipulation skills, the questions did drive us into examining what extra learning experiences the Internet and hypertext materials might offer.

Lyotard offers us a starting point [Lyotard 1979: 83] when he asks what is transmitted in higher education. He answers his own question when he explains that the essential information transmitted is an organised stock of knowledge. In designing POETICA a great deal of thought was put into the organisation of the stock of information we were aiming to pass on to the learners. The organisation, the design of the information, became layered. When students first enter the learning space they are presented with a range of administrative details. They can go no further or no deeper into the learning space without first encountering these adminstrative texts. The administrative texts are for the orientation of the learner. The position of the administrative texts also ensures that important administrative messages are at least presented to the reader.

The second layer presents the students with study texts. These texts are equivalent to study materials from theoretical books. Again, only by passing through this layer can students access the third layer, the source texts, in our case, literary texts (poems), but in other systems this may be maps, say for geography, or original source documents scanned in for history. Lyotard had anticipated something of this [Lyotard 1979: 83-84] and others have explained these non-linear structures more recently [Malina 1995: 1]. Malina explains the fundamental principle of hypertext with its easily set up connections and Ratzan suggests how we might use hypertext to change our way of conceptualizing textual materials [Ratzan 1995: 77], 'Hypertext breaks the linear paradigm. The hypertext paradigm permits knowledge to be articulated in a variety of formats, enhancing our ability to forge new relevance chains and thus make new cognitive connections.'

This notion of new connections has been expressed earlier [Lyotard 1979: 83-85] in Lyotard's discussions on the importance of telematics study in higher education. He underlines the importance of the capacity to actualise data that is relevant to the problem being worked on here and now. He also explains that learners should be skilled in ordering that data into efficient strategies, that is, making new connections.

In fact this begins to suggest some of the new skills we could be teaching in higher education, skills which will equip learners with strategies for problem-solving and for organizing data into efficient strategies. In our own design work whilst developing the courseware we had been going through this process ourselves. We had taken a range of data and ordered them for our students to navigate. In doing this actualisation process, together with the collection of data which we felt were relevant to the study of prosody and metrics, we had gone through Lyotard's learning process.

We had been through this learning process but is this the right sort of learning for students? Lyotard, writing back in the late seventies, felt that the person who will gain the advantage would be the one who could find new arrangements for data that were previously thought to be independent. The moment of making one of these new links he calls 'un coup' and for him, this fast change or movement 'at a blow', is true articulation or imagination. Perhaps imagination is something that we are trying to teach our arts undergraduates. Knowledge in the late twentieth century is still often guarded in traditional rigid structures. By offering new ways of exploring knowledge bases we may encourage our learners to make the next leap. The Context 32 programme at Brown University is one such offering [Landow 1990: passim] and Perry talks about how scholars can become involved in 'the sculpting of information into a larger and more cohesive whole' [Perry 1995: 86] when using the Internet.

We attempted then to stimulate this type of learning. One way of doing this is to provide the students with an on-line or electronic notepad (we used MicroSoft Notepad on the Windows operating system), and, by setting sample assignment questions, we drive the learners into quarrying or mining texts from the POETICA database of textware. The gathered or harvested text then forms the basis of an end of module essay. More recently we have been exploring the idea of encouraging students to store their notes directly onto the university server alongside their e-mail so that thay may access their notes from any computer on the Internet.

A further strategy is by launching an accessible e-mail Newsgroup conference over the Internet. This encourages participation or collaboration. Bailey and Cotlar have written on this [Bailey & Cotlar 1994: 188] arguing that through mail-lists 'behavioral [sic] patterns, attitudes, values and beliefs can be explored in meaningful ways.' They continue to say that the learning process is enhanced and often associate this type of telematic learning with the needs of the commercial and industrial sectors.

As yet, very few findings are available on the effect of studying in this way even though the Internet has been in place since the late 1960s. Reading between the lines of rhetoric in so many journal, book and newspaper articles of the early nineties we seem to be in the phase of accepting this new medium uncritically. It will be interesting to see if we are finding new ways of learning, new ways of imagining and if we are in the process of redefining what knowledge is.

In our workshop, we are going to explore whether arranging data is a move towards new knowledge. We are also going to see how teachers set up knowledge structures for learners to navigate and the implications of this for steering students to making choices about data, where to find information and about what to study.

Workshop Briefing - Ordering Knowledge

It is supportive of our final argument here to point out that the original classifications of animals based on the technology of observation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is being overtuned, as genetic matching divides some species and brings others closer together, for example humans and chimpanzees. Our final argument being that we might empower our learners to make their own classifications and for each of us, learners and teachers, to be enabled to order the world of knowledge as we see fit.

Now consider the topographic arrangement of the passenger maps of city metro systems, like the London Underground, which do not follow the complex nature of an accurate map but, instead, order information for ease of use, especially journey planning. As your learners discover or appreciate your patterning they can form hypotheses about the order and the relationships between the objects. This processing by the learners involves critical analysis, judgement, appreciation, calculation, even risk-taking and imagination. They engage with the textual objects or their signifieds, intellectually, and this, coupled with the observable outcomes of their decision making, could be said to be learning taking place.

