AUC Academic Conference 'From Virtual to Reality' The University of
Queensland 1996AUC Academic Conference 'From Virtual to Reality' The University of
Queensland 1996
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Paper Title:
TEACHING THROUGH THE WEB:
TOWARDS THE VIRTUAL MUSEUMPresenter / Author:
Robert Hannah, University of Otago, New Zealand
Keywords: Multimedia, Humanities
Faculty area: Classics
Teaching through Computers: Background
Anyone involved in Classics - the study of ancient Greek and Roman cultures - these days should not be surprised at the use of computers in the subject. This use varies considerably. It may be a language learning exercise, a complex word-search on databases of surviving Greek and Latin texts, or a search for archaeological data on another database. All of these functions tend to have in common the use of HyperCard as a storage and search facility. Yet others may choose to "surf the net", sometimes via Gopher or ftp, but of course more and more now via the World Wide Web - and there are plenty of sites for the serious-minded student of Classics on the World Wide Web. The Perseus programme, which combines very good selections of Greek texts and translations, plus images of archaeological sites and objects, is available both as a set of CDs and online through the Web. It provides the user with the opportunity to create "pathways" through a growing body of material evidence of the 5th and 4th centuries B.C from Greece. The user, however, has no input into the collection of the data in this programme, and simply works with whatever the producers have presented. The Vergil Project, on the other hand, presents users with a highly interactive opportunity to develop the online database of literary and visual material concerning the Roman poet Vergil, and to add commentaries to it.
My own interest over the years has focussed on the area of multimedia within the Macintosh computer world. While multimedia signifies in its broadest sense the computerised assimilation of text, sound and visuals, preferably in an interactive fashion for the user, my own projects have concentrated on the combination of just text and visuals. With its emphasis on the visual image in its display, and with the development in the early 1990s of the QuickTime extension software to improve compression of digital images, the Macintosh had a head start over other computer platforms in the attempts to combine visuals with text without breaking the memory bank. The challenge since then has been to develop uses of multimedia which are instructive for the students - treating them less as passive spectators to something I have created, and more as active participants in the processes of assimilating and analysing knowledge in Classics.
Computers and Classics at Otago: databasing slide collections
In effect, I have worked over the past few years on three projects. Three years ago I presented a paper on the initial project, "Databasing and digitising slide collections", to the Apple University Consortium Conference in Christchurch. This exercise envisages the digitisation, ultimately on to CD-ROM, of the departmental collection of almost 10,000 slides.
The impetus for this had come from a simple necessity faced by me and my students in Greek and Roman art: there were no facilities in the university for them to review a lecture's slides. Given that there were unlikely to be such facilities in the future, it seemed to me more profitable to explore the possibilities offered by computers in making the slides available to students in another way. At the same time, I could make the whole slide collection available to the departmental staff, so that more informed use of it could be made for a greater variety of courses.
The first step was achieved relatively easily, of transferring to computer the textual basis of the slide collection. For this we used HyperCard, since it seemed to offer a more user-friendly interface for staff who were, and still remain, less happy about using computers to access information. Keeping things simple was also the key to the amount of information that I decided to have transferred to the computer version of the slide index. Lengthy descriptions or analytical statements have been avoided; instead effectively a system of key-words has been used to allow staff to find appropriate slides for their lectures.
For further information, they would need to go to the slide itself, and that, I intended, would be available on disk. It has been in the process of trying to achieve the second aim, of including scans of the slides on the slide database, that I have moved on to the second project.
Computers and Classics at Otago: passive learning - HyperCard
This is an attempt to make available in computerised form the materials, both the textual notes and the illustrative slides, for my particular courses in Greek and Roman art at Otago.
My work here is governed by two principles. Firstly, I want to establish a system whereby my students can have access to my lectures outside the lecture room - whether for revision, or because they have missed a lecture through illness. Secondly, I have doubts about the viability of the lecture (or perhaps just my own lectures!) into the 21st century. At times I feel the lecture, as a means of disseminating knowledge, should have died with the early Renaissance and the invention of the printed book. At other times I think the lecture system can work well, when I am able to put the physical and mental energy into what is really a dramatic performance in front of a large, and (because of the architectural form of lecture halls) necessarily passive, audience. A by-product which arises from this project, and that is the gradual accumulation of scanned images for inclusion in the larger database of the digitised departmental slide collection.
