The theme of the CATH94 Conference was 'Courseware in Action'.
This publication of papers from it has been rather slow in making its appearance,but the lessons its contributors have to offer are no less useful for that. The overall tone of the articles is sceptical and cautionary, rather than the techno-triumphalism one might expect.
T Alex Reid provides a witty introduction warning of the dangers of
over-optimism, which is followed by practical advice from Fred Riley on
choosing authoring tools. It is interesting to note that the majority of
authors, presumably referring to work current in 1993-4, were constrained
to use programs such as Toolbook, Guide, and Authorware. What this emphasises is the truly liberating and revolutionary power of the Web and HTML in producing an environment which has pushed many of these small-volume programs into the background - though they are still being used for Intranet applications.
This is demonstrated in Anne Squires account of a poetry shell program
in Toolbook, with all the limitations of a proprietary program. As she
quite rightly observes: "to produce anything more than an electronic textbook is a skilled, expensive, and time-consuming operation".
Lynda Myers (Texas Tech Uni) argues persuasively for computer networking
as a means of engaging students in a variety of discourse groups: "the ability to decipher the rules governing a specific type of writing is a skill students need to use in academe and beyond."
In some cases the use of conditional and future tenses reveals work-in-progress rather than a tried and tested product. Expressions such as "this program could ... might ... will" give the game away somewhat.
The most useful papers on the other hand are those which report on classroom practice, and any individuals or department contemplating a heady flight into computer-assisted learning would do well to learn from the experience and the mistakes of these pioneers.
The subject bases are eclectic - history, language acquisition, music,
media arts. Michael Cosgrave gives an interesting account of historical
studies at Cork, focusing on 'the paperless exam'. He provides a very honest account which takes note of the small but crucial issues such as choosing the most appropriate word-processor, the off-putting costs of site-licences, and the security problems of submitting paperless answers for exam assessment, and the costs of photocopying versus electronic distribution.
An article on textual resources at Oxford focuses on the Electra program
for establishing a database of writing by women 1780-1830. Apart from this seemingly arbitrary choice of period [someone's research interest?] this raises - but does not discuss - the interesting ideological question of what is chosen for inclusion. Given finite funding, might not the privileging of a text by inclusion give it an artificial status?
Michael Popham provides a lucid and engaging account of SGML which [quite
apart from its own significance] would be very useful for those who need
a gentle introduction to HTML. He explains very clearly the significance
of markup languages and the chance they offer for future-proofing information in electronic form.
It might be late in arriving post-Conference, but this collection offers
a very useful and wide-ranging survey of issues in the use of computer
technology in humanities teaching. The very latest information will be
available on the Internet no doubt, but a copy of this publication should
be read by any individuals or groups about to embark on another wide-eyed
CAL project.
