Academic Exchange Quarterly
Summer 2003: Volume 7, Issue 2
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Using the WWW for Classroom-Based Literature Seminars
Peter Yang,
Peter Yang is Associate Professor of Humanities and
LRC Director at
Abstract
This is a review of the use of the WWW for
classroom-based literature seminars. Due to the complexity of those seminars,
both teaching and learning are challenging tasks. Can dedicated Web sites help
meet those challenges? What can they do beyond meeting the basic need for
course management? How effective are the literature information pages, links to online full texts, Web tutorials, literature
forums, online quizzes and exams, search capabilities, and digital media?
Analysis of
Literature Seminar Web Sites
This
article focuses on the pedagogical considerations of the use of the WWW for classroom-based
literature seminars. It is based on an experience with the Web projects I
designed to enhance those seminars. I will review the functions and limitations
of various components of the Web sites.
The initial need for my literature seminar Web sites
was to improve seminar management. Later, I found it beneficial to maintain
links to outside Web sites with related literary texts. I realized that I
needed to create more valuable Web sites to meet those seminars’ pedagogical
requirements and started to create my own Web materials by using such Web
features as hyper-linking, interactivity, and cross-platform performance (Agnew
& Kellerman; Wang).
Seminar
Management Pages
Like thousands of other literature Web sites around
the world, my initial Web sites were to post general seminar information such
as a syllabus, class schedule, attendance and grading policy, and seminar
updates. The immediate results were that once objectives, grading policies, and
a class schedule were made readily available online, students no longer had to
worry about misplacing their hard copies.
In addition, seminar information, such as class
schedule and reading assignments, was directly linked to content pages on
authors, works, terms, themes, background materials, and other seminar pages
such as forum, tutorials, and quiz center. The direct linking gave students
convenient access to content pages, management pages, and seminar activities.
The Web sites became more dynamic, accessible, and user-friendly.
However, these advantages did not come automatically
with the Web sites. I had to verify and update seminar information and links to
content pages and external pages on a regular basis to avoid confusion and to
secure access.
Literature Information Pages
My first seminar Web site was dedicated to a “20th
Century Literature” seminar that dealt with fast changing literary
movements, authors of each movement, and works of each author around the turn
of the century. This period was associated with too much literary and nonliterary
background information and too many literary movements, experiments, authors,
works, ideologies, events, aspects and terms to be covered all in class. However,
this information was too crucial for the seminar to be treated casually.
The Web turned out to be an excellent platform to
present all this information because everything can be cross-referenced and
hyper-linked (Harris). I linked the years and places that were relevant to the
individual authors to resourceful external Web pages. Students could find from
the index of authors the biographical and bibliographical information of an
author, and his related works and interpretations. This cross-referencing and
hyper-linking feature made literature seminar information so contextualized and
meaningful that students could easily get more background information by
following the links. As a result, they displayed a more in-depth understanding
of the authors and works in class. The literature information pages were also
linked to pages such as Class Schedule, Literature Forum, Interactive Literature
Tutorial, and even Quizzes. When certain information was relevant to the
understanding of particular questions, the cross-links substantially eased the
students’ access to literary information and helped them understand literary
texts.
There was a concern about the potential for student
plagiarism because literary interpretations and analyses were readily available
in electronic forms, and students could be easily tempted to use them as their
own contributions—piracies, which were sometimes difficult to detect. The content
portion of the Web site was most tempting because it directly dealt with
materials covered in the seminar. However, the real problem was not in the
media but rather in the academic code of honor, the education of academic
ethics, and the university’s rules in preventing the academic plagiarism.
Students determined to steal intellectual properties would do so in many other
ways; stealing the electronic texts was just a more convenient way.
Another copyright and intellectual property related concern
was theft by colleagues. Therefore, some teachers were reluctant to post materials
other than syllabi. To protect my intellectual properties, I locked up
sensitive materials in a password-protected Web directory, which could only be
accessed by those who have express permission.
I debated with myself on what language (English or the
target language) should be used for seminar Web sites and decided to utilize
the target language because it was also the language used in the seminar. An
additional English version would be certainly an excellent add-on if there were
students struggling with the original texts.
Links to
Online Full Texts
The rapidly increasing availability and the hypertext
feature are often seen as advantages of online literary texts over printed ones
for reading in foreign languages (Schmidt), especially for extensive reading (Bamford; Day).
