Centenary College will host an ACS/Mellon pilot project in interdisciplinary liberal arts in 1997-1999. During a series of interactions in this pilot project, a group of faculty from several of the ACS member campuses will collaborate to develop one or more pilot interdisciplinary courses that they will team-teach over the Internet. While developing and teaching this course will provide the participating faculty with refreshing intellectual stimulation, the project is designed ultimately to reach beyond faculty development in order to benefit colleagues and students on the ACS member campuses by providing them experience with new paradigms in thinking, writing, and research; and to create a network throughout the ACS for developing ongoing interdisciplinary collaboration.
The specific goals of the pilot project are five-fold:
Timetable:
In Winter 1996-97, prior to holding the first face-to-face meeting of participants, the pilot project staff will polish plans in close communication with members of a six person advisory board nominated by the deans of the ACS member institutions. This advisory group will be identified by January 1997. For purposes of communication, the planners (staff and advisory group) will utilize both an e-mail listserv and a web site, both of which should be functional by early 1997. Early in the Spring Semester of 1997, the staff, in consultation with the advisory board, will advertise the pilot project among the ACS institutions, solicit and review applications, and select twelve participating faculty (ideally, one from each ACS member institution apart from Centenary, which will host and staff the pilot project). As soon as the participating faculty have been chosen, the web page and listserv will be opened to the prospective participants to ensure productive communication in advance of the first summer workshop.
The participating faculty will come together physically with the project staff in Summer 1997 (July 28-August 2) for a five-day workshop. The sessions will begin with an investigation and review of ways in which networked computer technology has changed processes of teaching, learning, and making meaning, including ways that the net can assist processes of student research and writing. The investigation will then turn to the opportunities and costs of courses taught (and, particularly, team-taught) over the Internet. On the basis of these investigations, and as a consequence of collaborative exercises (some computer-assisted) that will be designed to help participants refine the intersections of their interests and expertise, the participating faculty and staff of the pilot project will complete the preliminary design for one or more interdisciplinary courses (such as on "Teaching, Learning, and Making Meaning on the Internet," described later in this proposal) to be team-taught to students at the institutions of the participating ACS faculty and staff. By the end of the five-day workshop, the participants will have outlined specific questions that the teaching-teams will expect to address, potential sources (both on-line and in print) for syllabi, and anticipated applications of technology to the pedagogy of the courses.
During the Academic Year 1997-1998, the participants in the pilot project will further develop and refine their course as they share materials and insights through networked technology. All communications will involve members of the advisory group, who will participate actively in the planning of the course; all communications will likewise be open to ACS faculty "lurkers." Staff and participating faculty may travel as necessary in order to ensure that the interdisciplinary Internet courses develop on schedule. Participating faculty may choose to introduce an element from the planned course into one of their own courses in 1997-1998, so as to test the proposed pedagogy, resource, or element of content. In a timely way by Spring 1998, participating faculty will route the proposed Internet course through their respective institutional approval processes so that the course may be offered (and students at those institutions may enroll) no later than Spring 1999.
In a second workshop (3 days, summer 1998), the participating faculty will meet again to confirm their interdisciplinary collaborations, complete detailed syllabi for the proposed Internet courses, and update their investigation into new opportunities that have been created on the Internet in the year since the first workshop.
Thus, the pilot project will produce one or more collaborative interdisciplinary courses that will be team-taught over the Internet in Academic Year 1998-1999 by faculty members from across the consortium, and populated by students enrolled in the partiipating institutions. Faculty from throughout the ACS will be invited to "lurk" in this course, to ask questions of the participating faculty as the course is in progress, and to join in suggesting refinements. At the end of the course, the advisory group will oversee assessment activities and make the results available to the ACS. The vehicle for this evaluation will proceed primarily through surveys of faculty and student participants in the Internet course during and after the semester in which it is offered. Other appropriate assessment activities will be determined by the project staff and advisory board.
