Vol.24, No. 05	October 2, 1998

Teaching Core Curriculum Texts with the Help of Cyberspace Tools

WEB SITES SUPPLY TEACHING AIDS FOR INSTRUCTORS

By A. Dunlap-Smith

To study the Core is at best a daunting task; to teach it, even more so. In response, four of Columbia's administrative departments are collaborating to aid the Core's 100-plus instructors in their Herculean struggle with both digesting and regurgitating three millenia of the West's most enduring ideas.

What the Core Curriculum Department, Libraries, AcIS and T.C.'s Institute for Learning Technologies (ILT) did was to move 17 file drawers of papers out of their metal cabinets in the Core's Hamilton Hall office and onto the Web. In our cyber age this alone raises few eyebrows, but the consequences to the Core and to its instructors is potentially far-reaching.

"Our business is pedagogical innovation," Jen Hogan, a manager at ILT, says, "and though putting up Web pages is not what we do per se, the Web is one of the tools we use to transform the practice of teaching."

Hogan oversaw the three high school students, three college students and one graduate student who spent the summer putting the Core's teaching aids-study questions, maps, notes of lectures by visiting scholars, outlines, past exams and bibliographies-on the Web. She recalls some of the material from the filing cabinets being so old and so faded that it wouldn't scan. So, page by page, it was painstakingly retyped.

Director of the Core Curriculum and Adjunct Assistant Professor of English Eileen Gillooly is excited by the possibilities the Web brings to teaching the Core now that a foundation has been laid. She cites instructor homepages, links to pertinent sites both inside and outside ColumbiaWeb, discussion groups just for instructors as well as for students, and an array of audio and visual material soon to be made available that will affect the way teaching and, of course, studying the timeless Core works are done.

"Now that we have this, there are grand opportunities here, such as integrating more fully the various parts of the Core," Gillooly says. "For instance, while reading Plato we could have links to the Art Hum. archives on Ancient Greece, and this way present a more cohesive, interdisciplinary picture of intellectual and artistic developments throughout history."

But for now, Manuele Gragnolati is just pleased with the convenience of the Core's Web sites.

"I don't live near campus and I like to prepare my Lit. Hum. classes late at night," he says. Gragnolati, who is a graduate student in medieval Italian just months from completing his dissertation on Dante, is in his third semester of teaching Lit. Hum. He has already used the Lit. Hum. site for help with his classes on The Iliad and the "Hymn to Demeter." He laments one thing, however: "I wish I'd had this last year."

Instructors may visit the the new Lit. Hum. Web site at: www1.columbia.edu/sec/itc/lithum/hogan/. The C.C. site is located at www1.columbia.edu/sec/itc/cc/hogan/.