Beowulf to Lear: text, image, and hypertext

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Beowulf to Lear: Text, Image and Hypertext is a course that has been offered at Pace University in New York City since autumn 1996. While studying traditional literary works, students use e-mail, on-line discussion, and access to the World Wide Web, and create web projects, based on their reading and research. The best student work is published on our university web site (http://csis.pace.edu/grendel). Many of the students are recent immigrants to the United States, and some have just recently learned English. Almost all are the first in their families to attend college. The course can be considered a success by variety of measures, which we will describe in this paper. In particular, the course invokes considerable effort and, as a consequence, impressive achievement on the part of many of the students, who otherwise might not be so engaged by a required literature class. As one student remarked in our course evaluation, The average student spends more time with the material when working in a multimedia environment. The Internet has a way of drawing a person in; one can lose all sense of time when signed on. If that student is visiting web sites related to the literature being read and discussed in class, it can serve to spark an interest in the student.' In this paper, we provide further background about our university, describe the contexts from which our course was first developed, discuss the structure and syllabus for the course, report on the experience of six semesters, and present what we believe are the critical factors that have made the course successful. Our model may be adapted to teaching other interdisciplinary courses in the humanities and computer science. We also wish to encourage teachers, particularly of the Middle Ages, to develop similar projects and to engage their students in this profitable and compelling intellectual activity.