[Teaching with Technology/Education Development and Demonstration proposal, as submitted to the NEH October 1998]

Romantic Circles High School:
An Online Educational Resource

Steven E. Jones, Loyola University Chicago, Neil Fraistat, University of Maryland, and Carl Stahmer, University of California, Santa Barbara


GOALS

The foremost goal of this project is to build a high-quality, editorially controlled, collaborative Internet resource for education: "Romantic Circles High School." This network of Web pages and real-time communication technology is grounded in a community of teachers and students dedicated to literary study and the humanities. While its thematic content is nineteenth-century British literature, the project's theoretical concern is with humanities pedagogy in general, and one of its most important products will be new curricular models that can be disseminated throughout the country, demonstrating ways to use digital resources in the teaching of literature. Our ultimate goal is to build an experimental online community of educators and their students, across state (and even national) boundaries--but also across the sometimes more daunting border that separates secondary education from higher education.

PROBLEM AND RATIONALE

In recent years the teaching of poetry in general and of British Literature in particular has eroded in many high school classrooms. One of the things this project will do for participating high schools (and for those to whom the model is eventually disseminated) is to strengthen the teaching of British literature in the curriculum, returning significant works by Wordsworth or Keats, for example, to reading lists--and in a new electronic format that will be especially appealing to today's students.

With the World Wide Web and real-time virtual environments, the Internet as a whole now makes possible collaborative and distributed teaching at minimal cost to participating schools and individual classrooms. But major barriers still stand in the way, including (to our minds, most immediately) the poor quality and general unreliability of many of the resources currently available online. There is a pressing need for educational resources on the Web that would meet the following basic criteria:

  1. In terms of content, these resources should contain accurate and reliable information, with a focus on literary works of aesthetic excellence and historical importance, produced by experts under peer-review and general editorial oversight.


  2. In terms of form, they must go beyond simple "home-page" format--and even beyond the Web itself--to make use of the interactive and engaging possibilities of the networked electronic medium, especially its potential for fostering communication and collaboration. This entails treating such a project as a true "site"--a place where meetings of various kinds can take place and different forms of knowledge can be built through collaborative effort. This is why real-time interactive environments are crucial to our concept of Romantic Circles High School.


  3. In terms of stability, they should remain online long enough for teachers to be able to incorporate them in their year-to-year curriculum planning. This also means that the markup and server-end technology must be flexible and up-to-date enough to continue to be usable as platforms and browsers inevitably change over time.

We propose to build a model network of resources according to these criteria, based on our collective experience at Romantic Circles, a peer-reviewed scholarly Website for the study and teaching of nineteenth-century British literature and culture. Although Romantic Circles is less than two years old, it has already had an appreciable impact on the scholarly community. Ashton Nichols called it one of the resources by which "we should be legitimately astounded" and which "have new and powerful roles in the critical lexicon of humanities research" (NASSR 96). The site was also selected by Academe Today as a "Website of the Day," featured in an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education ("Digital Villa Focuses on Romantic Literature," September 1996), and received a glowing review in Intelligent Agent: Newsletter on the Use of Interactive Media and Technology in Arts and Education (February 1997). Romantic Circles continues to grow in interesting ways, including a new partnership with Cambridge University Press.

Last year, the NEH, MCI, and the Council for Great City Schools recognized Romantic Circles as among the finest educational Web sites in the country and invited us to participate in the EdSITEment project (see appendix). This project provides the impetus for the present proposal--the full-scale construction of a new Website dedicated to the special curricular needs of literary study in secondary education. We intend Romantic Circles High School to serve as a model. To accomplish this, we will draw upon one of the essential strengths of Romantic Circles: its structure of editorial oversight and control. The existing site is a fully peer-reviewed home for carefully edited electronic editions of literary texts, scholarly resources and study aids, and a kind of central exchange for communication among scholars, teachers, and graduate students all over the world. Our scholarly standards are the highest. Our Advisory Board is comprised of some of the most distinguished scholars of Romanticism in the world, and our peer-review process guarantees the kind of quality control so often missing on the Web. Using this editorial structure, we will develop a new set of resources created by and for the special curricular and pedagogical needs of secondary education--through collaboration among college and high school educators and students, thus breaking down the clear divisions between the two levels in favor of a more permeable border. This will be encouraged in part by setting up clearly signposted hyperlinks from the more elementary to the more complex kinds of textual and historical resources, for example, but also by running regular discussion threads and online teachers' meetings involving both college and high school educators, as well as through the scheduled Focus Group workshops described below.

