STUDENT-CONSTRUCTED WEBSITES
FOR RESEARCH PROJECTS:
IS IT WORTH IT?

Paper forthcoming in
The Journal of Multimedia History
by
Adrienne Hood, University of Toronto
Jacqueline Spafford, Royal Ontario Museum
June, 1998


INDEX

Special thanks to the students of HIS 476/1543, in 1996-97 and 1997-98, for participating in a time-consuming experiment.

BACKGROUND
Adrienne Hood teaches a two-semester, upper division/graduate course through the University of Toronto History Department entitled "Topics in Material Culture." This course attracts participants from several disciplines, including History, Art History, Museum Studies, Anthropology, Journalism, as well as students working full-time in various professions. The content deals with both the abstract (theory) and the concrete (objects), but as a history course it is aimed at people with little or no visual training. For their main project, students conduct original research on a topic of their choice that must stem from artifact analysis and be backed up by the material culture theory covered in the course.

OBJECTIVES
In order to stretch the participants' capacities to work with the visual and the abstract (historians are notoriously dependent on text), Hood assigned websites as part of the course requirements for the first time in 1996-97. She wanted the students to design and create individual sites that incorporated their research in a non-traditional format. Other objectives were:

We should point out here that we are aware that many people are working with instructional and research web-based projects that far exceed this one in sophistication. There are even more people, however, who are beginning to see the advantage of integrating websites into their curriculum but have not yet taken the first step, due to such factors as technophobia, lack of facilities, lack of time, or lack of departmental support. We encountered all of these in varying degrees, and will address them here. Our hope is that by discussing the problems we overcame, the difficulties we are still encountering, and, more importantly, the successes we achieved, that other people might consider taking the first step towards working with this important new communication technology.

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THE FIRST YEAR - 1996/97
Computer Literacy
The largest problem we initially encountered was the unevenness of the participants' computer abilities, including the instructor's. They ranged from a level of comfort with a variety of computer applications (2-3 students out of a class of 16) to near computer illiteracy (surprisingly, the majority). This was magnified by the near-terror on the part of students with little computer experience - some contemplated dropping the course when they considered the overwhelming project that lay ahead. In addition, while Hood appreciated the possibilities of the Internet for creating exciting new ways to communicate history, she soon discovered that she had no idea how to create a website of her own, let alone how to teach this to others. One of the University's academic computer facilities, Information Commons, was very enthusiastic about the project and had promised assistance, thus she proceeded, thinking it couldn't be too difficult. She soon found out otherwise.

Equipment and University Support
In addition to the problems created by the uneven levels of computer literacy was the lack of facilities available to all students, since many did not otherwise have access to an adequate computer. The problem was exacerbated in 1996/7 because the course combined undergraduates and graduates; while the university had computer labs that were available exclusively to one or the other, none accommodated both. A related barrier was the fact that students had their email accounts on different servers, and therefore not all could mount their finished sites on a common server.

Unfortunately, it only became clear that the university was not yet equipped to deal with a project like this, with all of its difficulties, after Hood had built it into her syllabus. Furthermore, the computer administration at UofT was complicated, as there were two facilities with which we had to deal. The "Centre for Computing in the Humanities and Social Sciences", or CHASS, supplies support for graduate students and faculty, and provides the server for graduate email accounts and personal websites. "Information Commons" sets up email accounts for everyone, especially undergraduates, and is responsible for listservs, another electronic component of the course Hood had established as a forum for discussion and problem solving. This latter group does not, however, provide space for personal websites. We were obliged, therefore, to deal with both facilities, confusing to a neophyte since it wasn't always clear who did what. At a time when the technical support for the entire university was in transition, politically it was important to deal with each sensitively.

Tackling the Problems - Funding
Around this time Hood linked up with Jackie Spafford, and together they began to tackle some of the problems. Spafford was auditing "Topics in Material Culture" out of interest in 1996. While working toward her MA (Art History), she had taken a course in Computing in the Humanities at UofT, and attended the CETH (Centre for Electronic Texts in the Humanities) summer session at Princeton University. These helped her develop a solid grounding in various computer and Internet applications. She had also worked on numerous Internet projects, designing websites for several university departments and conducting Internet training for small groups. When Hood told her of the problems she was encountering, Spafford suggested they try to get funding to allow her to teach some computer sessions for the course. Since Spafford had done freelance work with CHASS, she approached them first. We submitted a proposal which included an outline of the course and the objectives for including the website component. Our estimate was eleven hours to get the class up and running on HTML (HyperText Markup Language), to help Hood get up to speed on web basics, and to create a course homepage. CHASS agreed to provide funding for the specified hours; surprisingly this turned out to be the easiest part of the organization.

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Finding a Computer-Equipped Classroom
Next we needed to find a classroom equipped with computers. Ideally this would have an adequate number of well-equipped computers, would be available on the evenings that Hood's course was offered, and would be located within easy walking distance from the class as several sessions would be held during the second half of the class. There are a few appropriate computer labs on campus, but obtaining the permission to use them is time-consuming as they are often fully booked, making advanced planning essential. Several weeks and phone calls later, we found a classroom (operated by Information Commons) that we could use for training sessions. It was located nearby in the main UofT library building, and was equipped with 30 high-speed PCs, and an instructor's computer with an LCD projector that permitted the projection of the computer screen.

