Katherine Giglio teaches Shakespeare studies and Renaissance literature at the University of Central Florida. She holds a Ph.D. in English literature from Syracuse University (2006).
John Venecek is currently the Humanities Librarian at the University of Central Florida. He holds an MA in Rhetoric from DePaul University and an MLS from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Mr. Venecek has also taught English both at the College of DuPage and while serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Yekaterinburg, Russia (1996-98). His current focus is on employing interactive technologies to enhance information literacy instruction.
Authored for DHQ; migrated from original DHQauthor format
This article presents the results of a semester-long project designed to determine how
effectively interactive Web 2.0 technology can facilitate collaborative research in
undergraduate learners. The study was conducted during a 2007 advanced Shakespeare course
at the University of Central Florida that focused heavily on a new historicist approach to
studying literature. In this paper we first establish the theoretical foundation for this
particular approach to literary studies, then discuss more in-depth how the collaborative,
inter-connective nature of wikis allowed students to witness first-hand some of the
concealed assumptions enmeshed in the creation of historical explanation or narrative. We
also discuss how, in thinking about the past, this technology allowed our students realize
some of the stakes in describing history for the present. In other words, having students
create wikis based on the social identities that recur in Shakespeare’s works developed an
implicit awareness of motives for doing
history. We also show how employing open
source technology in a localized classroom setting can assuage some of the gaps we
experience in trying to provide enough period coverage while also attending to theoretical
apparatus and students’ experience of meaningful connections to material. On a larger
scale, creating inquiry-based projects can alleviate some of the humanities’ disengagement
from the real world
that many have been suggesting of late.
Exploring history, literacy and Shakespearean identity in the digital age.
...I don’t think or know much about the people in Shakespeare’s time other than they liked going to the theater and this made his works popular.
People in Shakespeare’s time ate drum sticks and lived short, dirty lives.
Everyone loved Queen Elizabeth...
The above statements are a sample of responses submitted by upper-division Shakespeare
students to a question posed at the beginning of the semester: What do you know about
people in Shakespeare’s time?
These quotes reflect some of the facts
gleaned by
students from other classes, movies such as 1998’s
know,or are at least part of what they think about when they think of the citizenry of sixteenth and early seventeenth century England. To the additional query —
is history important in understanding a literary text?— everyone assured us that it is. One student, elaborating as if writing for an exam, answered,
Yes, history gives a text more context and make meaning more apparent, make parts of the text more meaningful.Another stated the same thought more casually:
Yes. The time period affects the writer that affects the piece.No one in a class of thirty-eight responded negatively, yet their cautious responses suggest that such reading was simply mandatory and without immediate relevance; that reading literature historically was just another academic exercise expected of them as English majors in order to move forward to graduation.
The overarching goal of this class is to read Shakespeare in a reflective and ultimately
relevant way through the integration of historical context. This objective may seem simple
at first, but it is one that has repeatedly proven difficult to accomplish. Past efforts
have found that 1) Non-history majors frequently enter literature courses having experienced
history as an amalgam of mere facts to be memorized rather than material texts worthy of
analysis and application, and 2) time-strained professors trained in their own specialties [may] know very little about areas
outside their own fields of interest
and thus lack the kind of multi-layered
knowledge of a particular period or topic needed to facilitate deep textual inter-connection
truthover literary ambiguity looms always at the back of the classroom. As Donald Ulin writes, for those of us
juggling history, poetics, and the theory necessary for an adequate imbrications of the two...what are we to do with all of this material, given the time limitations involved in a semester and our students’ own limited grasp of history and theory?