Searchability can be considered another advantage. Quoting exact passages and
referencing exact page numbers is crucial to a good research paper. The
literature book is often too thick and the search for “hidden” passages often
takes much time during the busy student’s overloaded schedule. With Web-based
literary texts, my students just had to run a keyword search to locate the
chapters containing the wanted passages. This significantly saved them time in writing
papers and strengthened their textual support of papers.
However, some students preferred reading books to
online texts because of the lack of tangibility in an online environment. Similar
situations had been observed and documented (Grossman). Therefore, I avoided
assigning long online texts for initial reading, but recommended them for research
purpose. In addition, because external Web pages with literary texts were often
of a transient nature, I regularly checked links to external Web pages to
maintain accessibility and avoid confusion.
Web
Tutorials
Since my literature seminars dealt with complicated
contents, Web tutorials were needed in addition to class activities such as lectures,
presentations, and class/group discussions. Web tutorials were designed to
interactively combine online exercises with related information, hints and
clues. They proved to be effective in helping students understand literary
works because interactive hypertext, automatic-check features (Woodlief, Paradigm) were included. With materials organized
in different ways, students often considered interactive exercises fun games
and liked them much more than regular workbook exercises.
The “response-based” (Meskill
and Swan) Web tutorials challenged students to think about various literary
themes. I avoided exposing students to too many difficult questions at once.
One way to both challenge and encourage them was to provide them with more
information in questions and choices and with instant interactive feedback.
For example: With a problem consisting of a statement
and four choices, the student should make a choice to single out the exception
in the statement. A blank field labeled “Feedback” immediately follows the
initial question. Information and interaction are so integrated that the
information does not take additional room on the question sheet. The student
can click any keywords in the problem either before or after making a choice.
Whenever a wrong choice is made, the tutorial gives instant feedback on the
problem, such as a link so that the student can review related materials.
It was convenient to accomplish this pedagogical goal
by using JavaScript, which allowed me to put together different learning
activities or components at one place to enhance the students’ interest in the
literature study.
Literature
Forum
The Web sites of “Comparative Drama” and “20th Century
German Drama” were designed both for the classroom-based seminars and for
future distance-learning seminars. This means that the Web sites must also
allow distance-learning students to complete the seminar requirements largely
online. To reach this goal, these Web sites had to offer a classroom-like
learning environment (Sala), in
which a “community of learners” could not only have detailed explanations of
literary works, but also participate “collaboratively” (Grigar;
Holeton; Wang; Woodlief)
in communication in “real time” or “on demand.”
The forum of my Web sites were virtual meeting places
for students to discuss questions related to literature seminars. They were
organized by author and then by his or her works. The teacher and students
posted questions and answered questions from other students. The forum had its own
merits. First, not every student was brave enough to ask questions in class.
Some chose not to ask questions in class and some preferred to raise questions
anonymously. The discussion online was more provocative than that in class. The
forum was separated into discussion panels. Students could easily locate and
respond to messages. This convenient platform allowed me to receive more
feedback from students and to incorporate questions posted in the forum into
class activities. Students were more involved in the critical thinking process.
Password protection was necessary to prevent intruders from interruption and
allowed students to use their real names if desired.
Another convenient feature of the forum was that
students could include links to relevant Web resources in their messages. I
encouraged those who had written excellent papers to post their papers in the forum.
These activities significantly electrified students’ enthusiasm and involvement
in literature seminars and enriched their learning experience.
Online Quizzes
and Exams
The relatively large size of “Masterpieces of Modern
Fiction” seminar I taught together with another professor made us experiment
with some timesaving and more efficient solutions. We set up a CGI-based quiz
center with quizzes of open-book test nature and allowed students to reread
literary texts when they took the quizzes. CGI and ASP were used, not Javascript, because the Web browser’s View Page Source
feature would reveal results in the Javascript. Java
applets with built-in security features could also be used for this purpose.
All these server-side scripts can prevent students from deciphering test
results.
The pedagogical rationale of the open-book quiz center
was to encourage students to read texts more closely and to think about the
contents and facts of the texts. Since the quiz center allowed students to take
the quiz online, the limited class time was freed for class and class
discussion. At the top of each quiz, there are instructions that acquaint
students with the number of allowed attempts, dates of the quizzes, and quiz
rules.
The automatic correcting and grading function of the
Web-based quizzes allowed students to check mistakes on the spot. They could
take quizzes a second time and, if they did not have an answer at the end, the
correct answer would be displayed. The grading function freed the teachers of
tedious correcting and grading, and the multiple-choice format of Web-based
quizzes allowed them to incorporate more pedagogical aspects into quizzes.
