Serendipity35

More from the NJEDge.Net Annual Conference

As I said in my last post, the best part of the conference for me was reconnecting with a former student of mine, Mary Zedeck. I taught Mary a few decades ago when she was a middle schooler and I was an English teacher.

So now she's at Seton Hall University in instructional design. She had two poster sessions at the conference.

The one that I want to talk about here involves literature. "Exploring Literary Texts Through Virtual Worlds" is part of SHU's virtual worlds exploration. I've seen several presentations by Seton Hall staff and faculty about their research and classes in Second Life and ActiveWorlds. Still, I'm not totally sold on virtual worlds and education quite yet.

The poster session shows their use of Second Life with their English department. The text says it is the:

"...active interpretation of literary texts. Through the development of learning activities in-world, participation in a wiki, and reflection, students engage in material culture analysis and see first-hand the ways interpretative choices can affect the reading of texts. Objects and symbols that have cultural, historical and literary significance can be used to provide new and interesting entry points for interpretation. However, providing opportunities for discovery and engagement of this kind can be difficult to arrange due to limitations of time, space, and availability of materials."

The best parts are missing in all that - students are in Second Life walking around and in places like Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables. I have walked through the home that Hawthorne used as his model in my first life, but we're not taking our NJ students to Salem to walk through the house.

The English teacher in me would immediately wonder what value it would be to walk through the home anyway. What does an actual field trip offer students? I've been in the Seamen's Bethel in New Bedford and sat where Herman Melville sat (second bench from the back, left-hand side) and thought about the sermon from Moby Dick. Did I understand the chapter being in the actual setting? Well, it did fire up my imagination and I did get some hard-to-describe feeling in sitting in Melville's seat (no spirit channeling to report) - but can I can't say that I understood the novel any better?

In New Bedford I picked up brochures, listened to docents talk about the exhibits, went through the bookstore with all its specialized collections. How much of that could we do with students virtually? Well, all of it minus sitting in the bethel.

You'll get few arguments from teachers about using films in their literature class and visual literacy is certainly a legitimate concern. When I wrote here about traveling through books using Google Books & Google Earth, I really was most interested in new paths into a piece of literature. Do you want to talk about convergences using technology? This is a good place to start.

Mary and I talked a lot about lessons from those middle school years. She still has strong memories of reading S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders, and so do I. I taught that novel many times and it never lost its charge with students or with me. When I had students create a setting map of the book's world (a combination of the real Tulsa, Oklahoma and the virtual world of Hinton's imagination) on poster paper, I was in the low or no-tech world of the 1980's, but I was using the same path SHU is walking today.

My students did some powerful problem-based learning (though the phrase never came up) in that kinesthetic, critical/creative thinking, constructivist, add-the-other-descriptors-here activity. They produced beautiful maps too. After classes wrote to Hinton a few times without a response, one class recorded question on a cassette tape & mailed it to her. What a kick it was when they got the tape back from her with her answers recorded there.

When the film of the novel came out in 1983, I couldn't get the school to approve a field trip to see it at a local theater, my students "invited" me to the Thursday night "premiere" at the Colony Theater and I arrived to find about 60 students gathered by the box office. They loved the film and were exploding with comments about what Francis Ford Coppola had gotten right and wrong in the adaptation. They were very much in favor of a strict interpretation of the novel. The "class" continued across the street at the Friendly's restaurant with conversation spilling over the booths. ("That was Hinton playing the nurse in the hospital with Dally! Why did they make the East & West side of town into the North & South side?")

It saddens me to see that there are Cliff and Spark Notes for The Outsiders. What might a teacher do to that book that would send a reader there instead of the book itself?

And the same kinds of paths were there when I taught Romeo and Juliet to 7th graders - letters sent to Juliet in Verona, Italy (and answered!), scenes that they performed and then would argue with the interpretation of "professionals" when we watched film versions and (always) went to see a stage version.

If I could do anything virtually to capture any of that kind of enthusiasm, how could I not use the technology?