I am not happy with the notion of putting everything I say in lectures on board the computer. In my field of Classical archaeology, "knowledge" changes all the time, as new material finds come to light or new approaches to the analysis of old material are developed. There is no point in setting one's thoughts in digital concrete, which has to be broken up and recast in the next year. In addition, there are fundamental issues about copyright. The creation of a computerised lecture is, effectively, a means of publishing that lecture. And like all publications (in the western world, at any rate) appropriate acknowledgement and recognition ought to be given to the lecturer who has published lectures in this fashion. Similarly, there is an issue about copyright over the images themselves, and access to these images is necessarily restricted at present: there is no facility to print off the resultant scan, so it remains accessible only for personal study by the user.
Developments over the years in HyperCard, and the commercial production of HyperCard-based authoring programmes, have made the task of production much easier than it was at first. The limitations in the form of presentation, which such commercial authoring programmes offer, is actually an advantage to me, since it means I can avoid wasting time trying out innumerable options for background, font, arrangement of fields, etc. Such choices, I found early on, actually slowed down the production of the stacks, and now, while I know how to alter the formats by getting into the script, I ignore the temptation to do so, in the interests of producing the goods.
So far I have been able to transfer to HyperCard the course notes, and to scan in the slides for two and a half full year courses; the end of that particular tunnel is in sight in 1997 (assuming no changes in course offerings). Students, then, can open up a stack on, say, the Archaeology and Art of the Greek Bronze Age, read the course notes, and at the same time, view scans of the slides linked into the same stack. These computerised lectures usually contain only basic data and digitised slide images, rather than my analysis and opinion of the data. In this way, I can transmit the information, but leave to the formal lecture the actual personal process of digesting that information in order to come to some reasoned conclusions about it. The digital images are scanned in at low resolution, partly because this suits individual computer screen display, and partly to prevent printing of those images into usable hard copy form which might infringe copyright regulations.
Computers and Classics at Otago: active learning - the Web
My final project, to enable students to prepare multimedia projects themselves and specifically "virtual museum" entries for the World Wide Web, is ultimately derived from the first two, though its form may seem very different.
The first two projects provide purely passive experiences for my students in the realm of multimedia. Yet the enjoyment for me, as their teacher, is in the constructing of the material for the courses. Is there, I wondered, some way in which the students themselves could utilise the computer actively, and put together their own projects in text and image?
While HyperCard offers the students a multimedia experience, it is not so easy for them to author their own work in it. However simple the scripting language may seem to those brought up on more abstract systems, it is not sufficiently straightforward for mixed ability classes of students, some of whom still may not have touched a keyboard, and none of whom will ever have done any programming. For the sake of quality control and to improve the flexibility of presentation, I am a believer in knowing how to understand the basic programming language of what I produce. Students, I think, ought to know why things turn out the way they do, because then they can start to create their own work and remain in control of it. Large-scale operations, admittedly, tend to lead to short-cuts in the production technique, to speed up the very process of production, and I have done this myself by utilising commercial authoring software to produce some of my own teaching stacks in HyperCard. One could easily do the same in teaching students how to author their own work on the Web, by sending them directly to various HTML engines to provide them with convertors or ready-made tags. But this still seems to me to weaken the control the students could have over their own work. Not only do they not know why things might go wrong, but they may also lose the flexibility of mind which understanding the underlying language and syntax gives them - a flexibility which increases the possibility of really creative work.