It is anticipated that the courses created through this pilot project may be repeated or modified to be offered again in subsequent academic years. The technology especially assists such an endeavor, since all materials created in conjunction with the course continue to exist in web links as building blocks for future incarnations of the studies. Besides developing their own Internet course, the faculty involved in this project are expected to become resource persons for others in the consortium who wish to involve themselves in similar opportunities for innovative interdisciplinary teaching and learning via technology. Pending funding from the NEH devoted to dissemination of the ongoing Holt-Shelburne collaboration growing out of "History of Ideas On-Line," the ACS may be assisted in these efforts by Professors Avery, Holt, and Shelburne (see attached letter).
Along with development of courses, the pilot
project will result in the networking of web pages, syllabi, teaching techniques,
and other materials between and among the participating faculty, the advisory
group, and others in the consortium who are interested in interdisciplinary
liberal arts, especially in areas in which understanding may be enhanced by
computer technology. The web site and listserv will continue to facilitate
valuable communication among the participants, advisory group, and others
who may join the effort after the pilot project has been completed.
The successful and nationally-recognized course in "History of Ideas On-Line: The Early Modern Creation of Space," developed and taught in Spring 1996 by Centenary Professor (and Interdisciplinary Pilot Project staff member) Steve Shelburne and former Centenary Professor Lynn Holt (now at Mississippi State University), will provide a template for our initial thinking in the development of the course through this pilot project. (Details of "History of Ideas On-Line: The Early Modern Creation of Space," including syllabus, lectures, on-line readings, images, and discussion mechanisms, are browsable [at http://holtpc.philosophy.msstate.edu/H-Ideas]. For access passwords, contact sshelbur@beta.centenary.edu.) The student and faculty investigators involved in this semester-long course considered space in its celestial, terrestrial, and mental configurations; examined images as well as written texts together; lectured, questioned, and commented through web technology, and developed ideas at the cutting edges of the intersections among philosophy, astronomy, cartography, psychology, history of ideas, and culture studies.
The course content for "History of Ideas On-Line" directly paralleled, and encouraged questions on, the transitions from a classroom-based to a computer-based pedagogy, in which gestural language is replaced by disembodied signs that must be read with new grammars and syntax. After all, the course focussed on the effect of various media on images of self-representation. In the early modern period, a shift from manuscripts to books fostered complaints that books would proliferate texts, devalue the written word, and threaten the sanctified authority of the priesthood with a flaming egalitarianism. Those complaints sound familiar to those heard in the current shift from a print to an electronic medium, and in the shift toward the apparent license of electronically-accessed instruction on the "Wild, Wild Web." We anticipate that similar examination of the technological medium will create a strong thematic component in most of the successful early incarnations of on-line courses such as we propose to develop on the model of Shelburne/Holt's course.
Specific technological choices for the "History of Ideas On-line" course included a moderated discussion group among the participating and other interested faculty, moderated discussion groups for student and faculty participants together, web posting of weekly faculty lectures and discussion questions along with pertinent images and documents, student paper submissions via FTP, and encouragement to the whole range of participants to identify and post links to other related sites. (In response to student requests, Professors Shelburne and Holt intend when they next teach the course to add a synchronous chat line to the asynchronous discussion groups that characerized their first attempt at the course. They hope that the synchronous discussion will help students make a less bumpy transition from the informality of the spoken word to what some students imagine must be the daunting polish of the written word.)
We propose to develop, as one of the pilot ACS exemplars of such an interdisciplinary Internet course, a study of "'Reading,' 'Writing,' and 'Making Meaning' in the Age of Electronic Culture." This course will consider ways in which the basic "survival" skills of our culture--"reading" and "writing"--are being reshaped by the emerging communications technologies that surround us as a result of the world-wide dissemination of computers, VCR's, interactive multimedia video games, cellular phones, fax machines, and cable/satellite television. As we move from a culture that has been largely regional, linear, and print-based to one that is quickly becoming global, polyhymnic, and electronic, we are faced with radical changes in modes of human interaction that this course will address. Such changes include the transformation of discourse and modes of thinking by multimedia, the political economy of information and telecommunications, and ethical issues of surveillance and data security. We propose to explore these issues and others with both on-line and off-line texts, so that the participants will be forced to consider differences between reading an essay on paper and reading one on screen; differences between writing letters and writing e-mails; differences between classroom communications and a seminar on-line; differences between information (and authority) delivered linearly and that accessed electively through hypermedia.