The project described here was undertaken by a literature professor and a humanities
librarian at the University of Central Florida and was designed to meet this challenge by
merging our specialties — Renaissance literature and information literacy — in one
semester-long Shakespeare course. Our goal was to design an engaging, critical, and
theoretically reflective project wherein theory would emerge naturally
as students
experienced a full range of written and visual texts pertinent to the vaster understanding
of our given time period. As will be discussed in greater detail, we found that the
collaborative possibilities of wiki technology allowed students to witness first-hand some
of the concealed postmodernist assumptions enmeshed in the creation of historical
explanation or narrative. Our students were able to make original and meaningful connections
with both literary and historical material even as they struggled with one another’s
interpretations of primary and secondary sources. The inquiry-based design of our project
brought to light deeper and compelling questions regarding historical narratives. We will
discuss how, in thinking about the past, this technology provided a unique venue through
which our students were able to realize some of stakes in describing history for the
present. We will also examine the effectiveness of employing open source technology to
assuage some of the gaps we experience in trying to provide enough period coverage while
also attending to theoretical apparatus and students’ experience of meaningful connections
to material. On a larger scale, creating inquiry-based projects can alleviate some of the
humanities’ disengagement from the real world
that many have been suggesting of late.
In other words, our classrooms can be laboratories where important questions regarding
collaborative analysis arise first while we begin to work on the larger Humanities
2.0
projects called for by Cathy N. Davidson in the May 2008 issue of
New historicist and cultural materialist approaches to literature emphasizes the value of reading literary and non-literary texts from the same period as if they are in constant exchange with each other. Each version we present, whether through our lectures or the texts we assign, holds certain biases, focuses on individual intellectual interests, or otherwise produces gaps in historical narratives. History is a narrative that is always constructed, and even if we try to keep our own ideologies in check, we may unwittingly fall into pitfalls caused by practicalities, such as time constraints and overcrowded classes. With only one or two weeks to spend on
Having students create wikis based on issues of social identity in the early modern
period allowed us to address these concerns and develop an implicit awareness of motives
for doing
history. Although some have tagged the new millennium as the
post-identity age,
issues of gender, race, ethnicity, religion, class, sexuality,
and (dis)ability still inform the lived material realities that students, in going about their daily lives, must
contend with
Since many students came to class with some previous exposure to Shakespeare’s works, we asked them to generate a list of categories they had encountered in such plays as
Men,
Women,
Nobility,
Servants,
Religious Types,
Professionals,
Magicians and Witches,
Colonizer and Colonized,
Fools,
Poor Folk,and
Villains.Students then formed small groups of three to four members and chose a specific identity to focus on for the duration of the semester. Each group was then charged with creating a wiki based on the identity they had chosen. The wikis would include an array of primary and secondary sources that would serve as a research guide — a customizable course-specific database — that this and future classes could consult and continue to develop. We said very little about how the wikis should look or how the content should be organized. We wanted to give the groups as much creative freedom as possible in deciding what these resources would be with one stipulation: the wikis needed to include the types of historical and literary resources emphasized above. We hoped this approach would allow quality time to be spent on neglected topics such as the medical profession as represented by Lady Macbeth’s doctor, even if classroom discussion, as is typical, favored the play’s more glamorous villains and witches.
Moreover, we anticipated that amassing literary, historical, and critical materials
focused on issues of social identity would provide direct access to what Jameson called
the radical historicity of everything
—
that is, the notions of gender, poverty, race, ethnicity, etc., everything we may be tempted to think of as
permanent
conventions of referentiality in favor of abstraction [and]
idealization,
and is thus typically responded to by readers who have been taught to seek literature’s eternal verities
in preference to anything of local or historical
importance
Shakespeare especially has achieved an appeal based in part on his artful capacity for
abstraction. Students come to class expecting to relate
(earnestly or cynically) to
truth.
