The Guided Tour

Note: this is a paper I gave to a seminar on the use of Web pages for University teaching held at Birmingham University on 9/1/97. It thus reflects my state of mind and knowledge, and the state of my Web site, at that time.

An outline of the talk is here.

Introduction: the structure of the site

The site, and its home page, are divided into sections roughly corresponding to my interests as a teacher and researcher, so the best way to start is to say what these are. Here is the home page.

Each section has an icon, which is also a link to a sub home page for that section; pages in each section are headed with that icon, and at the end of each page in a section a small version of the same icon will link you back to the sub home page. The main heading, 'B&P', is the abbreviated name of what I mainly do, which is to teach a three year course called bibliography and paleography in the School of English. Anywhere on the site, the small 'B&P' icon at the end of a page will get you back to the main home page.

Bibliography is the study of printing; paleography is the study of handwriting. And those two subjects are what the site is mainly about. I should add that the kind of handwriting I'm talking about is usually forged handwriting: for the last 22 years I have acted as a forensic handwriting consultant, giving evidence in court on dud girocheques and forged wills and so on, and a lot of my web site is devoted to that subject.

The first section is an introduction to the whole site, which includes, incidentally, a copy of this talk. So if any of you miss any of it, say by falling asleep, and should happen to regret it, all is not lost. And this for me is the enormous benefit of the Web for teaching purposes. It's so easy. It is as easy to publish as to write. I put this talk on the Web because it was easy to do so. Any teaching aid you create you can instantly publish, and and keep available for as long as you like, for anyone.

So this site was created, in a wholly amateur way, with a sense of playing with the possibilities of this miraculous new medium: just to see what can be done with it. All of it was created with the simple to use Web page creation program PageMill, apart from one section; none of it is interactive, or complex, or taxes my rather basic knowledge of computers. Making this site (it took about a year) was easy, and enjoyable, and very very useful.

Here are the other sections: printing, first, and then handwriting. I also teach a course on psychoanalysis and literary theory, and this has its own subsection: the course is called Theories of the Mind. There's a section called 'students', which has work created for the Web by students: in the bibliography course I teach desktop publishing, computer graphics, and web page creation, and the results are posted in this section. It also has links to Web pages created by former students--one of whom, for instance runs the Oxford University English Faculty Library Web pages. I teach a course on the novelist Kurt Vonnegut: there is a section devoted to him. And, finally, I'm interested in the possibility of publishing poetry and other creative writing on the Web. There is a separate section devoted to that.

In this talk I thought that the best way to deal with the material in the time was not to tour each section--the site is quite large, about 19 megabytes [it's grown somewhat since then: 200 megabytes on 12/2/99]--but to show the different ways I've found the Web to be of practical use for teaching, with examples from different parts of the site. So, here goes.

Teaching and the Web

lectures: formal

I give two kinds of lectures, which I'll call formal and informal. Formal lectures are written out, and delivered to a large audience, up to 200 students. It's easy to simply convert the written lecture to html and post it on the Web. I de-activate the link until after I've given it, since I want at least some of the students to turn up. Posting the lecture is handy for students who do miss it, and for revision purposes. I also get a small, but world-wide, email correspondence about the content, which is quite interesting. As I say, this is simple; you can beef it up a bit by using the hypertext resources of the Web by indexing the lecture, like this, and by adding links to illustrations, like this.

lectures: informal

Informal lectures are delivered to up to 20 students, and aren't written out. What I do with them is to appoint two (different) students per lecture as scribes. Their job is to take particularly careful notes, and get together after the lecture and agree on a combined set of notes. They email this to me, I check it for errors, and put it on the Web. Everyone benefits: the scribes get feedback about efficient note taking, the students get an approved set of notes on the course, and when I give the lectures in the following year, I can find out what I said last year. Here's an example.

manuals

One of the great and beautiful advantages of the Web is that once something gets posted it on the whole stays posted, without any further effort on your part. So some years ago I wrote a set of notes on how to write an undergraduate essay. It requires a certain amount of effort to file this efficiently and produce a master copy for endless photocopying whenever another set of students needs it; not to mention the odd student from some other course who has heard of it and turns up at odd times asking for a copy. Now it's on the Web, for anyone, at any time. Here it is. Again, not much use of hypertext, except in the indexing.

