In place of turning
in traditional papers on the subject, David Howenstine used the World
Wide Web to discuss sentimental abolitionist literature and
the general conditions of slavery in early America with his peers. As a
junior English major, Howenstine and his classmates in Lois Leveen’s English
341 class, “American Race, Sentiment, and Suffering,” were expected
to design personal home pages—sites where they could post weekly
journal entries on assigned texts and carry on more casual conversations
about them.
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At the beginning
of the semester, students had several tutorials on how to use Dreamweaver
software and learned the basics of website construction
from
Reed’s computing staff; after this initial instruction, they would walk
each other through new techniques on an overhead projector in the classroom.
The goal of posting journal entries on personal home pages was to help highlight
the connections between previous texts and a current novel or poem; by allowing
individuals to hyperlink from one journal entry to another, each entry became
more than just an isolated discussion. This web format allowed students to
include images in their writing, ranging from artwork to cultural artifacts
to photographs of authors, and to read and incorporate (via link) the ideas
of classmates into their own expositions. Finding himself a fan of this online
forum, Howenstine observes that “in general, web-based learning
pushes students away from traditional English ways of looking at
books and introduces
a much more historical and interwoven approach to thinking about
the various texts.”
For a final project, students split off into groups and designed homepages
dealing with one specific author and text. Howenstine’s group
chose Harriet Wilson and her book Our Nig. Their vision for
the site required them to introduce the author and text, place everything
in a literary context, write close readings of the text, discuss cultural
artifacts in relation to the text, include secondary and primary sources,
and provide other helpful links for the audience. This website was a
much more comprehensive project than the personal home pages had been,
as everyone had become adept at incorporating sophisticated features
into the design. Moreover, it grew to be a significant Harriet Wilson
resource and will undoubtedly take on an interactive life of its own
in the larger world of the web.