One of our biggest challenges in designing this project was choosing the appropriate
medium to achieve our goals. Wikis were a candidate because of their easy editing
functions and low learning curve. However, there is also a stigma attached to wikis thanks
in large part to the ongoing debate over the value of Wikipedia. The lack of
accountability and formal training of many Wikipedia users, as well as the absence of a
peer review process, often frustrates educators when its error-ridden entries are cited as
authoritative
in research papers. A recent example of this sort of backlash is
the case of the Middlebury College History Department’s decision to ban Wikipedia
citations. Brock Read writes that The problem with Wikipedia in the eyes of many
scholars is its open editing system. The site permits unregistered, anonymous users to
edit content alongside more traditional contributors
Wikipedia is very seductive: We all are sort of
enamored of the convenience and speed of the Web. From the standpoint of access, it’s
a marvelous thing. But from the standpoint of maintaining quality, it’s so much
less
For better or worse, wikis coerce users into making connections with other users and with
the material they present, and despite the ongoing debate over accuracy, wikis are being
increasingly used by educators who like the ease with which they can put collaborative
pedagogical values into practice. Most notable among these values is the opportunity for
students to work together, beyond the confines of the classroom, to negotiate language use
and the idea of discourse
and enact a public presentation of knowledge through the
blending of image, text, and sound (inevitably entails taking a stand on key theoretical
issues
and is an intrinsically theoretical as well as
empirical enterprise
remixing
them and exploring new connections and contexts.
The notion of context is worth discussing a bit more in-depth. One of the most common
criticisms of Web 2.0 applications is that they devalue information through a lack of
context and individual voice. Jaron Lanier, in his critique of Wikipedia entries, writes, Accuracy in a text is not enough. A desirable
text is more than a collection of accurate references. It is also an expression of
personality
When you see the context in which something
was written and you know who the author was just beyond a name, you learn so much more
than when you find the same text placed in the anonymous, faux-authoritative,
anti-contextual brew of the Wikipedia...You have to have a chance to sense personality
in order for language to have its full meaning
hive mind
Authenticity is crucial to society’s understanding of historicity,
whether measured in terms of centuries or seconds.
She adds that Digital culture wants to continually revise its
past as much as project into its future
frames information.
Further, The way a writer and publisher physically present information,
relying on resources outside the information itself, conveys to the reader much more
than information alone. Context not only gives people what to read, it tells them how to
read, what it means, what it’s worth, and why it matters.
Context, in other
words, creates a sense of the past, present, and future —
cultural and social, fixity and fluidity — on a continuum, irrespective of
technology
It is our contention, however, that the pedagogical applications of Web 2.0 technology
under consideration here provide an outlet through which educators can entice students to
look beyond fixed notions of authenticity and create new contexts that emphasize
flexibility in a way that is relevant to the current culture of information. James Hilton
speaks to this point when he compares current trends in the information seeking behavior
of college students to what he calls the rip,
mix and burn
era of music: Today’s students want to be able to take
content from other people, they want to mix it in new creative ways — to produce it,
to publish it, and to distribute it
remix and personalize
their research would help them find
their voices as scholars fully engaged in the act of knowledge production.
Viewed in this light, consensus can be seen, not as a final goal, but as a starting point from which students are encouraged to look for gaps in knowledge, imagine alternative interpretations, and contribute to the ever-changing, adaptable structure of the wiki. This point recalls John Trimbur’s classic essay,
is to reach consensus through an expanding conversation
in Bruffee’s social constructionist pedagogy, the language used to reach consensus acquires greater authority as it acquires greater social weight: the knowledge students put into words counts for more as they test it out, revising and relocating it by taking into account what their peers, the teacher, and voices outside the classroom have to say
the use of consensus in collaborative learning is an inherently dangerous and potentially totalitarian practice that stifles individual voice and creativity, suppresses differences, and enforces conformity
revise it, as a step toward developing a critical practice of collaborative learning,and continues to argue that consensus
can be a powerful instrument for students to generate differences, to identify systems of authority that organize these differences, and to transform the relations of power that determine who may speak and what counts as a meaningful statement
Trimbur’s words echo a point made earlier about how historical interpretation has the
power to unlock difference and, in so doing, can open a text to a greater array of
possibilities. Consensus, then, becomes a source of conflict rather than a mere act of
assimilation: Redefining consensus as a matter
of conflict suggests, moreover, that consensus does not so much reconcile differences
through rational negotiation. Instead, such a redefinition represents consensus as a
strategy that structures differences by organizing them in relation to each
other.
