THE HOUSE THE WEST BUILT
A MULTIMEDIA PRESENTATION BY STUDENTS IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION

http://www.usd.edu/honors/hwb.html
by
Clayton Miles Lehmann
Syllabus '97

I presented the following paper at the Syllabus '97 Conference at Sonoma State University in July 1997. Much of the extensive discussion following my presentation concerned the degree to which a project such as the one described here actually improves student writing or historical thinking. Several of us pointed out that the purpose of such projects need not necessarily involve a better way to learn, but rather simply a different way to learn, a different way for students to do their work. And it appears that because the Internet will continue to constitute an increasingly prevalent mode of communication, such projects do indeed have relevance.

In the spring of 1996 I had my students in Honors Western Civilization, which I teach for the Department of History and the University Honors Program of the University of South Dakota, develop a multimedia project entitled "The House the West Built." Working in groups of about five persons each, the students selected and researched some aspect of Western Civilization and presented their results on the World Wide Web. They used text, graphics, sound, and video within an HTML (hypertext markup language). Thanks to the ingenuity and hard work of my students, this project succeeded in presenting the fruits of traditional historical reflection in innovative ways, using existing and developing computer- and Internet-related technologies. It was so successful that I decided to continue it last year, so that it has become a growing and evolving site now containing eighteen parts. I wish to describe this project and encourage educators to use it as a model as they work with their own students. I shall further raise issues of copyright and the desirability and particular problems of multimedia education.⁽¹⁾

As I browsed the web in preparation for setting the original assignment, I searched for student history projects. Most of the information on instructional technology--and there is a great deal of it--concerns ways for teachers to use the web. Surprisingly, I found very few projects that students prepared, and all of those originated in composition courses.⁽²⁾

In what follows I shall assume the audience's rudimentary familiarity with the Internet. Most educators will be able to consult their local computer experts for further assistance, and many university web sites include pages of instruction about establishing web sites on the local network.⁽³⁾

The Assignment

The assignment constitutes one of the four projects my students do in the spring term.⁽⁴⁾ I divide the students randomly into nine groups of four to six members each. Each group develops a theme that treats some aspect of Western Civilization. I encourage them to use any material they can write, scan, record, photograph, or videotape. I tell them to have fun with the project, but warn them that its purpose is not to dazzle visitors to the site with technological bells and whistles but to develop a cogent and elegant critique of some aspect of their culture. The students receive the assignment at the beginning of the term and submit their projects about one month before the end of the term.

Purpose

My purpose in setting this assignment for my students is to go beyond using computer and Internet technology as a tool for my own teaching and research and make it a resource for my students and a vehicle for them to present their work. The fastest-growing, most universally accessible medium of communicating ideas that humanists have ever enjoyed, the World Wide Web requires new ways of formulating intellectual problems as well as presenting their solutions, and the medium itself entails new sorts of problems that probe the impact of computer and communications technology on human life and thought. I further expected this project to excite the interest of the students, as in fact it did. Finally, I wanted my students to have the experience of working within groups on complex problems.

The Project

The visitor to "The House the West Built" first arrives at an introductory screen that presents the project and makes acknowledgments. Visitors click on the openings in the façade of a historic building on USD's campus in order to visit the most current individual projects. Below is a list of the previous year's projects. Let's take as an example "The Evolution of Philosophy."

Here the main page has decorative elements, a picture of the authors, a list of linked sites elsewhere on the web, a bibliography, and text that explains the purpose of the site. Within that text one can click on key phrases or links that go to secondary pages on Greek and Roman Philosophers, Rationalism and Empiricism, Existentialism, Political Philosophers, and Socio-economic Theories. Each of these pages has pictures of the relevant philosophers.

In the first year of The House the West Built, I coded most of the projects myself. The students who authored "The Evolution of Philosophy" gave me a carefully prepared story board that showed me exactly how to assemble each of the files on their disks into the completed site. They also gave me hard copy indicating the location within the texts of pictures and links to other sites on the web. I had only to convert their texts to HTML documents, insert photographs, and establish the hypertext links from one document to the next. As I'll mention later, other projects were not so carefully prepared and the additional work I had to do caused me to change the assignment in the second year so that the students did the HTML markup themselves. I do not edit the texts themselves except in a few egregious instances. Seven months of writing papers for me inculcates a certain consistency of style among the students.

Other projects survey the impact of religion on art via an auction of selected works, complete with the auctioneer's chant. You can visit Renaissance Florence and view a video taken from the top of Brunelleschi's dome. You could go on to explore Medieval England, world architecture, the Museum of Western Civilization, mythology, or the education of women. While all the projects are quite good, I have demonstrated thus far the most graphically advanced of the first year. Only a year later much greater sophistication appears, largely because of improvements in Web browsers and authoring tools.