As we move more toward the theoretical in the study, this course will focus on theories of postmodernism. Issues to be raised and investigated include: cyberspace as the new community; freedom, censorship, and the net as the new frontier; cyberpunk and the cyborg mentality; simulation and virtual worlds; and the net as site and source of political organization and cultural resistance. Offline reading may include selections from Thomas Docherty, Postmodernism: A Reader; Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Message; William Gibson, Neuromancer; Benjamin Woolley, Virtual Worlds; and Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Virtual Frontier. Potential online sources are numerous and will probably begin in Alan Liu's VOICE OF THE SHUTTLE sites on "Technology of Writing," the "Computer and Composition," critical theory, and the "Cyberculture" pages (UC Santa Barbara); and in Jack Lynch's site on literary theory at the University of Pennsylvania. We would also utilize Arthur Kroker's online journal CTHEORY.
These ideas are meant to focus rather than constrain the eventual courses that will be developed in the interdisciplinary pilot project. The actual courses will develop out of the intersections among the research and teaching interests of the faculty who are chosen to participate in the project, and will be designed to meet the needs of the students at the institutions where those faculty teach. When the pilot course or courses are taught in 1998-1999, we anticipate that the member of the participating faculty at each of the participating campuses will become the instructor of record on that campus and will be responsible for grading the students enrolled from that campus.
It should be apparent that the paradigmatic course that we propose here will not conform to conventional patterns of relatively impersonal "distance learning": one of the participating faculty will be physically present for interaction with the enrolled students on each of the campuses at which the course is taught. That faculty member will coordinate the on-site student activities in conjunction with the course, including a weekly in-class meeting for synchronous discussion, portions of which may be broadcast to the other campuses via CUSeeMe technology, and regular face-to-face individual meetings with students as they work on course-related projects. In addition to the weekly synchronous discussions, there will be regular asynchronous electronic discussions and e-mail communications, as well as postings of lectures from participating faculty and other text, image, and video resources. Thus, in any given week, students will experience both face-to-face and electronically-mediated interactions, real-time and asynchronous discussions, and contact (actual or virtual) with all of the faculty who are teaching the course (and possibly with more faculty from among the ACS "lurkers" who are observing the pilot).
Because the emphasis of the pilot project we propose (and the expertise of the anticipated staff members) will be interdisciplinary, the materials and techniques that we investigate should be of interest to faculty in wide-ranging fields and in newly-developing areas on the boundaries of traditional disciplines. We anticipate that the pilot project (developing the initial paradigmatic courses) itself will attract a small but diverse group of participants whose very diversity will help shape the ground-breaking construction of the course we will plan together.
The project ought to interest especially faculty whose studies delve into transitional paradigms, such as historians of science or of intellectual and cultural history, philosophers of mind and cognitive social scientists, communication specialists, educational theorists, literary theorists, contemporary anthropologists, geographers, and theoretical physicists, to name a few. Likewise, this interdisciplinary course-development project should attract those teachers whose classes involve extensive writing (such as programs in writing across the curriculum) or whose studies can profit from access to recorded images and sounds. (Internet technology, after all, lends itself especially well to written communication; likewise, the Net offers the capacity to transfer rich supplementary information through digitalized audio and video.) Appropriate faculty participants may also include those who have responsibilities in cross-disciplinary general education on their campuses, as well as those who have previously developed interdisciplinary courses or have team-taught or otherwise worked collaboratively with colleagues.