In this way, Trimbur continues, consensus cannot be known without its
opposite — without the other voices at the periphery of the conversation
force change
in people’s interest,
but Trimbur adds that we need to look at collaborative learning not merely
as a process of consensus-making but more important as a process of identifying
differences and locating these differences in relation to each other
We hoped to avoid the afore-mentioned pitfalls and use the technology in a way that would
not only illuminate the interpretability of historical materials, but would promote the
sort of difference that Trimbur is concerned with. It is one thing to present students
with abstract theory, but quite another to have them engage with the phenomenon from which
theory is created, and forms of history — be they literary, social, economic, or otherwise
— are written from particular positions and involve judgments made in the present about
who and what is important in the past. Our students would engage with difference
on
three levels: first, through researching how identities of the past were qualified by
others, and second, by experiencing how these identities were interpreted by a playwright
interested in representing them for entertainment purposes in a certain place and time.
Third, the kind of substantive group negotiation engendered by wikis would enable students
to recognize their own positions by having to account for the alternative perspectives of
their classmates. Together, they would hone
their skills of inquiry by practicing them through collaboratively constructing a
text,
engaging in a kind of meta-historical conversation while working in a new
kind of classroom sphere
We were also interested in what impact this technology would have on the information
seeking behavior of our students. As stated above, we sought to embed research methodology
into the general discourse in what might be thought of as an integrated
approach to
information literacy. While an in-depth analysis of information literacy is beyond the
scope of this essay, it is worth noting that one trait many such programs share is that
they treat research methodology as something that can be taught outside of, or as an
add-on to, course content. The problem with this approach is the assumption that, after
being exposed to what are often referred to as one-shot
instruction sessions,
students will be equipped to navigate a complex maze of resources and make appropriate
course-specific choices. However, a number of studies have shown that, by and large, this
is not the case. Davis and Cohen, for example, conducted a citation analysis of research
papers in an introductory-level microeconomics course at Cornell University from
1996-1999. Their findings showed a fairly significant decrease in the number of
traditional
scholarly sources (books and journals) used by students during this
time. In general, students cited fewer books in 1999
than they did in 1996. Comprising nearly one third (30%) of total citations in 1996,
book citations dropped to less than one fifth (19%) in 1999. This translated into a
decrease from 3.5 books per bibliography in 1996 to 2.2 in 1999, with the median
citation number dropping from 3 to 1
web documents
cited,
one might surmise that a general increase in Internet usage during this time played a
factor in the shift away from books and journals. As a result, the authors conclude that,
since students are very literal
when it
comes to requirements, instructors should be more prescriptive with the types of resources
they would like to see students use
To test this hypothesis, Davis conducted a second study in 2000 in which he implemented
three recommendations based on results from his 1996-1999 study. Those recommendations
were stricter guidelines about what types of sources students should be allowed to use,
the creation of scholarly portals to guide students to authoritative
sources, and
more instruction about how to critically evaluate sources The results of the 2000 update suggest that the
professor’s verbal instructions had little (if any) effect on improving the scholarly
component of research papers. The number of traditional scholarly materials cited this
year was similar to previous years. Bibliographies grew, but only in respect to
additional web sites and newspapers. When viewed as a percentage of total citations,
the
scholarliness
of bibliographies continued to declineA possible crisis in undergraduate scholarship is at
hand
and that librarians and professors should work more closely and provide more clearly defined expectations in
their assignments
instruction and encouragement
(typified by
Davis’s approach) and their own instruction-and-penalty
approach. They ultimately found that instruction and encouragement has very
limited effect on the quality of student research, but instruction-and-penalty does
have significant effects
While the original results from Davis and Philips may have been surprising, the results
of the Robinson and Schlegl should be less so. Penalties are no doubt a strong
motivational tool, but they don’t address a larger issue that is at stake. Jason Martin
recently surveyed 200 education majors at the University of Central Florida to determine
what impact library instruction was having on sources used by his selected group of
students. Martin concluded that, not only is there no clear association between library
instruction and the type of sources used, but that student behavior is not so much
informed by what they know to be right or wrong as it is based on comfort and convenience.