I turn now to projects created this past spring. The project on the 60s, for example, has a gateway page with animated graphics. The main page flashes on using a JavaScript program. Frames, in which the browser screen splits into two or more sections, were big this year; many projects use them. Clicking on one of the links on the title frame to the left changes the page on the right. The project on the Rock-and-Roll Revolution also has a gateway leading to a main page with frames. You can select a topic from the title frame or click on a record on the right side and go to an annotated list of bands. The students who crafted this site wanted to include musical clips but were unable to secure permission from record companies. More on copyright later. The students have pictures of themselves dressed differently for each decade. You can tell the group had fun with this project. The project on the German revolution of 1989 has a photograph of the Berlin Wall with the graffiti retouched. You click on the sections of the wall to go to the various parts of the project. The Technical Revolution starts from a collage that contains live links to various parts of this site, including essays on education and technology and the generation gap and technology. The Sexual Revolution appropriately has grainy graphics, suggestive text and lurid backgrounds.

Implementation

Now, how did the House the West Built come to look like this? Keep in mind that Honors Western Civilization is a two-semester sequence in which nearly all the students take both semesters. I can therefore organize it in effect as a year-long course. When I first meet with my class in the fall I tell the students that they have to procure handouts such as syllabi, study questions, and documents from my home page,⁽⁵⁾ whence they can also follow links to sites of related interest around the world. I write the address or URL for my home page on the board and ask the forty to fifty students whether any understand what it is. A few students raise their hands--more every year. Then I give the entire class a brief lesson in using a Web browser.

Now let me describe what happened the first year. I presented the multimedia assignment to the students at the beginning of the spring term and established the nine groups in the second week. I told them that they were responsible for establishing the content of their projects and assigning responsibilities within the groups but that I would work closely with them to turn digitized text, images, sound, and video into the final presentation--in effect, that I would mark up their projects in HTML. I had secured production assistance from an institute in the University of South Dakota's School of Education, InTEC (Interactive Technologies in Education and Corporations), whose director gave an introductory lecture on multimedia production to my class and helped individual groups with story boarding their ideas, scanning images, and digitizing video. I had already acquired proficiency in HTML editing and so decided to produce the projects directly in HTML, sometimes using Microsoft Word's free HTML add-on, Internet Assistant, which I had just acquired.⁽⁶⁾

Students at the University of South Dakota have ready access to relatively new machines running Windows 95 as well as Macintosh computers. On these machines the students can prepare the textual material for their presentations. Students have access to additional equipment at InTEC, including Macintosh Quadra 950 and PowerMac 8500 computers, Hewlett Packard and Apple scanners, equipment for video capture, and a QuickTake digitizing camera, as well as DeskScan, Photoshop, and Adobe Premiere software. Most of these machines and sites have direct connections to the university's research and education network, COYOTENet.

Through February and March we take occasional class time for the groups to meet briefly while I circulate among them in order to check their progress. I warn the students that they have to start early and meet often because they could not get a group of several people together and consult me and the staff at InTEC the eve of the due date. I suggest that they take some time to browse the web and see what sort of things others have done, and I point out that people who visit their web sites will not linger on a page with nothing but great expanses of text--that is, the projects have to take a multimedia approach, and that approach affects choice of topic and character of presentation. Each group must have a topic selected and a rough idea about how the presentation will look before midterm break at the beginning of March. By the first two weeks of April I spend several hours a week outside class with the students. The first year, to encourage cooperation within each group, I built a component of peer evaluation into the grading of the assignment (60% my evaluation, 40% fellow students'), but in fact I found no significant problems with each student doing his or her share of the work and I eliminated this component of the grading the next year.

The first year I instructed the students to submit their completed and digitized materials to me by 12 April, one month before the end of the term, in DOS file format and with a story board. I expected to spend the following days coding, assembling, and launching the projects. One of the students had already written web pages, and she launched her group's site. Students in two other groups became excited enough about web-authoring that they learned HTML and launched their own sites. In the end, I had to mark up only six of the projects. Even so, I spent much more time than I had expected, primarily for two reasons. Some groups had not adequately and concretely thought out how they wanted their presentations to appear and so did not give me enough information to turn their disks readily into web sites. I resolved this problem by conceptualizing the presentations myself and then having the respective group vet what I had done. Some groups gave me files that were not compatible with my PC, in which case I sent them back to their computers to save the files properly. I spent six to eight hours marking up each project. By 15 April 1996 the site was substantially complete, and I launched it--that is, I transferred it to the university's server so that it was readable to the world. The next day we met in a computer lab, and each group presented its site to the entire class. To our relief and delight, almost everything worked.

