AS@UVA: Virtual Space -- Actual Learning
Alan B. Howard
AS@UVA is the virtual space for the American Studies Programs at the University of Virginia:
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What follows is an attempt to describe something that -- much too slowly and with far too much ingrained resistance -- I 've come to understand about the promise of the new technologies for the humanities and especially for American Studies. It has little to do with what most university administrators, state legislators or the public seem to expect -- that computer networks will allow us to deliver learning more efficiently to a larger audience at lower unit costs. Instead, I think that the new technologies are a new opportunity to do what we have always claimed to do --to teach and learn -- but it won't be either easy or cheap. AS@UVA, it turns out, is both "virtual" and a "space" in ways far more complex than Time magazine ever dreamt of; it "virtual" in that it is a simulacrum of something it resembles but is not; and it is a "space" which turns out also to be a temporal continuity, a process.
In order to explain what this last sentence might amount to, I need to begin at the beginning. Bear in mind that the narrative that follows is, like The Education of Henry Adams, a comic tale of the inadequacy of good intentions and the possibilities of learning in spite of oneself.
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In the beginning, my intentions were good. AS@UVA began as a reaction to a set of conditions here at the University of Virginia, a hypothesis set against a set of real, if local and idiosyncratic, institutional problems.
The English Department had come to the realization -- somewhat later than other "major research universities" -- that it was overproducing Ph.D.s for a badly saturated market and that it would have to downsize its Ph.D. program and reallocate resources and energies elsewhere, to undergraduate and especially to masters-level programs.
Almost simultaneously the Department discovered that, since the M.A. had long been understood as the initial stage in the preparation for the Ph.D., it had absolutely no idea what a legitimate "terminal M.A." might look like, a graduate program that prepared students for something other than life in a tenured position.
And, at least in some quarters, this forced us to try to understand what we were educating students for, how our curriculum was organized to that end, and how we would know if we were doing a good job at it -- i.e., it forced us to consider the possibility that all the talk of "assessment" we'd been hearing might actually have something to do with us after all.
In pursuit of at least a partial solution to these problems, I began designing an American Studies professional masters program that would emphasize the use of the new technologies. We already had an undergraduate American Studies Program which had been running for over fifteen years, small but by all accounts successful. We also had an unusually rich set of human and material resources here at UVA. We had a large number of faculty housed in various departments but trained in American Studies or doing de facto American Studies: Richard Wilson in Architectural History; Jim Deetz in Anthropology; John Bunch in the Education School; Ed Ayers, Peter Onuff and Stephen Innes in History; Roger B. Stein in Art; as well as Dell Hymes, Chuck Perdue, Stephen Cushman, Eric Lott, and Stephen Railton in English to name only a few. And we had a library with extensive American holdings, a superb special collections division, The Electronic Text Center, a campus-wide high-quality computing network, and fairly easy access to the resources of Washington, D.C.; Richmond; Williamsburg; and, of course, Monticello. And, finally, I had some familiarity with computers, and least enough not to be phobic about them, and I had a good deal of curiosity how, since they seemed inevitable, they might actually work in an educational setting.
The original design proposal called for a one-year (12-month) program limited to ten students and somehow combining training in American Studies and in computing. The objective was to prepare graduate students for work or further training anywhere that analytical and expressive skills, a good understanding of American cultural processes, and a familiarity with computing would be of value. I also hoped that, if the program proved credible and its success demonstrable, it might provide a model for building similar programs in the English Department and, over time, might provide a path out of the swamp we had wandered into.
When I presented the project to my departmental chair in 1993, the computing I had in mind consisted of public workstations networked to Unix servers capable of delivering email, managing newsgroups, and allowing for file storage. My rather too-vague notion was that I could use this for distance and group work as well as for storing and manipulating student essays. Beyond that, I hoped that, if I could learn something like Asymetrix Toolbook, I could eventually figure out how it use it to construct larger projects that incorporated text and graphics. I had heard about Mosaic, but found it clunky and unreliable. Like the cavalry officer in the television ad who hears -- but does not yet recognize -- the sound of tank treads on some WW I battlefield, a sound that signals the end of everything he knows, I knew that Netscape and the web were out there. But it took me nearly a year to consider that they could ever be anything but a bizarre electronic interstate highway system -- without towns or rest stops and with only a few off-ramps that seemed to lead nowhere. So much for origins: a reasonable attempt to respond to a recognizable set of problems, a surplus of good will, and very little real experience or understanding.