His results revealed that, while 79% of the students surveyed acknowledged that library
resources were generally more reliable that Internet sources, 52% of the respondents based their decisions
more on convenient access than on the authority of the sources
they would not have gained a deeper
understanding of the critical importance of using academic sources
deeper understanding
gets
to the heart of one of the key components of information literacy: self-reliance. Instead
of using library instruction to guide students through portals of pre-approved,
authoritative
sources, it is our contention that the best approach is to
encourage students to be self-reliant, critical researchers. As the culture of information
continues to evolve and become more complex, and lines between library catalogs and the
Internet become increasingly transparent, distinctions between what counts as
scholarly
and non-scholarly
will also become less obvious. In such an
environment, emphasis should always be placed on the ability to seek, access, and assess
quality information, but this should be done in a way that accounts for the wide variety
of new and emerging sources of information.
Early in the semester, an introductory session was dedicated to forming the groups
described above, setting up accounts, and familiarizing students with the key wiki
functions. During this session, students were also given a list of expectations for their
online creations (see appendix 1). We created loosely constructed guidelines to allow the
groups as much freedom as possible in deciding what should be included in their wikis
while keeping the material task-relevant. After some initial apprehension from students
who, after being told for so long not to use wikis, were surprised that they were being
asked to create one of their own, this open-ended approach provided insightful discussion
on the cultural importance of Shakespeare and of intellectual presentation more generally.
As Doug Brent suggests, the online environment gives students ample opportunity to figure it out from the inside, not the
outside
In addition to the introductory session, the collaborating librarian, who also provided behind-the-scenes technical support, visited class regularly to provide instruction about using databases such as MLA and Early English Books Online (EEBO), and to conduct several workshop sessions later in the semester to help students in a more informal manner. During these sessions, we made a conscious effort to focus on strategies for seeking and assessing information gleaned from a wide variety of sources. Since special emphasis had been placed on primary sources, we talked specifically about how to search for such materials, not only through the UCF library catalog and databases, but also in the ever-increasing number of digital collections and other online resources. This approach would help us break free of the scholarly/non-scholarly dichotomy, which typically prompts students to rely on what is available in a single library collection, and focus more on research as exploration in interactive environments.
Calandra and Lee speak to this point in a recent article about their Digital History
Pedagogy Project: In seeking to position students as active
learners who are regularly constructing knowledge, the Context for learning becomes
important. Advances in digital media have led to the development of more complex,
authentic, and engaging learning environments and tools. Through the use of such
digital media, digital history can enable students as they attempt to construct
historical understandings which reflect the complexity of the past
suggests that a learner can be viewed as a knowledge constructor who actively selects and constructs pieces of verbal and visual knowledge in unique ways
meaningful learning occurs when learners select relevant information from what is presented organize the pieces of information into a coherent mental representation, and integrate the newly constructed representations with others
physical manipulation of digital media by the learner that supports active, meaningful learning; but that also produces tangible, shareable knowledge representation created by the learner
In their
open[ing] new realms of creative possibilityby rejecting
the notions of a fixed and final telos, absolute original, or ultimate fixed center (or foundation) to any process
The notion that all historical interpretations are colored by perceptions emanating
from a particular point of view was one of the primary theoretical precepts experienced
by our students, many of whom were able to recognize how different authorizing
institutions, namely government and the church, interpreted poverty, and the way
creative writers such as Shakespeare are always invested in some kind of interpretation.