A more technical manual allows you to make more use of the resources of the medium. Every year I teach students the craft of hand printing. I use a manual that I wrote for this purpose. It's now on the Web.

As well as the basic indexing function, I can use hypertext to illustrate the manual, like this; also, since the manual has a big glossary of the technical language of printing, which is here, I can add a hypertext explanation of the technical words as they occur, linked to the relevant part of the glossary: like this.

course outline and teaching materials

Last term, really in a spirit of exploration, I put all the teaching materials, week by week, of a whole course on the Web. There's a complete plan of the course, from the initial descriptive handout to the final workshop and presentations. Every handout (usually two or more a week) was put on the Web as well as being given in paper form to the students; reading lists, various bits of student work, and, when they have been typed up, the student feedback on the course. This is a wonderful way of having everything at hand, for students and for me and for the secretaries. Even if a student is not happy downloading material from the Web they can ask one of the School secretaries, who know how to access the material and print it out. Here's the outline of the course.

reading lists

Putting reading lists on the Web, where they don't get lost and are always available, is an obvious boon. Here is an introductory reading list, and an extensive reading list. More interesting is the handwriting reading list, which aspires to being a complete list, for students and more advanced researchers, of everything that's ever been written about the subject of forensic handwriting analysis. It's subject-indexed, using only html. Here it is.

And there are also pure Web reading lists: sets of links. The Web is now so advanced that there seems to be a page or set of pages somewhere that contains a comprehensive and lovingly updated set of links to whatever topic you want; so all you have to do is to put up a link to those pages. And keep an eye on them, using WebWatcher, to make sure they don't disappear. Here are some links to lists of links.

research projects

My students do research projects on the subject of forensic handwriting analysis. They use the handwriting reading list to survey the literature, have a series of seminars in which they learn research techniques, and then in which the projects are built up, and finally produce. In this set four groups were given the same research task, and hypertext links compare the versions of each section of each of the four, plus a composite produced by me. This is, as they say, still under construction, but you can get the idea.

I also some of my own papers on the Web, mainly about handwriting, and primarily at the moment for student use; I intend eventually to build this area into a comprehensive set of investigations into the theory and practice of forensic handwriting analysis, with refereed contributions. The Web is perfect for this, since the subject is a very minority interest with a high graphics component; extremely expensive to publish by conventional means.

administration

The administration of the School of English has been entirely and comprehensively computerized for about six years, and so it's relatively easy to translate the material on to the Web. I wrote a set of programs that generated html code from the computerized course descriptions, so we have a complete set of current courses indexed and described. What I want to do is to make this interactive, so that students either here or abroad can register for courses and the programming will make sure they obey the various rules that govern course choice. Under construction...

presenting visual materials

An obvious use of the Web, if you don't mind waiting for the downloads. Kurt Vonnegut wrote a novel about the bombing of Dresden. Here are a set of postcards of the city before and after the bombing.

poetry publishing

And here, saved to last since I was hoping I wouldn't have time for it, is a set of poems, laid out and published on the Web. I'm interested professionally in all forms of publishing, and in layout and design, and since I teach all this to students, I'm forced to show that I can do it. The best way to get round the copyright problems is to write the poems myself, so I did. It's a set of twelve haikus, one for each month of the year, each referring to a poem by the Japanese master Basho. The poem itself is a graphic; but there is also a text version of each that has hypertext links to quotations entirely taken from the Web that are supposed to shed some light on its meaning.

The haikus are being revised at the moment...