PROJECT STAFF

Project director:

Steven Jones, Associate Professor of English, Loyola University Chicago; Editor, Keats-Shelley Journal, Co-Editor, Romantic Circles (see attached c.v.)

Project consultants:

Neil Fraistat, Professor of English, University of Maryland, College Park; Co-Editor of The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Johns Hopkins University Press; Co-Editor Romantic Circles (see attached c.v. and letter).

Carl Stahmer, PhD candidate in English, University of California, Santa Barbara; programmer and designer; Co-Editor (and chief designer), Romantic Circles (see attached c.v. and letter).

Brenda Walton, teacher, Lake Highland Preparatory School, Orlando, Florida (see attached c.v. and letter).

Project evaluators:

Barbara McManus, VRoma Project
Alan Liu, University of California, Santa Barbara
Robert Tinker, The Virtual High School, Concord Consortium
John Unsworth, Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, University of Virginia

Project advisors:

The members of the Editorial Advisory Board of Romantic Circles, top scholars from all over the country (and the world) will, as part of their service commitment to the existing Website, offer (gratis) consultation and advice on every stage of the Romantic Circles High School project--an invaluable personnel resource, already in place.


Jones and Fraistat have extensive teaching and editorial experience in the field of Romantic-period literature and culture, as well as in pedagogical and hypertext theory; both serve on a number of advisory and editorial boards, including, for example, Romanticism on the Net, the Romantic Chronology, and The William Blake Archive. Stahmer is a star graduate student and respected teacher as well as a skilled programmer (PERL, C++, CGI-BIN, HTML, etc.) and a graphic designer--a creator and designer of some of the very best academic Websites now in use. Walton has experimented extensively with using the Internet to teach Romantic poetry and spoke at the international Keats Bicentenary conference at Harvard in 1995.

CONTENT AND SPECIFIC RESOURCES

Over the three-year course of the grant period, we will develop resources in a series of workshops and meetings (face-to-face as well as online) in which the primary consultants will work with small groups of high school teachers in our home bases: California, Maryland and the District of Columbia, Chicago, and Florida. (Schools already committed to working with us include Lake Highland Preparatory in Orlando, Roosevelt High School in greater Washington, and Evanston Township High School in greater Chicago [see appendix]. Projected participants include Evans High School and Colonial High School in Orlando; Dos Pueblos High School and Santa Barbara High in Santa Barbara; Lincoln Park High School and Lane Technical High School in Chicago; Woodrow Wilson High School and Eleanor Roosevelt High School in greater Washington D.C.)

These organized Focus Groups (see schedule below) will "seed" a new network, providing a community of primary contributors and participants, and also providing a valuable means for publicizing and disseminating information about the site, and a way to attract new participants in their districts. Each teacher in every Focus Group, working with their classes, will contribute new electronic resources for review and possible inclusion on the site.

Besides this effort to distribute the ideas and methods of Romantic Circles High School, we intend for the project as a whole to serve as a more widely accessible model and large-scale pilot program--its results fully public on the Web--for others to participate in, imitate, and improve upon. One way we'll involve more students at more schools immediately is to solicit direct links to the site from a number of high school library computer systems, where students will be sent to find Web resources, a list extending well beyond those schools directly involved through the Focus Groups. One such high school library, at Rincon University High School in Arizona, has already arranged to establish such a direct link.

