name: Robert Tobin

institution: Whitman College

language: German

status: Full-time, tenure track

project:

title: Glossing Goethe and Autobiography

duration: Summer-Fall 1998

description:
With the help of a student, I would like to develop applications for web-page authoring programs for my German courses. In my third-year German course, the programs would be used to enable students to develop personal home pages in which they present themselves to the internet in German. In my German literature course on the Faust tradition, students would use the html authoring programs to provide rich glosses to selected passages of Goethe's Faust; the glosses will consist of commentary, explanation, interpretation, images, and free associations that relate to words and phrases in the original text.

In the course of the upcoming summer, both I and the student assistant would come to terms with the authoring program Homesite,develop models for both the personal home pages and the glossed sections of Goethe, and develop appropriate vocabulary lists and lesson plans that would allow for the integration of these projects into classroom instruction.

outcome:
In both advanced language and literature courses, this project should give students proficiency in computer and web-related vocabulary. Some students may deem this vocabulary practical and useful.

Upper-level German language acquisition could become even more fun and attractive when it is linked to the acquisition of the computer skill of web-page building.

In the third-year German course, students read and compose a great many autobiographical texts. An overarching goal of the course is to develop skill both in self-expression and in reading attentively the expressions of others. This particularly web-based exercise would encourage students to present themselves imaginatively and creatively both to the members of the class(including me) and to the internet community. With a little bit of creativity, they should be able to find German links that allow them to tie their life stories to bits of German culture that appeal or have some special meaning to them. Since German speakers throughout the world would have access to these web pages, the pages could conceivably prompt e-mail communications between students and German-speaking web surfers.

In the literature course, the glosses are meant to complement the traditional research paper, which I of course also require. The glosses encourage close reading, promoting an interaction with the text in which nearly every word and every phrase could lead to definitions of unfamiliar words, images of scenes, excerpts of musical settings of texts, background on geographical and historical aspects of texts, important critical interpretations and occasional personal reflections. This nearly talmudic commentary on the text provides an important non-linear complement to the research paper and encourages a kind of thinking that is becoming increasingly important in the modern world.

timeline:

It is worth noting that I have been teaching along these lines for some time. In my literature courses, I have consistently required students to gloss passages; I just haven't had them do this on the computer - instead they have used large pieces of construction paper and drawn lines from the original passage to their commentaries. My advanced German course has also been organized around autobiographies for some time now and students have been required to write autobiographies. Again, I have not required use of the web. One year, I did give students the chance to do German web pages on their own for extra credit, but only one student was really up to the project.

Thus it seems to me that my courses and my students are waiting for me to develop ways of integrating the web into their classrooms.

Having heard about the Mellon project, I have been in touch with a student who knows his way around web pages. He has suggested a good web-page authoring program and has offered to train me and my student assistant this spring. We would like to hire him for the summer on a consulting basis, should any problems arise.

The bulk of the project would be done in one month this summer, probably August, but perhaps June. Then the work would be put to use in the classroom in our fall semester, which begins at the end of August.

The student assistant for the summer would stay on in the fall as a lab consultant, helping students construct their projects.

amount: $5,100

breakdown:
summer faculty stipend $2,700
student assistants 1,400
fall assistant 1,000 (year 2)