Students took the quizzes as an additional opportunity to study related issues.
Online quizzes could be reused with some adaptation,
revision, and enhancement for future classes. The initial investment of more
time and energy in creating Web-based quizzes paid off. According to my survey,
the students preferred online quizzes to traditional in-class quizzes because
they could take them at their convenience. They also appreciated the
possibility to check the answers online.
However, since the Web-based quizzes depended on the
network, technical problems of the quiz server and the network forced me to
postpone deadlines. The “soft” deadlines, in turn, invited students to delay
the completion of their reading assignments of literary works, which again had
a negative impact on class activities that relied on their reading preparation.
Another problem was that it gave the students an
opportunity to find out answers by communication. Poor students sometimes
“performed” much better on Web-based quizzes than in class. This “problem”
caused me to reevaluate the objective set for quizzes and tests. The online
tests were used as an assessment tool. Therefore, they were administered in a
relatively closed, monitored physical environment to insure the reliability of
testing outcomes. The purpose of quizzes was redefined as to help students
learn. When students achieved better results in online quizzes through
communicating with others, the intended objective was considered accomplished.
When there was a doubt about some students’ class preparation, smaller class
assignments (pop quizzes or question sheets) were given. Because literature
seminars deal with a much more complex mix, literature quizzes are often
different from straightforward science and math quizzes that can be easily
converted to Web-based quizzes. While literary concepts, biographical facts,
and historical facts can well be contents of quizzes and be further converted
to Web-based quizzes, it would be controversial to do so with literary
interpretation, especially if the tests were automatically graded.
Vocabulary
My drama seminar Web site has a vocabulary list for
each work covered. Whenever available, easier German words are used to explain
difficult ones. An advantage of online vocabulary lists is that words in these
lists are also linked to other related Web pages and vice versa. This back and
forward linking or “word webs” (Barton) allows students to reflect on the use
of the words in literary texts. An alternative is the annotation of literary
texts. The vocabulary lists and text annotations save students a great deal of
time for reading and thus more effectively prepare them for class activities.
Search
Capability
Another Web feature—search engine—made the literature
seminar Web sites pedagogically more attractive than literature textbooks
alone. Unfamiliar words or terms often obstruct students’ text comprehension.
In a book, it is difficult to get explanations despite the existence of
indexes. The Web search engine, which is put on a separate search page and on
each seminar page, allowed students to search for explanations despite the
enormous amount of Web pages on a literature Web site. The search function, in
conjunction with indexes of the literature Web site, saved students much time
on research.
Use of the
Web in Conjunction with Multimedia
I used audiovisual materials to enhance presentations,
interactive tutorials and quizzes. Student response was overwhelmingly
positive. They considered this combined use of the Web and multimedia a
convenient and powerful learning tool that visualizes, illuminates, highlights,
and accentuates learning materials.
Digitized video clips were used for classroom
presentations to enhance lectures and for Web tutorials. In class, I used a
frame-based presentation page with a menu and a video player on the same
screen. It allowed me to continuously present the video clips of various plays
by clicking items on the menu. For a
drama seminar, I assigned the viewing of clips of videotaped plays. The
screening was accompanied by discussion of various topics, such as: 1) how the
stage interacts with the audience; 2) how the plays can be staged theatrically;
and 3) how differently the three adaptations of Dürrenmatt’s Der Besuch treat the rich lady and the themes of revenge or
mercy. In tutorials, video clips were combined with JavaScript-based
multiple-choice forms, which allowed students to view video clips and then to
answer related comprehension questions.
Digitizing audiovisual materials has become relatively
easy and inexpensive. Digitized audiovisual materials have a potential to serve
as a more interactive and learner-friendly learning tool than original
audiovisual materials (Sammons). However, the use of video materials for Web
tutorials must be dealt with great caution because this involves more sensitive
copyright issues than that of photocopied print materials. It is highly
recommended to use these materials either in a face-to-face classroom setting or
in a password-protected Web site.
Conclusion
As analyzed above, dedicated Web sites can contribute
to enhancing literature seminars through course management, literature information
pages, links to online full texts, Web
tutorials, literature forums, online quizzes and exams, search capabilities,
and digital media if they are designed and used in a pedagogical way. The
limitations of those functions should, however, be carefully avoided.
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