We have already begun to build prototypes of the core resources, which will be up and running in their first versions at the beginning of the funded period. These consist of: (1) a new online anthology of literary texts, the Romantic Circles High School Reader: a Hypertext Anthology for the Classroom; and (2) an online virtual reality environment known as Romantic Circles High School MOO, an electronic "place" in which to meet, interact, and share educational resources and experiences. (MOO is a technical acronym for "Multi-User Dimension, Object Oriented.")

As the prototype in progress of the literature anthology or Reader shows--

http://orion.it.luc.edu/~sjones1/reader.htm

--this will be a collection of hypertexts expressly created for the high school classroom, based on the very best texts of literary works with the help of top editors (besides the Romantic Circles Editors, these might include Jack Stillinger, Jerome McGann, Betty Bennett, or Carl Woodring, all of whom are on our Editorial Board, as well as other colleagues), the Reader will incorporate hypermedia annotation, suggested lesson plans, study questions, and links to related texts, and will be organized in clusters, providing teachers with a selection of texts grouped thematically ("ruins and antiquity"), historically ("Napoleonic wars"), or by formal convention ("the sonnet"). Every text will be available in simple ASCII version for quick downloading and printing, as well as in advanced HTML format for reading on the Web. (And afterwards in SGML, for long-term archiving.)

Different classes will use all or a portion of the texts in the Reader in different ways, integrating the literature into their own specific curricular needs. Study questions--some linked to other Web materials--are provided with each cluster, among other hypermedia annotations. In each case students can also link from the Reader to our interactive discussion thread, where they can post a question of their own or carry on a conversation with others. The Reader's core literary texts will be available free to all participants, as the basis of creative projects by the students. These may take the form of reports or essays, collaborative research resulting in a historical image archive, an electronic timeline linked to various texts, a class field trip report complete with snapshots, or a new hypertext adding a sonnet to the sonnet cluster in the Reader. Students will build using our existing "building blocks": sample resources and the code for creating them will be made available at our site, eliminating the need for complicated and extended training before the students can begin building knowledge at the site.

These texts will also be accessible through our dedicated MOO, an online area for real-time interaction and creativity based on object-oriented programming. The centerpiece of the whole project will be an entirely new "building" constructed in advance via Romantic Circles' existing MOO, a virtual conference and meeting center we call the "Villa Diodati," named after the house on Lake Geneva where in 1816 Byron, Shelley, and Mary Shelley talked and told each other stories--and where Mary Shelley began her most famous novel, Frankenstein (see the introduction to the existing Villa Diodati):

http://www.inform.umd.edu/RC/pages/cex/villa/villa-intro.html

The new High School MOO will consist of a virtual high school building, an online space technically accessible via a simple telnet connection, since the space is imagined, described, and manipulated through text. But we are currently developing a Java-driven MOO client for the Web so that the image of the school building and the text-based virtual reality "behind" it will be served simultaneously in the browser window. This means that a student logging on to RC High MOO will see split screens, which will show text describing the virtual space, maps, and the words other users type, as well as a series of images and texts as they are encountered within the MOOspace.

[See the MOO interface prototype]

For example, when the visitor clicks to enter the building he or she will read something like the following:
Welcome to the west hall. The hallway winds around to the West (left) and leads to the Auditorium, the Library, and classrooms 1-8. Directly to the right is a doorway to the East hall.
--all of which the image window will show on the floorplan map. Confronted with a virtual bookcase in the MOO library, the visitor could view the titles and type "read Ozymandias" or click on the text's image link in order to see a complete version of the hypertext from the High School Reader in his or her image window.

Thanks to the object-oriented programming of the MOO, the possibilities are endless, limited only by the imagination of the participants. For example, virtual objects from nineteenth-century Britain will appear as part of the descriptive text of many of the rooms (students would import them, already programmed by us). A famous romantic poem on a wooden Aeolian (wind) harp, for example, could be linked to a description of such an instrument, an image, and a sound file made from a real aeolian harp: poem, harp, sound file--all are accessible "objects" in the MOO programming language. The truly exciting feature of the MOO is that any such object can be programmed to respond to questions from the student. Such a wind harp could also be carried into the student's virtual classroom and installed in the window, where it could remain as part of the classroom's furniture, complete with its sounds, image, and abilities to respond to future questions--and with a link to Coleridge's poem, "The Aeolian Harp," in our Reader.

