I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about ways to get primary source documents to “talk” to each other and to the cloud of secondary sources that surround them.  For example, at Monticello we’re working on a digital version of Jefferson’s memorandum books (60 years’ worth of purchases made, places visited, people seen, etc.) and want to enrich it far beyond simply getting the text on the web.  Can we make that incredible information come alive in a rich and user-friendly way?  Put these and other primary sources into a broader context of people, events, ideas?  Connect these seamlessly with secondary sources treating the same topics?  Can we decentralize the process to pull information from non-Monticello assets?  What visualization tools will help?

Or another version of the same “problem.”  Thomas Jefferson wrote between eighteen and nineteen thousand letters in his lifetime and received several times that number from other writers.  What are ways to illuminate the connections among those letters?  What are ways to permit an easy understanding of the larger (political, social, material, geographic) contexts in which that correspondence took place?  Are there good tools that will let people explore letters by theme?  And beyond that, can the same solutions be applied to other correspondents at other times in other places (and, ultimately, turned into a giant killer spiderweb of correspondence)?

In days of yore, the researcher had a limited set of tools at their disposal to get a broad sweeping view of what a research collection consisted of.   There might be a well-crafted NUCMC entry,  a quick glance at a finding aid, a printed catalogue, or a chat with an archivist or librarian.  Sometimes these pieces of information might tell you how much of a collection might meet your research needs (and correspondingly how many days you should plan to spend working with a collection).

Unfortunately many of our digital collections still rely on modes of presentation and description that are based on analog interfaces to collections.   With increasingly large repositories (gathered into even larger aggregations) it is often hard for the researcher to know just how deep a particular rabbit hole goes.  Improved search capabilities help solve part of this problem, but they can often impede serendipitous discoveries and unexpected juxtapositions of materials.

As part of our work to update the IMLS Digital Collections and Content project’s Opening History site, we are exploring ways that we can make the contours of a collection more explicit, develop modes of browsing that facilitate discovery, and provide researchers a sense of what’s available at different levels.

I’m looking forward to THATCamp because this looks like a great group of people to brainstorm with.   Thus far, we’ve been using a paticipatory design technique known as “patchwork prototyping.” By the time of THATCamp we’ll have a few pieces of prototype together for review.   If others are interested, I would be willing & able to lead  a session that explores the general problem space using Opening History and any other collections that participants suggest.

Since sending in the brief blurb for THATCamp I’ve gone through the latest edition of McKeachie’s Teaching Tips book and spent some time pondering what’s necessary to make a seminar work. In some ways this is designing from the back end: for online graduate programs in the humanities or social sciences to work for a large segment of potential students, the classes have to accomplish a certain number of things, and that requires a certain (but undefined) intensity of exchange. I’m afraid I’ve got the Potter Stewart problem with definition here: I can’t tell you what constitutes sufficient intensity, but I know it when I’ve experienced it as either a teacher or student.

It’s certainly possible to construct that intensity in live chats, but since most online classes I’ve seen or taught are asynchronous, I have to think differently from “Oh, I’ll just transpose.” (Here, you can insert platitudinous warnings about uploading PPTs and thinking you’re done.) But while several colleagues have pointed me to some of their online discussions with deep threads (and at least at face value, it seems like intensity to me), that doesn’t help, in the same way that telling a colleague, “Oh, my seminars work great; what’s wrong with you?” isn’t sufficient.

So let me step back and reframe the issue: the existence of great conversation in a setting is not helpful to the central problem of running a seminar. In some ways, it’s a type of chauvenism (“you can have better conversations in this setting”), and that prevents useful conversations about what a seminar experience requires. Not a seminar class online or a face to face seminar but a seminar class in any setting.

Unfortunately, while I have searched, I have not been able to come across ethnographic or other qualitative research on this. There are plenty of how-to guides for running face-to-face discussion, but I am hungry for something beyond clinical-experience suggestions. There is some decent research on transactional distance, and cognitive apprenticeship is an interesting concept, but neither is that satisfying.

So back to basics and some extrapolation. In my most memorable literature classes, and in informal conversations around books, plays, movies, and poems, I’ve been entranced by how others think that writing works–maybe not in the same way that James Wood would parse it, but in some way.

“What does this mean? Was it good or bad? Why did that appear then? No, no, think about these moments, because she could have done something different. They swept in at the end, and that’s why it’s called deus ex machina.”

That’s the type of conversation I imagine for and remember from seminars: close readings, fast exchanges, excruciating pauses while I tried to piece ideas together, rethinking/reframing on the fly. Never mind that I’m an historian, and never mind the excruciating boredom in plenty of classes; the texture of intense conversation stuck in my brain is derived from conversations about novels, poems, plays, and movies.

And as fellow historians of ed David Tyack and Larry Cuban would point out, I have relied on this experience as a “grammar” that I would be predisposed to impose on online seminars. But as my original proposal for THATCamp pointed out, I don’t think the world (or learning) works in the same way everywhere.

What can be extrapolated from the best face-to-face seminars beyond the setting-specific events? I’ll propose that the best seminar classes are ill-formed questions, puzzles with weakly- but effectively-defined targets. Here, I am using “ill-formed” not in the sense of grammar but in the sense of a question that is not itself the best approach to a topic, and in this case, deliberately so. The best framing of an history class I ever took as either an undergraduate or graduate was Susan Stuard‘s course on early modern Europe. In essence, it was historiography, but framed as, “How do we explain the rise of modern just-pre-industrial Europe?” That was a great focus, but it was ill-formed in that it did not have a closed-form answer. The answers we read about and argued over were hypotheses that led to different questions. The course did not finish with our finding an (intellectual) pot of gold, but it was a great way to structure a class.

In many ways, problem-based learning uses the ill-formed question, “How do we solve this problem?” That question assumes a problem, a problem definition, and a potential solution, and of course the value is not in the solution itself but the development of analysis and the application of important concepts in the setting of problems. In this case, the course goal is not the motivating question, but the question is essential to meeting the goal.

Problem-based learning is great when it fits the goals of the course. Not all courses can be designed around problems, and if a seminar is online and asynchronous, I suspect that the loose “how does literature work?” question is not going to… well, work. But the ill-formed question can appear in more than the examples I have described or experienced.

For the record, below is what I proposed for THATCamp. Since I wrote the following months ago, I’ve had additional thoughts on where to go with this, but origins and drafts matter, so here it is, warts and all:

Rant/discussion/query:

Dialog: (How) can we generate and maintain the type of dramatic/performative classroom interaction in an online environment that exists in the best discussion and seminar classes? Face to face classes have a spontaneity that generates such dialogue, and teachers or facilitators can play the Devil’s-advocate role in a way that hones the issues moment to moment, iteratively. But in an asynchronous environment, there is no such inherent moment-to-moment tension and drama This is one essence of humanities classes that I have been unable to replicate online, and the technology skeptics such as Margaret Soltan doubt it is possible.

Central questions:
Are there elements of a live-dialogue drama that can be translated into an asynchronous environment, or should we give up on the “aha!” moment embedded in an argument?
If the first, what are those elements?
If the second, how do we pick different goals that still serve that conversational, perspective-shifting goal for the liberal arts?