I learned from this first year that I needed to have the students do more of the technical work, and that meant having all of them learn to author Web documents. So last year, the second year of The House the West Built, in addition to requiring them to establish e-mail accounts and browse the Web for course materials, I had each student make his or her own Web page by the end of the first semester. I directed the students to Web-authoring materials on the Web and to workshops that our library staff offers. To sweeten the task we had a contest: a panel of judges including myself, a graphic artist from the Department of Mass Communications, and two of the previous year's students selected the best home page; its creator had her books for the next semester paid for by the Honors Program.

So by last January the students were able to write their own web documents. Again, InTEC arranged for a short briefing about constructing Web sites. This time, however, the students made little use of InTEC's equipment because someone in each group had the equipment and software needed to accomplish a given task or had a friend who did. Much of the scanning was done on my equipment.

I gave the students the information they needed to move files into subdirectories I created for them on the home directory of The House the West Built, but this step required quite a bit of assistance from me and much of the file transfer was done through my machine. All the projects were in place by the deadline three weeks before the end of the term and with a little tweaking were running fine within a few days.

Copyright Issues

Within the context of a course, the fair use clause of US Copyright Law permits the students' incorporation of copyrighted items into their projects.⁽⁷⁾ Before making the site available to the world, however, one must secure permission to use copyrighted objects. To do so proved far more time-consuming than launching the site. Responses from copyright holders who had posted images on the web came quickly and almost always positively. I found it much more difficult to secure permissions from copyright holders via the mail as one must do with museums and publishers; these tend to respond negatively or simply not promptly enough within the four-month period of a semester.

Religion and Art, top left

Any images and sound clips the students did not secure permission to use I have deleted or substituted with an equivalent for which I could secure permission. Therefore current visitors to the site will not see exactly what my students planned. In addition, sites move or disappear over time, and not all links that worked in May 96 or May 97 still work.

Home Page

Conclusion

Beyond setting the problem and facilitating its execution, I saw my particular responsibility as ensuring the depth and sophistication as well as the technical quality of the presentations. Superficiality is the danger of multimedia approaches to education, and the very care of guarding against it will enhance students' critical skills.⁽⁸⁾ I insisted that the multimedia dimension of the project constitute not a seductive end in itself but a tool for persuasive and interesting presentations. While the completed projects do vary considerably in depth of content and sophistication of analysis and lack a sharply critical focus, none of them in fact succumbs to the tendency toward discontinuity in a point-and-click world where the visitor to a site decides what link to follow from any given point. My students were clever and hard-working enough to make the new medium serve a message that retains its traditional humanistic orientation.

When we started, the students faced the assignment with some trepidation but great excitement. The course evaluations, in the end, indicate an overwhelmingly positive response to the project: it was fun to do, interesting, valuable for learning about the Internet and about working with other people. Some students objected to the group experience, wishing they had selected their own groups or worked alone. A few wished that they had had more technical instruction, and one said that it was not an appropriate project as this was not a class in computer science. Several concluded like this: "I hated the multimedia project at first but when it was done I liked [it]."

I am always willing to respond to questions or comments; e-mail me at clehmann@charlie.usd.edu.

NOTES

1. I first described this project in an article for Perspectives: American Historical Association Newsletter, 35.2, Feb 1997; available on-line at http://www.usd.edu/honors/hwb_art.htm. Much of this article is based on the earlier one.

2. For a fine example of a class project go to Once Upon a Time in the Eighties, with reflections by the instructor, Matthew G Kirschenbaum, and links to other projects; see also the index of student writing for the web at Writing for the World. I know of no history projects by students on the World Wide Web. George P. Landow created a site, The Victorian Web, which has a counterpart in Brown University's Storyspace Cluster, a collection of hypertext documents not yet accessible on the WWW. I understand that this counterpart contains material generated by his students.

3. See USD's at http://www.usd.edu/heidi/howtomk.html or http://www.usd.edu/intec/publish.html. I also recommend as a starting point New Tools for Teaching by James J O'Donnell, a pioneer of cyberspace technology in education.

4. The others were traditional papers; for the syllabus go to http://www.usd.edu/~clehmann/122h_96.htm.

5. Whose address or URL is http://www.usd.edu/~clehmann.

6. For further information consult InTEC's page on educational technology at http://www.usd.edu/intec/edtech.html.

7. InTEC has a useful collection of documents and links on the issue of copyright and the World Wide Web at http://www.usd.edu/intec/copyright.html.

8. For reflections on the lack of content and continuity in multimedia writing from the inside of the industry see Paul Roberts, "Virtual Grubstreet: Sorrows of a Multimedia Hack," Harper's Magazine, June 1996, 71-77.