In the MOO, such objects are literally created out of words, and a few simple programming commands can bring a new object into being, including objects imagined or learned about by students during the course of their participation in the project. The Java interface will also allow students and teachers working in the MOO to create, or "dig," these MOO objects using a forms-based Web interface. This automated object production system will allow all users to actively participate in the MOO as builders, without having to first gain expertise in the MOO programming language. The virtual classrooms--one for each real class that participates--will be open spaces in which to create and display students' responses to the core resources. The opportunities for educational interaction are, we believe, astounding in their scope and pedagogical implications.

The RC High School MOO will also contain a virtual Teachers Lounge, where teachers from around the country--college and high school together-- can log-in for real-time live communication, posting assignments and curriculum ideas, queries to colleagues, meetings, or help from other teachers on the teaching of literature; a virtual Auditorium, programmed such that many can "listen" but only one guest can "speak" at assemblies, lectures, or poetry readings, as well as online Literature Fairs; and virtual Offices, where teachers and selected and trained graduate tutors from around the country can meet, one-on-one or in small groups, with one or two students for "MOOtorials"--concentrated tutoring in literary studies. (existing tutoring programs in our home institutions will contribute to this resource).

As research shows (see Haynes and Holmevik), simply generating student curiosity and excitement about learning in our networked age is one benefit of using such electronic resources. But as we are currently discovering for ourselves at Romantic Circles, MOO spaces, real-time online environments, are educationally effective on several fronts: because they are text-based, their use helps improve language and rhetorical skills; students must read and write to communicate with a very real "auditor"--sometimes many at one time. Still, because they spatially-conceived and make use of graphics, Web-based MOOs appeal to and draw in those students who have difficulties with such verbal skills. And because they are interactive and inherently playful, all MOOs help improve social and communication skills. All of this enhances this technology's use as a tool in the study of literature and culture of the past, subjects which often seem dead and remote from the student's concerns, something passively to be consumed. On the contrary, these tools encourage the actively participating student to help make literary knowledge--and make it her or his own. As we look to the future, it is clear that educators will have to think beyond the Web as it currently exists. Such online virtual spaces represent one direction educational technology is likely to evolve in the near future.

The key to this project as a whole, from our meetings with educators to the way we build resources and have them evaluated, is not technology but human collaboration, face to face partnerships among educators. Anyone who has spent much time online knows that communities are not created simply by putting up Web pages, but on the other hand a community can be built with Internet resources at its center--as its infrastructure and shared point of focus. Teachers and students around the country will work with us as partners to actually create online resources for other teachers and students to use. In this way, we will build an educational community, making learning an active form of knowledge-production. Such an approach can radically change the relationship of a student to the material, between students and teachers, and among students themselves--as they work together in a larger national online community to build new forms of education, and to produce knowledge of the humanities for themselves and others.

Such collaboration takes a very concrete form in this case. Our software and hardware will provide the material infrastructure for a wide range of high school projects around the country. One important product will be our Java-based Web/MOO interface, since there is nothing like it currently available. When its development is complete, we will release it as shareware, so that educators in a variety of disciplines can adapt it for use in other MOO-based projects.

We will also provide accounts on our server for classrooms that might not otherwise have access to the Internet. There is a great deal of talk these days about "putting computers in the schools," but less is said (or understood) about the server-side needs of education. Our server and site will provide a rare avenue of distributed access, giving students and educators the means to become not consumers or "users" but content providers and producers of the resources they and others like them will use.

INSTITUTIONAL CONTEXT

Loyola University Chicago prides itself on its strong commitment to excellence in the humanities, and to teaching as a practice and an ideal. It has a multicultural student body on an urban campus (actually a network of multiple campuses), and an ongoing history of community service, including in Chicago public schools. The English Department sponsors an Adult Literacy Center, for example, reaching out to Chicago's strong immigrant and ethnic communities and others who need instruction. Our students frequently volunteer there as tutors or teach in the area high schools.