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When you go toAS@UVA I hope that little of this extraordinarily rough beginning is still visible; at the same time I suspect your first impression will be -- nothing special. A home page with a panel of hot buttons pointing you to subordinate pages -- descriptions of the American Studies Programs at Virginia, a set links to resources in American Studies, a collection of locally produced electronic texts, a collection of historic and demographic maps, a group of electronic courses at UVA and elsewhere, a cluster of projects focused on the National Capitol Building, and another set of pages built for the Virginia Association of Museums. If you drill down in any of these areas you'll find some faculty work and a lot of student projects, some of it a little shabby but most of it of pretty good quality, well designed, informative, likely to be useful.
But if you take some time to move about in the space -- with an anthropologist's eye rather than that of a tourist or video surfer -- I hope you'll begin to sense that something different is going on here. In the section on program descriptions, e.g., you have access to descriptions of the American Studies Programs at Virginia, pretty much analogous to the printed materials distributed by the related departments or by the University itself. In addition, however, you'll find a set of electronic courses, syllabi and student work for the most recent cycle of core courses in both undergraduate and masters' programs, a sampler of representative student projects in American Studies, pointers to institutional human, and technical resources for the programs, and resumes for graduates of the programs. In effect, you're invited to explore the program by two paths not usually open to you: in addition to the official version of what the programs are and do, you can see how those general claims and objectives translate into classroom situations and how those situations translate into student learning and accomplishment. What prospective students see here, then, , is a fair representation of what will happen to them should they apply to the programs. What interested onlookers can see is how we actually do the business of teaching and learning here and with what results.
If you move on to Hypertexts, you'll find three different kinds of activity: first, an ongoing archive of core texts in American Studies, texts like de Tocqueville's Democracy in America and Henry Adams' The Education of Henry Adams that are touchstones for many of us whatever our ideological differences or methodological eccentricities. Second, there is the beginning of an archive of lost texts, texts that were once powerful in American society but which have become almost invisible. These are texts that have lost their audience, their commercial viability, and hence their very reality, but which remain interesting exactly because they once had all of these. These texts range from nineteenth century works like Mary Anne Sadlier's Bessy Conway: or, The Irish Girl in America, a novel about the Irish immigration experience to David Levin's History as Romantic Art, the classic modern study of Bancroft, Parkman, Prescott and Motley. Third, there is a group of true hypertexts, electronic texts that sit at the center of a series of satellite projects-other primary texts, images, reviews, essays -- each designed to place the primary text within a thicker con-text in some fashion might rehabilitate it, return to it the power and resonance it once had. The most fully developed of these is Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land, a classic text in American Studies, often criticized but less often read even by its detractors. But Herman Melville's The Confidence Man: His Masquerade, Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, and Mark Twain's Puddn'head Wilson are also useful, interesting hypertext publications.
Clicking on Yellow Pages leads to a space dedicated to providing information on electronic resources for teaching and learning American Studies. It includes some material that can be found elsewhere, search engines, professional associations, bulletin boards, and American Studies programs. But it also includes two relatively novel features. First, there is a set of directories by discipline -- Ethnicity Studies, Gender Studies, Literature, Social Sciences and the like -- each a selective set of pointers maintained by a graduate student who serves as its editor. The editor is responsible for selecting a limited number of the most useful resources available on the Web in a particular area, to describe and evaluate them for the viewer, and to maintain the list over time. There is also a section called Journals and Zines that includes a list of electronic periodicals in American Studies and related fields as well as selected synoptic versions the current run of specific journals; again, these are created and maintained by graduate students through the year.
If you go next to The Capitol Project you'll find a continuing exploration of the National Capitol Building as a cultural product and cultural producer. At its center -- although as in all virtual spaces its difficult to say exactly what the center actually is -- there is a large set of images of the Capitol itself and of the sculpture and painting which, in their interplay, constitute a complex and powerful web of symbols iterating and re-iterating a definition of the American Faith. Over time, we are building an array of commentaries on this web of symbols, piece by piece and item by item explaining the processes by which each component was produced and integrated into the larger structure. In the end -- although there is no end -- the goal is to recontextualize the Capitol, to place its images back into something like the cultural processes that formed them.
The Capitol space is also being linked to a series of peripheral spaces that complement or contest it. A fairly straight forward example of what we have in mind here would be two sites, the state capitol building in Denver, Colorado, a structure clearly designed to mirror and refract the National Capitol, and the capitol building in Lincoln, Nebraska, a structure just as clearly designed to oppose the Capitol while also echoing its major ideological structures. Since neither of these is yet present in The Capitol Project, better examples might be The Arlington National Cemetery and The Holocaust Museum, each of which stands in uneasy confirmation and confrontation with the Capitol itself.
