Dpt. of Comparative Literature
Univ. of Aarhus, Denmark
email: aeksp@hum.aau.dk
Paper delivered at the CALLMOO seminar, Bergen, Norway, 15 Dec. 1997
This paper is not concerned with MUDs and MOOs, but the technologies used in the HUMANITIES projects. My emphasis will be on the kinds of pedagogical situations developed through the use of technology. My aim will be to argue that telematic technology is not a neutral tool that can be used without considerations in order to increase the efficiency of learning, but that it calls for, what I would call, a media conscious pedagogy.
HUMANITIES is an abbreviation of Historic Universities Multimedia Network for InnovaTIon in Education Systems - and the universities in the project are the ones joined by the European COIMBRA university network. HUMANITIES' aim is to experiment with ways of introducing telematic technologies such as Video-ISDN and the Internet in classical European university settings. The goal is to develop concepts of Open and Distance Learning (opposed to simply delivering courses top-down), and especially HUMANITIES II was developed in a decentralised fashion between the participating universities and the task force in charge of the course content. The task force members were, as the participating universities, spread out across Europe (Daniel Apollon in Bergen, Barend van Heusden in Groningen, Norbert Bachleitner in Vienna, Domingo Sanchez de Mesa in Grenada, and myself in Aarhus), and even the planning was carried out largely through the Internet. &endash; The subject of the HUMANITIES II course was "Literature(s) in a Multi Media Context".
The communication technologies used were:
- satellite transmission
- video ISDN (high (384 KB) and low (128 KB) quality
- telephone (conference + one to one)
- Internet
WWW-homepages (http://www.dipoli.hut.fi/org/TechNet/org/humanities/lite/index.html)
news groups/mailing lists (http://www.dipoli.hut.fi/org/TechNet/org/humanities/lite/dgroup.html)
Internet Relay Chat
- Fax
- Mail (for texts, evaluation reports, etc.)
The main activity in the common project was five satellite sessions with lectures and discussions. For this we used a combination of satellite transmission, video ISDN, telephone, and email collected in our main studio; Univisjon here in Bergen. In the studio the various signals were combined and edited into one signal that was uplinked to the satellite (Intelsat 707) to be received throughout Europe. Some of the sessions were moderated from Bergen and had gathered professors in the studio in Bergen, which allowed for very high, satellite quality, image and sound. But as we did not want to centralise the course delivering and bring everybody to Bergen, the Bergen studio also functioned as a hub combining remote sites, using high quality video ISDN (384 KB) or lower quality (128 KB), though the low quality can be problematic for longer interactions.
For example, we had a session mediated by task force chairman Daniel Apollon and with the cybertext professor Espen Aarseth in the studio discussing with the hypertext professor George P. Landow and professor Enric Bou at Brown University using high quality ISDN video. Afterwards and during the session students from all over Europe interacted with questions and comments using low quality ISDN, telephone or email. - Another session with professor Siegfried Schmidt was mediated from a remote site in Münster (Germany) by task force member Barend van Heusden. This session included professor Jenaro Talens at yet another remote site (Grenada, Spain) mediated by task force member Domingo Sanchez de Mesa. Both these remote sites used video ISDN to transmit the signals to Bergen and uplinked to the satellite from there.
The discussions and interactions among the students played a large role in the project, though one should not confuse telematically mediated discussions with local ones. These discussions were initiated during the satellite sessions, and they were on beforehand structured into 3-4 topics which the students were asked to relate their questions to, in order not to end with a too fragmented discussion, as sometimes was the case in HUMANITIES I. This structuring definitely improved discussions &endash; and preparation, structuring, and mediation is definitely necessary, as discussions can very easily become fragmented, formal, and stiff because of the technology, the foreign languages, and the thought of the many listeners out there in the dark.
We also had two audio-conferences (using telephone bridges) among the students. However it proved to be difficult to get a good result from this technology. There will easily be noise from the many connected partners and it is a rather straining experience that should not exceed one hour and should also be firmly mediated. However, it is in other ways less stiff and formal than the video discussions and it helps tremendously in creating a common forum among the students. They hear each other (mainly mediated through their local tutor) and each other's points of views, and it slowly develops into an understanding of the different positions.