One student working on representations of the poor stated in his final analysis that
Shakespeare’s work is more than beautiful old
language and stories; before doing this, I never would have been able to say that
Shakespeare included references to such political and seemingly esoteric things such
as houses of correction and criminals and beggars. I had read two of the plays before
and I think these references just went over my head.
The ability to
meaningfully connect plays to important social concerns circulating at the time of their
creation was fostered by having to make critical interpretive choices as a group: We
started our project taking for granted that the poor were victims,
he explained,
until [one group member] mentioned the Friar [of Romeo and Juliet]. His poverty was
a choice.
The group took a long time negotiating this second insight into poverty
because we kept arguing over if we should present both views.
The title of
their final wiki,
those who chose to be poor, and those who had no options to fight against it(see Figure 1). This group effectively collected and situated appropriate Elizabethan tracts to witness agency and then measure how both views of agency could be true.
Another group member commented on their decision to explore both the merry beggar
and the resentful poor
in several plays. I worried that our definition was too
loose but it seems to me that Shakespeare always gives us both sides of the same
coin.
For this group, a less abstract view of the Elizabethan impoverished emerged
through combining references to the poor in plays with poor laws and sermons, source
materials typically referred to by scholars and advanced graduate students. In other
words, by assessing primary and secondary source material, students achieved some
scholarly authority. The off-line collaboration demonstrates some of the highest goals
we hold for collaborative learning: responsible for creating their own body of
knowledge, students worked outside of class to discuss and negotiate the information
that each brought individually to the table, a move that ultimately led to deeper and
vaster thinking about a subject. Many teams remarked upon Shakespeare’s ability to
double-deal with both positive and negative discourses of identities circulating in his
era. This led them to think about the playwright as an active interpreter of his own
period, and about the intrinsic capacity of facts
to be interpreted in multiple
ways.
The students charged with creating a page dedicated to the
innocentand unsullied native civilization. Face to face, the class could spend only one allotted hour comparing both, a conversation that ended with most students favoring Hakluyt’s tract as the one that shed the most meaning, while the latter seemed only to useful in contextualizing Gonzalo’s famous utopian speech. Online, however, students expressed an understanding of a different kind. Their wiki discussion of
framework for representing Calibanis also in play (see Figure 2). For these students, Caliban appears both as a potential rapist of Miranda and a victim of physically torment having had,
through violence, to learn the language in order to survive...and forced to abandon his own language.
This is not to say that at least one student would not have arrived at this more
inclusive understanding through the process of writing an individual research paper.
However, the editing history suggests that the collaborative process played an active
part in increasing the whole group’s sensitivity to Shakespeare’s multiple
interpretations of his subject. The three most significant edits to the page occurred
throughout November when we were covering the play in class. One student began the page
with a few simple reading notes, arguing that Caliban is the colonized other and
Prospero is the master figure.
A week later, another student reminded the group
that Caliban represented a kind of danger to the newcomers, carrying with him the threat
of rape and potential for violence. The first student reminded everyone that this early
suggestion of interracial sexual relations
had negative implications that were
alive and well in our own time (see Figure 3, Figure 4, Figure 5). In plays
such as
men of colorare
often demonized and accused of barbarity in order to furtherHer point was taken seriously as there was a week-long lull in the production of the page until the young woman finished it herself. The second student summed up the negotiation best when, in his final report, he suggested that his reluctance to continue posting on the subject came more from indecision than any real power-play between students:otherthem and justify keeping them away from women. The black male rape myth stems from these very notions.
I chose not to continue working on this page because it occurred to me that Caliban was never really there [in the play]. Our group couldn’t decide if he was presented in a positive or negative light as a colonialother.I think we never get to view him just on his own terms.
Lanugage as a weapon of the colonizer.