Beyond this kind of inter-institutional dialectic, The Capitol is also linked to sites that are less powerful, less part of the official culture, but also struggling to take part in the larger conversation about American identity and values. In “The Historical Monument of the Federal Republic,” by Erastus Salisbury Field or the paintings and constructions of Howard Finster, we see two artists who have appropriated symbols from the Capitol, amplifying them and refiguring them to their own very different purposes.
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Mapping the site in this physical and spatial way actually turns out to be quite deceptive. AS@UVA came on line about a year ago, on Jan. 1, 1996, and has grown and changed significantly since then. The major architecture has already been reworked once; a large number of new projects added and some older projects deleted, revised or amplified; and ideas that seemed promising have been built and mounted, some kept, some discarded when they didn't pan out. If you wait three months to visit the site, it will be different again, perhaps better , but certainly different.
AS@UVA is, I have discovered, less a space than a process -- and that the process is what is real and significant about it. In the descriptions I've given above, I find myself repeatedly mixing verb tenses, blending what is visible now with what was originally there and what we hope will eventually be there. The casual mingling of ideal and actual, fact and aspiration isn't inadvertent it is the familiar turn of the American mind, the sort of thing that commentators from de Tocqueville to Bercovitch have noted in mingled amusement and despair. It is meant to suggest that although AS@UVA seems to lie there, fixed on the screen , a set of objects physically related in virtual space, in fact what you are seeing is only the trace of a different, and I think larger and more important, on-going process of teaching and learning American Studies.
This process has emerged out of the gap between what I originally imagined and what was possible, between what I understood and what I would be forced to understand. And these gaps are reflected in the parallel difference between what appears on the screen and what is really going on. In 1995, students were admitted to a program that didn't even exist. I explained at our first meeting that the motto of the program was a line from Monty Python, "And now for something different." We were going to try to do integrate American Studies and the new technologies, something for which there were no models. They weren't going to take American Studies at all; we were going to build it -- by designing and building the first iteration of AS@UVA. I went on to explain that I hadn't a clue about how this was to be done. I'd have to learn the technology myself and, although I'd try to keep ahead of them, I knew that, at some point, they'd have to take the lead. I had a few general notions about where we were headed but nothing very clear and we'd have to figure it out as we went along. This was not what exactly what they expected, but, after a short collective sigh, they turned to the task.
And sometime shortly thereafter, the whole project began to assume a life of its own, heading off in directions I hadn't anticipated and, in fact, wouldn't have chosen The students began exercising a kind of creative control that, in extremis I might deflect but couldn't simply deny; they set up projects that struck me, initially, as misguided but which often enough turned out to be really interesting, things I wouldn't have done, couldn't have done and yet, in a number of cases, projects that actually worked. At least as significantly, the site itself began to assert its own shape and logic. Having taken up some tasks that seemed likely to work, there was an obligation to continue them; having established a set of interdependent projects, as each project grew and changed it set off a concatenation of effects in other projects which required adjustment and re-thinking all the way down the line; each of the better projects suggested some extension that ought to be built, some further development that would be required to optimize it. All of this was completely outside the range of my own experience. In the past, I had been able to count on designing a new course, then developing it over a few years, all in the confidence that, at some point I'd have something with a long, useful life. I'd have to modify the course at points, accommodating changes in my own interests or the scholarship in the area, but essentially I could look forward to a long-term payback on my initial investment. AS@UVA, it turned out, required constant re-thinking, continual upkeep and maintenance. It would not only never be finished, it would always be behind. Whatever it was, it was alive! It was moving! And it was always hungry!
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In creating a new program with students rather than building it and then imposing it on them, I had set in motion forces that changed virtually everything . First, it altered the level and kind of expectations of everyone: their work would be visible, not just to their teachers, but theoretically to the whole world; it was, as one student put it, a bit like showering in public. They couldn't just talk to me, they couldn't get by repeating what they thought I wanted to hear; instead, they would have to identify that audience, decide what it already knew, what it needed to know next, and in what kind of language it was prepared to hear. And that audience would most certainly give them feedback, by simply turning its attention elsewhere or by actually going through the work and then e-mailing them a short review. Just one example. One group of undergraduates created a project on Mountain, Georgia, the Confederate Memorial cum convention center and theme park. It went up last May and almost at once they began receiving email about it. Most of the responses are generally favorable but a significant number are not. They've been accused of celebrating the Lost Cause and of defaming it; they've been charged with racism and with not being racist. In other words, they found themselves in the enviable position of displeasing both ends of a number of intersecting political spectrums.