From: IN%"H-CLC@MSU.EDU" "H-NET List on Computers in Literary Studies"
24-MAY-1995 01:58:25.02
Subject: Re: HUMANITIES - A European pilotproject with distant education
Date: Mon, 22 May 1995 13:32:18 -0800
From: zoe borovsky <borovsky@darkwing.uoregon.edu
dear soeren,
i forwarded your post to disc-nordic, a very small discussion group of
Scandinavian scholars in the US, because I think that your project is quite
advanced for those of us in the humanities here. It may be that distant
education is more advanced in fields such as communication science and
law--these are usually well-funded professional schools in the US--but, the
liberal arts are typically the last ones to receive funding for such a
project. Therefore, your project is of special interest to literature
scholars. I read with great interest the lecture by Els JONGENEEL,
University of Groningen: "An Introduction to the Theme of
the City in Literature" and scanned the discussion groups for any mention
of Scandinavian cities in literature (or cities in Scandinavian
literature. Have any students taken up this topic in their papers? I
have placed a link from our Norwegian home page to
http://www.uib.no:80/ped/humanities.html, and then thought that you might
be interested in the home page I have been contributing to for students in
our Germanic Dept (includes Norwegian, Finnish, Danish, and Swedish). The
address is http://babel.uoregon.edu/germanic.html. I am, of course, most
involved in finding Web sites of interest to the Scandinavian languages,
but I will bring your project to the attention of our comp lit department
as well as Romance Languages.
It is interesting that students here are very active in discussion
groups and lists--it is quite common for students to have email
accounts--but the distribution is more in the sciences and professional
schools and less in the humanities. The humanities faculty are least
likely to be involved in electronic resources, but once we get the funding,
we might just catch-up very quickly!
thank you for posting the information about your project. It is
certainly a fascinating endeavor.
vennlig hilsen,
zoe borovsky
Date: Fri, 19 May 1995 11:42:26 MET
From: Soeren Pold <AEKSP@hum.aau.dk
I guess we're not as experienced with distant education in Europe as you
probably are in USA or in other large English speaking communities. Of course
we have open universities, but the use of telematics and Internet in ordinary
universities is quite limited. Therefore (as you might guess with me being on
this list) it was with great hopes and enthusiasm that I joined the HUMANITIES
pilotproject.
HUMANITIES is a cross-European project between (if you count the active) app.
15 universities from Spain, Austria, Italy, Belgium, Holland, Poland, Norway,
Sweden, Iceland and Denmark, partly sponsored by the European Union. There
are thematic study groups in both Literature (around the theme 'cityscape')
and Communication studies (around national news), and there's supposed to be
one in Law as well. The courses consists of both a local part (with lectures as
well as tutoring) and a part consisting of satelite or distributed video
lectures with following audio conference. And then we use email and
Internet (WWW) intensively. The email discussions on our lists is
mirrored by newsgroups, which you can see and interact with if you or
your students are interested.
The project hasn't though been without problems. The professional level hasn't
been quite rewarding in my view, and we have some problems with getting the
students to interact on the more substantial levels. These problems are partly
due to lack of planning. The theme 'cityscape in literature' is rather broad if
you don't establish some common ground to concentrate the research from.
And we've met lots of cultural differences in the approaches, which on the one
hand has in some way problematized the project, on the other hand hasn't been
explicited enough to start a discussion about these differences.
For example one of the most lively discussions has been on which language(s)
we should use. From the beginning we agreed on English, but it has turned out
to be a problem for the professors, especially from the latin countries. The
result of this has been that our discussions some times has reminded of Babel.
Anyway the project has been interesting up to now. The students have been
introduced to the Internet (which has been a chock in itself) and I'm sure
they'll get a lot out of it in the long term.
Right now, I'm supposed to make some kind of evaluation about the project.
Therefore I'm very interested in hearing about other experiences with this
kind of projects. To me it seems like a very rewarding way to use
telecommunications and the Internet in literary studies, but still we could do
much better than this, and you probably have done something better?
You can visit the project on the following WWW adresses:
The main homepage with links to the discussion groups:
http://www.dipoli.hut.fi/org/TechNet/org/humanities/index.html
The Norwegian, literature specific home page with links to some of our
material:
http://www.uib.no:80/ped/humanities.html
Try it out and tell me your opinion. If you have any questions don't
hesitate.
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
Soeren Pold
Dpt. of Comparative Literature
University of Aarhus
Willemoesgade 15
8200 Aarhus N
Denmark
phone: +45 8942 1992
fax: +45 8942 1850
My smiling face =:-
http://www.uib.no/ped/tutors/spaarhus.gif
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