As for required technical expertise, the
initial pilot project faculty should have considerable prior acquaintance
with the computer, the World Wide Web, and HTML or authoring software. In
this description of required technical expertise it should be clear that applicants
for the initial course development may be well served, before they attend
the first Interdisciplinary Pilot Project summer workshop, to enroll at one
or more of the introductory workshops in Web, HTML, or authoring, such as
those currently proposed and hosted by other ACS colleges. The planners of
the Interdisciplinary Pilot Project have expressly designed this "higher
end" experience in consultation with others in the ACS so that it will
not duplicate, but may productively build on the work planned in these other
workshops. Although the workshops will utilize an IBM platform, Mac users
should not be greatly disadvantaged.
The three members of the Centenary faculty who will staff this pilot project have worked in the forefront of developing and using technology in interdisciplinary teaching. All three are members of the Centenary Department of English, which has integrated the use of computer technology into its entire first-year curriculum in the past three years. Each of the three instructors is committed to interdisciplinary culture studies and to team teaching, and all three use technology extensively to aid teaching and learning in their classes.
Associate Professor Jeff Hendricks (PhD University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana, 1983) directs Centenary's interdisciplinary program in film, television, and video and instructs courses in professional communications for the Centenary MBA program. He is author, co-author, or editor of four books and is presently engaged in co-authoring a CD-ROM on the biodiversity in the Smithsonian's National Zoological Park. He has developed this project under the auspices of Red River Media Productions, an organization of which he is a founder and director. Professor Hendricks uses the Internet extensively in all of his classes and finds the technology especially useful in film courses for gaining access to rare film clips; in student research projects for locating materials not readily available in print, particularly at colleges with limited library facilities; and in courses on contemporary topics such as postmodernism, for which multimedia texts often act as embodiments of theory. He has given workshops for the Centenary faculty on student Internet research.
Professor George Newtown (PhD Yale University, 1979) has occupied the Centenary Endowed Chair of Liberal Arts since 1990. In this position, he has developed and taught many experimental, interdisciplinary, linked, and team-taught courses, including courses on "Religion and Violence" and "Images of Apocalypse" (both with a colleague in the Centenary Religion Department), on "The 'Other' in Francophone Literature, Art, and Film" (with a colleague in French), and on "Narratives of Disease and Death" (a senior seminar for Applied Science students offered for the first time in Fall 1996). Newtown experimented on behalf of Centenary with intensive use of computers in freshman composition classes, trained his colleagues in the Centenary English Department, serves as campus system administrator for the Daedalus program, and has run workshops for the faculty certified to teach in the program in writing across the curriculum at the college. He has made presentations on computer-assisted writing instruction at meetings of the Association for General and Liberal Studies and as a staff member of the ACS Summer Teaching/Learning Workshop and at the Society for Values in Higher Education National New Faculty Workshop. He is currently working on research projects in postmodern autobiography. Newtown will serve as the project director for the ACS/Mellon interdisciplinary Internet pilot project.
Associate Professor Steve Shelburne (PhD University of Connecticut, 1987) teaches early modern English literature and culture along with interdisciplinary courses in philosophy and art history. In Spring 1996, Shelburne collaborated with Lynn Holt, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Mississippi State University, on an Internet course called "History of Ideas Online." This course looks at the development of spatial consciousness in early-modern Europe. It focuses on developments in astronomy, cartography, city planning, and architecture and on their metaphorical applications in literature and philosophy. This team-taught Internet course has been highlighted in The Chronicle of Higher Education (15 March 1996) and featured in an article in the July 1996 issue of Connections, a magazine of 100,000 circulation produced at Electronic Data Systems in Dallas. It has also been cited by a senior advisor for the Library of Congress as an outstanding example of the use of distance learning technology. We expect that Professor Shelburne's course will provide a model for similar collaborative efforts among ACS faculty in the proposed pilot project.
The three staff members look forward to the
gathering of fecund minds that this ACS/Mellon pilot project will foster.