It was in this context of searching for a means of enabling my students to do their own creative computerisation, in a discipline which does not traditionally teach computer skills, that I started to realise that the answer might lie in such facilities as the World Wide Web. Users of the Web will be familiar with the way in which this medium allows the integration of text, visuals and sound in a "hypertext" environment. In hypertext one need no longer move, as through a written essay, in a strictly linear fashion from idea A to idea Z, interrupted occasionally by references in footnotes or illustrations. Indeed, we know our own minds often do not work in that fashion as we work our way through problems. The logical presentation of one's thoughts is often encouraged by a desire to communicate those thoughts, or to make them more accessible, to another person. But the actual processes of creative thinking and of problem-solving are usually much less logical, more intuitive and digressive, more web-like. Hypertext allows us to present our ideas in that more intuitive, non-linear fashion, while still allowing us to impose on it a logic which permits others to read our thoughts and understand their trend. So students can jump from one "page" in the file on screen to another and back again, or on to a further "page" or illustration, and then back again, or on to yet another item, and so on. Clearly, for their entry to be readily understandable to other readers, some order must be imposed on the arrangement and linking of items in the entry through a directory of some kind. But hypertext provides the students with greater freedom to express their ideas as they come to them.
In my 3rd year courses on Classical Greek art and Imperial Roman art, I have introduced a semester in which students are asked to create a Web "virtual museum" entry. I set the students last year (1995) an exercise in creating an entry on the ancient Roman statue of Augustus from Primaporta near Rome, which is in the Vatican Museums. Scanned images of my own recent photographs of the statue were provided for each student.
A similar exercise in Greek art is being set this year (1996), centring on a Greek vase in the local Otago Museum.
Students had to have gained their "CAL Licences" before starting on this semester's work. This licence simply allowed them access as passive users to HyperCard stacks set up on central file-servers in the university system. It implied a very basic level of keyboard skills, and an introduction to the Macintosh icon-based platform. I then spent several classes training them in the basics of hypertext programming, from writing their essay-like ideas on SimpleText, to incorporating several basic HTML tags - typically those which govern paragraphing, styles of text, font sizes, and the insertion of images. At the same time, they were encouraged to view current entries for "virtual museums" on the international Web, to see the variety of approaches which exist, and, more usefully, to see precisely how certain special effects had been achieved by viewing the scripting behind those effects (since Web browsers allow the reader to view the background coding). While there was trepidation all round - would this exercise work, would the machines / network work (no, not always!) - the results were very encouraging.
From the students' point of view, this is a "real world" activity, even though their particular assignments currently are not being sent down the Web outside the classroom. It provides them not only with experience in using the computer as a word-processor, but, more importantly, with an introduction to the world of programming. It surprised me that not all students in these classes had experience in using computers as word-processors. This will change over the next five years or so, as the current generation of primary school children moves on through the secondary system and so into university. But it was very encouraging that none of the current students in my classes, despite their lack of expertise, failed to grasp either the basic typing skills required for the exercise, or the basic coding needed to make their entries download successfully onto a Web browser.
Some differences among the students did emerge. It turned out that while some of them, including even the brightest, continued to use a linear, essay-like approach to their entries, because that was the system they had been trained in and were comfortable with, others found that hypertext gave them avenues by which they could express themselves differently. They discovered different ways of directing their readers around their entries, via textual links and via images (such as making an image itself "clickable" and so linked to another image or "page" of text). Some adopted a suitably personalised "guide-talk" to entice their reader along certain paths in their entries. In other words, there was room in the exercise for much more creativity than an essay would encourage.
At a time when our universities are encouraged to make their students more "computer literate", especially within the Humanities, I think this project has done the job well. Computer literacy "out there", in the workplace, may simply mean an attitude, a willingness to try, and a relative lack of fear in front of the machinery. It can amount, of course, to specific word-processing and spreadsheeting skills. But it can mean much more. If we can introduce our students to the mechanics of programming, in however simple a fashion, it may mean that we are giving them more personal control over what the computer can do them in more ways than we can think of ourselves.
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Robert Hannah
Senior Lecturer
University of Otago
P.O. Box 56, Dunedin, New ZealandTelephone: (64) (03) 479 8711
Fax: (64) (03) 479 9029email: robert.hannah@stonebow.otago.ac.nz
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