As the class struggled to think about what Shakespeare thought of people in his own
historical moment, they also fought with the idea that Shakespeare was a historical
entity or more specifically, a looking at works
through
Despite her engagement with
James I’s absolutist philosophy of kingship and the play, royal
eyes put a new spin on each play. I began reading each play
keeping in mind that Shakespeare had to be sure not to offend his monarchs and in the
end, had to always uphold their right to the throne in some way. I have begun to think
of him as a less brilliant and more sychophantic [sic] playwright...so in some ways
this project hurt my appreciation of Shakespeare.
This student’s grievance articulates not only her own individual struggle of
disenchantment with Shakespeare-the-great-writer but also that of her peers, which was
expressed less directly in words but perceivable through the images they included or
failed to include in their wikis. Despite the depth and reflective range of
historiographical textual interpretations, the limited range of the pictures suggests
that the students were taking a somewhat different approach to visual presentation. The
nobility
group chose to include pictures of Elizabeth II’s bejeweled crowns and
lush nineteenth- and early twentieth-century paintings such as John Waterhouse’s
Yes, he was just that sexy,a superfluous if not comical remark given as if the student recognized that the image of the male author misrepresented their topic and even devalued the analytic work therein (see Figure 7).
The disconnect between text and image presented us with an unexpected and interesting
dilemma. Our initial reaction was that many groups had fallen into the trap of
emphasizing style over substance. Many English majors have primarily been trained in
textual rather than visual analysis, which is still an emerging area of English studies.
Our students were both negotiating this new technology and struggling to define an
appropriate audience for the work they were creating. For many, the Internet is
primarily a place to engage in social interaction and the consumption of popular
culture, a place to converse with peers rather than serious researchers with whom they
may not yet feel authorized to speak. Notably, most pictures were situated throughout
the pages in the upper halves of each field, or used as dividers between topic sections,
those places where a viewer would immediately encounter new written analysis and might
expect, magazine-style, an image to hook
their interest. If, as John Zuern
suggests, [t]he most complicated and ultimately
most productive aspect of the transition from word to image in teaching is the
capacity of images to do more than simply restate verbal messages, to resist, in fact,
any mere repetition of the verbal statement,
then the images the students
chose resisted the socio-political analysis and the historical temporality in which they
were urged to engage
Overall, the project offered students a closer view of Shakespeare’s plays as
historical material broadly conceived. Characters in the plays were not cordoned off as
timeless inspirational entities, but instead, became figures that required a special
kind of consideration grounded in the playwright’s historical moment. This primary goal
achieved, new kinds of critique was elicited by students who, in seeking ways to
conceptualize characters as a group and for the public internet, were made savvy of some
of the pitfalls of doing
history. Mid-point in the semester, several students
realized that the specific kind of history required by the instructor was only one of
many historical narratives available to explore. One student in the supernatural
group found her intellectual enthusiasm reined-in by her group: In looking at the
witches and witchcraft and mostly
The editing record of this student’s work
shows that this conversation occurred early on in the semester as she set up fields for
these areas to fill in over a weekend, but later in the week she had shifted her
interest to conform to both group and instructor expectation. Admittedly, she was
limited by her group missing the creative component of doing a socio-political history
that I know a ton of information about the
serving class and can talk more concretely than anyone about Malvolio’s expected role,
but not so much about other areas of interest. I think that this was a good project to
help us understand Shakespeare’s works, but it does limit us to only being experts on
one aspect of his works.
The point made by this student is representative of an issue that recurred in many
final reaction papers; namely that, while the wikis provided students an interactive
outlet through which they could explore characters and themes that would not have been
part of regular lectures, there wasn’t enough time to explore wikis other than their
own. In the end, even though the wikis helped fill in some of the gaps that naturally
occur in any class, the students didn’t get to experience the full benefit of their
work. The primary reason seems to be that they were so focused on building their own
wikis that there was very little time for crossover or interaction between groups. This
may be because they developed a sense of subject specialization described above, or
because they felt a natural attachment to their own work. In any case, the nature of the
research inadvertently enforced subject-specific boundaries while crossing the
disciplinary limits of literature, history, and information studies. This replicated, in
a smaller single-classroom form, the larger enterprise of university research, wherein
distinct precincts of the world
become scrutinized by a small group of specialists
reading and writing principally for each other
Collaborating on the historically specific identities at play in Shakespeare’s works
coerced students to contend with challenges inherent in postmodern knowledge production.
