Open Learning in English 2001 began as a project financed by HEFCE under the Fund for the Development of Teaching and Learning scheme (FDTL) in 1997. Based in the Department of English at Chester College, the project set out to develop interactive multimedia open-learning materials in English literature on CD-ROM. Members of the Department had, between them, a fair amount of experience in the design and writing of distance-learning and resource-based learning materials, but using the well-established formats of print-and-paper, and audio and video tapes. We wanted to explore the possibilities of more recent technologies to see what the pedagogical advantages might be of exploiting electronic multimedia formats. We set out to design and produce two study-guides on CD-ROM in house – on George Eliot’s Middlemarch and on the poetry of Thomas Hardy. (We also partnered the Open University in their Shakespeare multimedia project on adaptations and appropriations of King Lear.) As we slowly came to grips with the nature of the CD format (the learning curve we followed was steep), we came to appreciate what CDs could and couldn’t do well. Not a few mistakes were made along the way, but we’re pleased with the results. The Eliot and Hardy CDs are both now available for wider use.
The interconnectedness of the structure and concerns of Middlemarch, together with George Eliot’s analogical habits of mind, make this novel peculiarly suited to study through an electronic hypermedium. The aim of Dr Josie Billington in this study-guide was to encourage students to explore the complex interrelations of the novel’s myriad levels and concerns by offering to them a simplified model or version of the movement and formal structure of the novel itself. The guiding image of the CD-ROM is a menu ‘web’, which offers a rich variety of encounters with aspects of the text – character, scene, image, narrative voice – all of which are interlinked. Whichever ‘thread’ a reader/user picks up will always lead to further possible encounters which themselves will lead to others and so on. It is a principle of the study-guide that the application of technology should be sanctioned by the form and vision of the novel itself and it is intended that use of the study-guide should faithfully mimic, however approximately, the experience of reading the novel itself. This CD also distinguishes itself from more conventional critical or pedagogical texts and situations in other important ways. The very capacity of the CD-ROM means that this study-guide, in terms both of approach to and extent of material, can uniquely begin to match the expansiveness and leisureliness of the nineteenth-century realist mode in which the novel is written. In addition, the greater opportunities for close and sustained engagement with the text of the novel, together with the audio-visual options, means that more of the novel can ‘live’ than is possible in an ordinary study-guide or in a normal one/two-hour seminar or lecture. Finally, this study-guide has the advantage over more linear packages of providing easy hyperlinked access to critical, contextual, and bio/bibliographical support.
A thematic guiding premise operates throughout the CD-ROM on Hardy’s poetry (designed and written by Dr Sara Haslam, with Dr Glyn Turton): that of conjunction. Hardy’s poetry is so focused on the personal and historical past that conjunction can be seen to be its key. No poem of Hardy’s is free of the distinct resonances that occur – often frequently – elsewhere in his work. Clearly, to an extent, this is true of all poets. But in Hardy it is the case to an exceptional degree. Using this CD-ROM to encourage movement from aspect to aspect, theme to theme, we aim to have given its users the facility to move as easily and associatively across Hardy’s poetic work as he himself did across his own deeply felt and powerfully articulated experience. This CD, then, is not a way of utilising technology for technology’s sake. Its portable, high-capacity format is beneficial in demonstrable ways. As well as making it possible to incorporate diverse forms of primary and secondary material (and thus encourage wider research), this flexible format has clear conceptual benefits too. In crucial ways a CD-ROM can work like the human mind, which often moves laterally as it encounters new ideas. Such lateral movement in the mind is modified by the way in which it also moves back and forth in time: reflecting and understanding and re-considering. This CD enables and encourages this movement. As a writer, as those who know his work will agree, and as suggested above, Hardy is strikingly suitable for this kind of approach. Layers of time are made manifest in his poems; he continually evokes and reinvestigates time past. So this CD is intended not to replace the reading of Hardy’s poetry, but to foster the most rewarding, challenging and productive engagement with it.
The CD-ROMs are designed for undergraduate and postgraduate students and teachers of literature, and can be used to replace or to support lectures and seminars as appropriate. We are confident that degree-level students of literature will benefit in many important ways from using these CD-ROMs. We hope that once colleagues have explored it for themselves, they will agree on the high potential for using it in their own teaching. Please contact us if you would like further copies of the CD-ROMs, or an informal discussion about their design/development and use.
Newsletter Issue 2 - August 2001
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