Secondly, though, the act of preparing elements, the process of extraction, labelling and finally the arrangement of elements as objects of study for the students engaged the development staff so thoroughly with the materials and demanded of them such complex analytic and design skills that this too could properly be called learning.

In the workshop associated with this paper we will be exploring this ordering process. However, the purpose of the paper is not only to provide a model for the conversion of degree materials into hypertext structures for delivery via the Internet but also to suggest and encourage that next step so that we can begin to explore ways of providing our learners with the new knowledge-handling tools to stimulate their creativity and sharpen their critical and evaluative faculties so that they may be better able to deal with the information explosion of the late 1990s. The hoped-for outcomes being more imaginative responses to information, better-informed decision-making, more skilful handling of data, an enrichment of cultural content, greater empathy with other knowledge workers and access to a wider, global community thus making lifelong learners of our graduates.

When we look at the topography of hypertext structures such as interlinked Worldwide Web pages we can detect relational links in two directions, horizontally and vertically. This creates a hierarchy or layered menu structure.

You could also say these structures have a two-dimensional topography. It offers learners a list of options. They can choose one and follow the pathway down to a subordinate layer where they are presented with an object for study or a sub-list of options. This hierarchy is suitable for WWW Browsers, such as Netscape, which provide backward arrows (rewind buttons) for users to step back up hierarchical pathways in a straight forward way.

This design relies on learners evolving a mental location map of where they are in the structure. Early in our project students sometimes complained of being lost in the maze, and so we re-designed the Home Page (the starting point) grouping objects together. This lost feeling is suggestive of narrative. Two other features which parallel narrative are associated with hypertext. Firstly, the notion of travelling. Learners embark on a journey exploring textual objects further and further away from the starting point. Traditional narrative thread presented, say in film, is one-dimensional though, and viewers cannot return. In hypertext learners can steer their way back as cybernauts (c.f. cyber from Greek for steerer).

The other narrative-like feature which concerns us as teachers is the planting of a function or unit [Barthes 1988, 106-107] "The essence of a function is, so to speak, the seed that it sows in the narrative, planting an element that will come to fruition later - either on the same level or elsewhere, on another level. If in Un Coeur simple Flaubert at one point tells the reader, seemingly without emphasis, that the daughters of the Sous-Prefet of Pont-l'Eveque owned a parrot, it is because this parrot is subsequently to have a great importance in Felicite's life; the statement of this detail (whatever its linguistic form) thus constitutes a function, or narrative unit."

Let us use an analogy. In an early scene in a story or film, take for example, the 1995 Cannes Festival winner, La Haine, [Kassovitz 1995] the film's characters are shown discovering a revolver. As viewers we cannot escape from that knowledge, which Barthes would call a function. The revolver is planted in our minds and colours every subsequent scene. When will the revolver be used? Will it be discovered? We cannot see it but it is always there throughout the unfolding narrative.

We, as learning providers, can take advantage of that residual knowledge when designing links. Since we plan the route our learners must follow to access a particular text we can ensure they arrive there having passed through and seen pieces of information that will colour their approach to the subsequent pieces of textual information.

With these two ideas in mind then, hierarchy and function. I would like to invite you to arrange the pieces of textual information which we will hand out. The outcome will be a web of interconnected textual items which you have arranged for your partner to work with. When you have arranged all the items in rows and columns, please remove three items and mark the blank spaces A, B and C. Note on a separate sheet items you have removed and mark the letters corresponding to the blank spaces in your hierarchy grid, A, B and C.

Turn to your partner, present the grid, without explanation, and ask them to replace the removed three items in the places marked A, B and C. This will let you see how your arrangement or ordering has been communicated to your partner. This exercise simulates and provides a starting model for your own design of Home Pages and Worldwide Web materials.

Bibliography

Roland Barthes, The Semiotic Challenge, English translation 1988, Blackwells, Oxford. Originally: Introduction to the Structural Annalysis of Narratives, Communications 1966.

Mathieu Kassovitz (director), La Haine, 1995, FILM 15, Lazennec Productions (MEDIA Programme of the European Community)

George P Landow, Changing Texts, Changing Readers: Hypertext in Literary Education, Criticism and Scholarship, Reorientations, Ed. Bruce Henrickson and Thais Morgan Urbana, University of Illinois, 1990

Jean-Francois Lyotard, La condition postmoderne, rapport sur le savoir, Minuit, Paris 1979

Roger F Malina, The Fourth World: The Promises and Dangers of the World Wide Web, Leornardo, San Francisco,1995, 28, pp. 1-2

Charlie Mansfield, Tony McNeill, Simon Stobart, Knowledge Pathways (Les Chemins du Savoir), in Proceedings of the 5th European Distance Education Network Conference , Ed. Judy Frankl, Beryl O'Reilly, 1996, EDEN England. pp. 178-179 ISBN 0 7492 73615

L. Stephen Perry, Using the Internet for International Research, American Studies International, US, 1995, 33, 1, pp. 86-98

Lee Ratzan, The Internet Cafe, Exchange and Connection on the Internet, Wilson Library Bulletin, US, 1995, 69, 10, pp. 77-78

Charlie Mansfield and Suzanne Robertson
Learning Development Services
Hutton Building
University of Sunderland
Tel: 0191 515 2068
Fax: 0191 515 2279
e-mail: charlie.mansfield@sunderland.ac.uk

31 July 1996