This project, with its requirements to link image with text, illustrated how Shakespeare
always comes pre-packaged as a cultural icon before students enter our classrooms.
Further, it provided students the opportunity to appreciate Shakespeare through his works
as a uniquely talented but, like ourselves, politically and socially invested human being.
Students also recognized gaps inherent in knowledge acquisition when solely depending upon
their professors as authorities. By recognizing these gaps, they were encouraged to
explore both primary and secondary resources, text and image, in an attempt to challenge
established interpretations of these works and make new connections — a potentially
overwhelming task given the unwieldy nature of Shakespeare studies. As a result, our
students grappled not only with issues related to historical and literary interpretation,
but also with the breadth and scope of what they could hope to achieve in one semester.
Our response was to emphasized quality over completeness and to encourage students to
rethink their approaches to research and to become more savvy users of information. After
some initial anxiety, we found that they were, in fact, using a relatively high level of
resources, especially when compared to other previously cited studies. For example, while
the average number of citations in our project is on par with the Davis and Cohen study
(12.3 per wiki to their final result of 11.9 per paper in 1999), the ratio of scholarly
materials used (books and articles) in each project was much different. While David and
Cohen saw a decline from 30-19% in three years, we recorded a much higher 43% of total
citations from books and 22% from articles for a combined total of 65%. After weeding out
books and articles that were from popular or otherwise non-scholarly
publishers, we
were left with 48% from scholarly books and articles. Additionally, nine out of the twelve
groups consulted primary sources for a total number of thirteen citations among those nine
groups. We included these in the scholarly
category primarily because they
demonstrated proficiency using an academic database (EEBO). Along with a few academic web
citations, this brought our final scholarly/non-scholarly total to 59/41% (see appendix 2
for a complete breakdown of the citations).
Our scholarly/non-scholarly ratio is much lower than in the Robinson and Schlegl study,
which achieved 86% using the instruction + penalty
method that we previously argued
against. It is also worth noting that, while we were happy with the results of the catalog
and database searches, those results didn’t transfer to the quality of online searches.
24.5% of all citations were from the Internet, which averages to about three web citations
per wiki. This number is not overwhelming, especially considering we were working in an
online medium, but relatively few of these citations were academic (only four out of 36
total). Although this is clearly an area to improve upon in future classes, we believe the
results are significant enough to support our assertion about the value of integrated
library instruction — that by making discussion about research methodology part of the
general discourse throughout the semester, students would become comfortable enough with
the library catalog and databases to use them at a higher rate than we have seen in
previous studies.
Another area to be dealt with is the problem of subject specialization described above.
This problem posed a challenge to one of our key hypotheses: that employing open source
technology would assuage some of the gaps we experience in trying to provide enough period
coverage while also attending to theoretical apparatus and students’ experience of
meaningful connections to material. Collectively, the project did start to accomplish this
task. However, as stated above, because they were so focused on their own creations, there
wasn’t sufficient time for extensive crossover and exploration. One possible explanation
for this trend might be that the groups striving for too much coverage, thereby resulting
in entries that were often too general or uneven. In fact, many students asked about what
we thought the wikis should look like and how long they should be, always striving, it
seemed, for a sense of finalization or
It would be possible for a wiki, or a community of wiki users, to strive toward a
finalized authoritative edition,
but, as Schroeder and den Besten point out in
their analysis of the Thomas Pynchon
adopt a more playful approach which treats texts as having endless scope for further work
competition to complete the taskwhich, they say, would not occur if the wiki entries were organized alphabetically or by topic as in a traditional scholarly bibliography
where endless detective work is called for, and this may apply to other areas of e-research or online collaborations