At Loyola, Steven Jones has used the Web and other electronic media in the classroom for years, teaching Romantic-period literature, contemporary literature, poetry, textual editing and bibliography--in the process establishing a human network of working relationships with colleagues in Information Technologies, the Center for Instructional Design, and the university libraries. He has been repeatedly invited to speak at Loyola and elsewhere on the topic of technology and education. The English Department stands ready to support this proposal with reduced teaching load and released time as necessary.

Information Technologies at the University of Maryland has agreed to house and maintain our requested new dedicated server; the University of Maryland recently became the legal publisher of Romantic Circles (see appendix), and is proud to support our ongoing efforts in this new project. As an extension of his international reputation as an important editor and theorist of textual criticism, Professor Fraistat is among the University's most "wired" instructors and researchers and is frequently called on to present on Romantic Circles and other projects. His department has committed student research assistance toward this project and fully supports Fraistat's innovative work in this area.

The University of California at Santa Barbara is home to some of the most advanced technological applications in the humanities, including the "Transcriptions: Literature and the Culture of Information" project, funded by an NEH Teaching with Technology grant. Stahmer has the full support of--and full programmer's access to--the necessary servers and networks at UCSB.

Outside the General Editors' home institutions, Romantic Circles has a working, collaborative relationship with the Electronic Text Center and Institute for the Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia. All our HTML-coded hypertexts are reproduced and archived there in SGML, and our Associate Editor Matt Kirschenbaum is the technical force behind some of Virginia's vitally influential electronic publishing projects. The combined institutional resources of Loyola, Maryland, and Santa Barbara-- not to mention Virginia and other collaborating institutions, is we believe unprecedented for a project of this kind.


SCHEDULE

1999
2000
2001
2002



First Year (1999-2000) CONSTRUCTION AND INITIAL CONTRIBUTIONS.

In this stage we will first (spring-summer 1999) mount the RC High School Hypertext Reader and MOO space described above and meet with the first group of local teachers. Then (academic year 1999-2000) initial high school classes around the country will build class projects and report on them at a year-end Online Literature Fair.

After mounting prospectus pages (April-May 1999), we will hold an initial Focus Group workshop early in the grant period (September 1999) in Orlando, Florida, where Walton teaches. There Jones, in consultation with Fraistat, Stahmer, and Walton (who will be the home coordinator), will lead a group of three local high school educators in a mutual feedback discussion and day-long curriculum-development workshop. Participants will have been sent a list of questions and shared readings, as well as being directed to the online resources, in preparation for the meeting. Besides discussing the site with representative high school educators--from a cross-section of schools with varying degrees of Internet access--to determine the best kinds of resources, problems with access, and special needs of their schools, districts, and state, we will also use this meeting (and the three to follow it) as a training session for the site and its technology, thus putting in place several skilled collaborators and participants. This format will be copied in the following three Focus Group meetings (a total of four).

In the year following that initial meeting, Focus Group teachers will build on our Reader and other resources to have his or her class contribute at least one electronic resource for consideration and inclusion in Romantic Circles High School as a larger site. They will also respond to a survey that will be compiled as part of our ongoing "formative assessment" of the project (as will each successive Focus Group.)

The second such meeting will be held in March 2000, in Santa Barbara, where Stahmer studies. During the spring and summer of this first year we will have purchased and installed our server hardware and software at the University of Maryland (Stahmer's special expertise will be indispensable at this stage in particular). The new dedicated Sun server, MOO server software and database, and 4 digital cameras for use by the schools in each of our home regions, will be in place by summer. So, besides the curricular agenda outlined above, the timely special focus of this second meeting (hosted by Stahmer) will be the concomitant hardware and software needs of the local schools and how this affects curricular choices.

Second Year (2000-2001) FURTHER IMPLEMENTATION AND DEMONSTRATION.

A second cycle of classes will begin contributing resources to the site--but this time building upon the first year's efforts in a kind of collaboration across the years.

