Yesterday I gave a talk about VHL, online collaboration in the humanities and their impact on teaching at the day-long faculty showcase here at Brown. Although the Q&A was lively, overall I’d say the reception was lukewarm at best.

Presenting as I did in the afternoon, after having heard five or six speakers before me, I wasn’t surprised at the reception: everybody else was there to talk about WebCT, the course management software that Brown uses. This was WebCT’s show.

Given the title of the showcase, it was strange to me that the Instructional Technology Group representatives spoke of… well, nothing besides WebCT. It appears that many faculty members at Brown are being introduced to the pedagogical possibilities that computing affords only, or mostly, through WebCT. The brilliantly competent people at the ITG who create amazing Flash and Java animations at the professors’ request, and help out in general, seem to be doing this almost entirely within the WebCT framework. I think that this is a misguided strategy that is actually hurting the pursuit of knowledge.

Necessary disclaimer: I do not actually have a problem with the idea of course management software. But it seems that faculty here at Brown who come to using electronic tools in their teaching through WebCT seem to be by degrees less forthcoming to share the knowledge and tools they’ve created with people who do not work for them or study with them.

One big advantage of course management software is that it allows for electronic distribution of copyright-protected material to only those individuals registered for a course. An important feature, but one also available by other means: password-protecting individual files is easy. The same goes for electronic dissemination of grades: although, depending on the number of students involved, secure areas might take longer to set up, course management software is certainly not essential.

Our information technologists have integrated WebCT with wonderful electronic resources, such as the Brown Electronic Audio Reserve System (EARS). This has been rightly praised, but does not outweigh the negatives of using the software. These negatives are many.

The interface is clunky. About 70% of the people who had used it vocalized their frustration in this regard yesterday. It is not intuitive, it isn’t designed with multiple user types in mind, it does not allow a professor to see what a student would see, and it uses godawful mid-1990s icons. Okay, so the last one is an aesthetic preference, but really, aren’t we past clip art now?

Most importantly, course management software presumes that educators do not want to share their work. It gives you every opportunity to hide. Most materials contained in course management systems are unavailable for view by interested parties who are not directly involved with the course. Some systems (like CourseWorks, used by Columbia) permit faculty to allow greater access to their work. From what I’ve seen at Brown, however, faculty actually prefer to remain proprietary about the contents of their courses. Because we are at the beginning of a semester, and Brown has a class-shopping period for undergraduates, you can take a look at what’s on offer using a guest account. This account will be unavailable after February 11th, however; without it, most course websites look something like this. The most you get in these introductory pages is the occasional syllabus.

I talked about collaboration, of course, and about technologies that we plan to use for annotation of texts. Adapted, they could potentially help students to learn textual criticism techniques and professors to make comments on student work. But the mention of asking students to put their work on the web with unrestricted access was met with scepticism. Students, some said, need a safe space, a classroom or a closed community of some sort, to feel entirely free to express themselves. While feeling safe is important, students spend their lives online expressing their opinions in email, various forms of live chat and on newsgroups. Webcasting every class session might take the whole knowledge-sharing concept too far; but a faculty member who makes their materials widely available and/or asks students to publicly post some of their work does them a service. It’s rhetoric practice, and practice in expository writing. The feedback you get is both exhilarating (”I’m not learning in a vacuum, there are other people interested in the same thing”) and hugely useful in improving writing skills. I’d go so far as to predict that people who spend a lot of time communicating on the net will eventually make more engaging conference presenters. And goodness knows, we need some of that too.

MIT’s OpenCourseWare is the most shining example of what happens when you share your knowledge. The risk of people “stealing” your ideas and materials may be marginally greater than when you publish in print; but in the end, are we in the business of creating and passing on knowledge, or in the business of hoarding it? The world seems to be loving OpenCourseWare. MIT’s move promotes collegiality and sparks interest in “academic” subjects. It demystifies learning and makes it pleasurable, it sparks curiosity.

Course management software makes it easy for faculty to put stuff online even if they don’t really know what they are doing. But the resources Brown is spending on this could be put to better use by giving people support to disseminate knowledge, tools and materials in a way more balanced between public and private.

There’s a new blogging category: “typos and errors.” We’re finding some discrepancies between the critical edition and the one graciously provided to us by Prof. Pietro Beltrami and Opera del Vocabolario Italiano; such things are inevitable, and we’re keeping a running tally of error correction mostly for our and OVI’s benefit.

Today marks the first day of corrections, thanks to Mike’s eagle-eye proofreading. Two of them, both in Canto XIII, Esposizione Litterale.

1. Par. 13, which starts “Per le quali parole l’autore divenuto più attento…”: changed grai to guai.

2. Inserted missing par. 18, which I reproduce below for cutting and pasting. This comes right before par. 19, which starts “Dice adunque: E ‘l buon maestro…” Here’s the paragraph:

E dividesi questa parte in nove: nella prima Virgilio gli dimostra in qual girone egli è; nella seconda si maraviglia l’autore d’udir trar guai, e non veder da cui; nella terza Virgilio gli mostra come da questa maraviglia si solva; nella quarta l’autore fa quello che Virgilio gli dice; nella quinta lo spirito schiantato si ramarica; nella sesta Virgilio il consola e domandalo chi egli è; nella settima lo spirito dice chi egli è; nella ottava il domanda Virgilio come in quelle piante si leghino e se alcuna se ne scioglie mai; nella nona lo spirito risponde alla domanda. La seconda comincia quivi: “Io sentia”; la terza quivi: “Però disse”; la quarta quivi: “Allor porsi”; la quinta quivi: “E ’l tronco suo”; la sesta quivi: “S’egli avesse”; la settima quivi: “E ’l tronco: sì”; la ottava quivi: “Perciò rincominciò”; la nona quivi: “Allor soffiò”.

While going through canto XIII, I noticed that there are some odd inconsistencies in the use of quotation marks (odd in the sense that they are replaced by italics sometimes in our text, but not always. For the sake of documentation, the paragraphs in question are:

XIII.let.8, 9, 12, 13, 14, 22, 23, 24, 30, 33, 57, 59, 60, 61, 64, 84, 86 (twice), 87, 90, 93, 102, 105, 107, 111 and 112.

86 is a good example. You can see the inconsistencies quite clearly there. What’s our position on this?

M

p.s. Paragraph 18 was missing from the text. I have it, however, if anyone wants it…

Here’s a dynamic dropdown that I used for another site. It works fine with IE.
http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex1/hvmenu/

You can see that I set it up very similarly: http://www.holycross.edu/departments/mll/website/flas/flafront2.htm

The spammers appear to be getting right through the multiple blocks I’ve set up. They’re getting good. As a result, I’m setting the highest level of moderation on: all comments must be approved by the administrator (me).

There’s another way to do this: there exists a plugin that will ask the commenter to look at a random image and type in the letters and numbers appearing in that image. Bots can’t generally read images (if you know of one that can, that’s one hell of an image-recognition software!), so this is more or less a failsafe. It does create an extra step for every comment, but seems to work well for some people.

Uh, comments?

Edit: Okay, this is a bad idea accessibility-wise. It is unlikely but quite possible that blind people will be reading this blog using text-to-voice software. The image option would render them unable to comment. So for the moment, I’ll moderate comments.

We’ve gotten comment-spammed, big time. I’ve now installed a plug-in that should take care of that. Now, after I erase all those vicious comments, we’ll be back to your regularly scheduled mostly quiet programming.