The last technology used for discussion was the Internet through mailing lists and mirroring news groups. We had four news groups and mailing lists for the literature project. These could be reached from a website with reading lists, schedule, technical information, help, and with links to relevant material for the course provided by the lecturers and local student groups.
At the time of the project in the autumn of 1996, students in comparative literature were still reluctant to use the Internet and enter the discussions. A way to further discussions was to have some collective work behind ones contribution, to make contributions to the discussion lists reflect local discussions. The telephone conferences and the satellite sessions often generated such collective questions and statements, and helped create a feeling of community. However, it is also important to mediate Internet discussions to secure that students' comments do not just echo out in empty cyberspace, and to avoid harassment of cultural differences.
To conclude on the discussions and the media used, they clearly functioned at different levels and each medium definitely also had limits. The best result was made when we succeeded in combining the discussion media to make them support each other. Thereby one channel animates discussions in other channels that on the other hand follow up on what is left out by the former. In general, the 'higher', synchronous technologies helped create a sense of a forum for discussion through the fact that they let only one speaker speak at a time, gives the speaker a somewhat prestigious platform and therefore create a stronger sense of a unified forum with a unified discussion. The Internet afterwards had plenty of space for the different threads in the discussions combined with the still very important discussions in the local classrooms.
In an interview on the WWW (http://www.altx.com/int2/george.landow.html) George P. Landow mentions, that the questions he got from the students in the satellite session mentioned above "were all rather dumb", and that he prefers listservs. He obviously did not locate our listservs and check out the discussions there, and of course he could not be present in the local classrooms where his participation was heavily discussed and prepared through reading parts of his Hypertext theory.
However, using telematic technology in university learning is not only a case of didactics. It also influences the kinds of questions raised and how they are raised. The HUMANITIES II project was from the beginning designed as a mapping of the new digital field for literary studies. From the very beginning it was thought of as an open project, more concerned with creating reflection and raising questions than necessarily answering them. And the answers that we got, for example from George P. Landow and Siegfried Schmidt were much discussed and criticised. The project ended with each local study group creating a thesis on their view of the future of literature in a multi media context - a dozen European theses of the future of literature - a truly grand event. After that the project unfortunately faded out, though there were plans of creating websites, papers and even a printed book.
Generally it is my experience that the open form and pedagogy of the project has been well suited for discussing such hypothetical and multifaceted issues, as the future of literature and literary studies. In general I think we succeeded in creating a critical environment for discussing these current issues and how such a notion of media literature potentially changes theory and the literary canon. Part of this success was, from a local point of view, definitely due to the fact, that the local teacher was not the only authority, and the space of the local classroom was not the only forum for discussion.
Of course there are limits to distance education; it can be difficult to present an ordinary lecture on television. But speaking of the limits to distance learning, one has to acknowledge that there are also limits to local education and "the big idea of presence", as Michel Serres points out in an interview (Artforum, April 1995): "One of the issues around this question is the idea of the larger-than-life presence of the professor. [...][T]he presence of the teacher is very useful for teaching but it also sets up blocks. We used to have young people who couldn't learn math because they hated their math professor, or who liked their philosophy professor so much that they became fanatics and lost their freedom of thought."
Serres' point is that each medium or channel, including presence in the classroom, has its limitations, which is what I have tried to argue. Each forum is controlled by someone and something that creates its ways of working; its genre. That is the case, not the least in local classrooms. However, when one adds new forums this control is spread out on different authorities and media - and the students have the possibility of skipping between forums and genres. &endash; To be specific this situation in Aarhus led to many interesting and illuminating discussions on methods, didactics and rhetorics in teaching - which of course was linked to the theme as well. As a teacher I experienced that I was far from the only authority but became more an informed mediator of &endash; and a contributor to &endash; discussions that included many different perspectives from texts and remote speakers. In this way it can at least multiply the perspectives to include more forums as we did, and the students will in this way get a more varied comprehension of a complex field of knowledge, such as the ones we deal with in the universities.
To succeed on a university level with technologically mediated distant education, it is my belief that we must use the remote control as a tool to open local forums and simultaneously use the local forums to subvert the power of the remote control. It is necessary with a media conscious pedagogy that changes both the local and the global setting without cancelling either of them. In this way we gain both global insight and local critical integrity.