We will hold two more Focus Group meetings, one in September 2000 and one in March 2001, in Chicago and in Maryland, hosted by Jones and Fraistat, respectively. Besides the curricular agenda outlined above, the special focus of these two meetings--both in large urban areas with complex and diverse public school systems--will be ways to facilitate students' access to and training in using the Web and other online tools, especially in financially-troubled schools. The point in each case is to build and strengthen, through face to face discussion, an actual core community of participants in the ongoing online project.

By December 2000, through online sessions in the MOO spaces already established and recruitment through existing tutoring centers at Loyola and the University of Maryland, we will prepare tutors and students to use the Web and MOO resources as they come online. Our Focus Group participants will serve as bridges to their own individual communities, identifying other teachers and students for these training session, adding up to a concentrated program of outreach, curriculum-development, and training, the goal of which is to establish effective methods for integrating the resources into other classrooms around the country.

Third Year (2001-2002) DEMONSTRATION and DISSEMINATION.

The third year of the grant period will mark the culmination of the process of bringing all our resources online. By the early portion of this year, our numerous collaborators around the country will have helped us make the site a rich source of teaching and learning tools, and a place for educational communication. A third round of classes will contribute to the site and integrate in their literature curriculum the expanded collection of resources in place, ending with their own Virtual Literature Fair in the spring.

But we also aim to have a national impact, well beyond the specific Focus Group members and their schools, so we will build a mailing list for disseminating the resources and the model itself. We will send printed mailings via the Focus Group and their contacts, and will make repeated announcements on humanities and education listserv discussion groups, and place printed notices in letterpress scholarly journals (many of which we either edit or serve as advisors to).

In early November 2001, we will run a major event: a "National Teachers' Conference on Technology and Education," focused on the particular content at our site: the teaching of nineteenth-century literature and culture. We will hold planning sessions and solicit papers (some from our pool of Focus Group participants but also drawn from a general call for papers), leading up to a 3-day conference at Loyola University Chicago. Participants will include selected teachers and other guest speakers from around the nation.

A third online Literature Fair (May 2002) will showcase students work and help publicize the site.

EVALUATION

During the first two years of the grant period, the process of ongoing formative assessment will be based largely on written surveys required of all Focus Group participants six months after their meetings, as well as on the direct feedback on prototype resources given to us during the Focus Group meetings themselves.

Beginning immediately after the third-year fall event and running into the winter, we will formally solicit feedback from the participants and will collate it in a written report--part of a process of summative assessment that will also include commissioning reports from nationally-recognized expert consultants (prominent both in the humanities and in computing pedagogy, both in secondary and higher education; see attached letters): Barbara McManus, VRoma Project), Alan Liu (University of California, Santa Barbara), Robert Tinker (The Virtual High School, Concord Consortium), and John M. Unsworth (University of Virginia, Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities), all of whom will evaluate the project as a whole. Their reports will become the basis for a projected three-year plan (beyond the grant period) for Romantic Circles High School, as well as being incorporated in the final report to the Endowment.


SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Online resources and educational Websites
Romantic Circles: http://www.rc.umd.edu

Romantic Circles High School Reader (prototype): http://orion.it.luc.edu/~sjones1/reader.htm

Romantic Circles High School MOO (prototype Web entrance): http://humanitas.ucsb.edu/users/cstahmer/webMoo/webmoo.html

Diversity University: http://www.du.org

Pueblo Global Learning Collaboratory: http://pcacad.pc.maricopa.edu/Pueblo

LinguaMOO MOOTeach: http://home.earthlink.net/~d3davis/mainpg.htm

VRoma Project: http://vroma.rhodes.edu

Books and Articles

Berge, Zane L. and Mauri P. Collins, eds. Computer Mediated Communication and the Online Classroom. 2 vols. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 1995.

Haynes, Cynthia and Jan Rune Holmevik, eds. High Wired: On the Design, Use, and Theory of Educational MOOs. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998.

Lanham, Richard A. The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

Murray, Janet. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. New York: The Free Press, 1997.



(October 1998)

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