HTML Instruction
Hood initially donated two 3-hour sessions of class time. Spafford began each with a brief introduction to the concept of the WorldWideWeb, and the mechanics of browsers. She then distributed handouts on basic HTML coding, and used an enlarged projected image to analyze a few fairly basic websites by contrasting the browser view with a view of the same file as encoded text, using two open windows.

The first session was fairly disastrous as it was next to impossible to find the appropriate level at which to instruct. The participants who had no computer experience beyond word processing (many still on DOS-run systems) felt discouraged by the bombardment of new information, while those who were capable of moving more quickly were frustrated by the attention paid to basics. The second session went much more smoothly. Students were instructed to bring the text of whatever research they had completed at that point in word-processed form on a diskette. Spafford showed them how to convert it to ASCII (non-formatted text) and then how to add HTML coding. The computers were unfortunately not outfitted with HTML editors, so students had to use Notepad, which required them to type in the HTML, rather than using software which would add the coding at the click of a button. Although somewhat inefficient, this proved to be beneficial as it forced the students to think about the coding logically and thoroughly, and they quickly learned from their mistakes. We also took advantage of various websites with archived gifs (digitized pictures which can be easily copied into one's own site), icons and background patterns. By the end of this session they each had a simple page which incorporated a variety of fonts, display variations, colors, images and hypertext links. This was a powerful way for them to see the possibilities opening up - they were subsequently less daunted by the whole enterprise, and showed new enthusiasm about continuing.

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The Course Homepage
In the meantime, we worked together on a very basic homepage for the course, which was linked to the History Department's website, and in turn would have links to each students' homepage. With time this page became more informative and sophisticated, with links to related sites, electronic journals, resources for website design, and, eventually, students' webpages. When the homepage became too long for one "page", it was reorganized. A menu was added with links to each of these groupings as well as to the student websites. There was certainly more which could have been done to it at each stage, but Hood found it to be very time-consuming. It remained, for this initial year, a joint project, with Spafford assisting with updates.

Enhancing the Sites
Once the students began to mount their first attempts and realized they could be seen by "the world", they began to put more effort into both the look and content. Spafford gave two more training sessions. In the first, students continued to work on the encoded text they had started in the previous session - they were shown how to add links to external sites, how to add files and link them, and how to add basic navigational aids. They worked on their own for the most part, while Hood and Spafford moved around the class providing individual help. For the last part of the class students with advanced skills sat with the students who were having the most trouble and provided some one-on-one help which greatly helped ease frustrations.

In the second of these two sessions, the focus was on adding images to the sites. In another part of the library building CHASS had a room equipped with a scanner which could be booked by the hour. It was made available to us and we initially reserved it for a 2-hour session. We told students to bring some images to enhance the research included in their sites. Spafford scanned these, saving them as fairly low-resolution gifs. She made minor corrections and alterations in Photoshop 3.0, an image manipulation program that was loaded on the same computer. Several students found and incorporated related images on the internet, which Spafford had shown them how to copy and transfer.

Uploading the Sites
All but one student managed to have his/her page finished by the deadline, although the hurdles weren't all crossed. There was a further problem with the graduate/undergraduate split when students began to transfer their sites to the server. Grads could set up their own homepages using their email accounts on the CHASS server, but undergrads did not have this option with their accounts, which were mainly on the Information Commons server. Numerous phone calls and emails did not lead us to a solution, so as a last resort we decided to have undergrads hand in their completed webpages and accompanying images on a diskette and we loaded them into a subdirectory on Hood's account.

Graduates, meanwhile, needed to be shown how to upload their work to the CHASS server, using an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) program. Since there was neither a computer classroom free at this time nor money available to hold another session, we put this together rather informally. Spafford posted detailed instructions on the class listserv on how to access and use the FTP program included in their email software package, and a step-by-step lesson on how to create a directory and then upload their work. Some required several attempts, and assistance from one of us, but eventually all the sites were up and running.

Despite all the problems, the students came away feeling they had gained a useful skill and had successfully entered the world of the Internet. Hood had also learned many new things and had managed to survive all of the demands of this undertaking. Based on the high level of student enthusiasm resulting from the first attempt, Hood assigned a similar project for her 1997-98 class. In addition, she felt that all her goals had not yet been attained, due mainly to the technical and logistical problems we encountered, and hoped that this could change next time.
Menu of all 1996-97 student websites

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THE SECOND YEAR - 1997/98
This year things were immediately easier as (a) the class was confined to graduates, eliminating some of the administrative problems and facilitating the mounting of websites on the server, and (b) over the course of the initial experiment Hood got to know how to find instructional support for the computer and internet component. In addition, she took a course during the first semester on "Instructional Design for Electronic Media" which not only gave her a much stronger sense of the communication potential (and pitfalls) of web design, but strengthened her belief that it was a valuable enough exercise to pursue during a second year.

Lynn Holden, the Academic Technology Liaison at Information Commons, came in during the second class meeting to give a session on design from a fairly conceptual viewpoint. This proved to be somewhat premature as the students had not even gone over the basics of website creation and found the concepts hard to grasp. While design is an integral component of web construction, in future years this session will be much more valuable given later in the course, once students have a better understanding of this new area and of their individual research projects.

Spafford donated her time to come in again early on to give two sessions on Internet basics, HTML, setting up a website account and FTPing. After the previous year's experiments, things went much more quickly and smoothly in these two sessions, and by the end of the second one each student had a preliminary site mounted on the Internet.

There were many more options offered the second year through CHASS and Information Commons. There are free sign-up courses on basic to advanced website design which several of Adrienne's students took and which helped them to learn much more quickly and systematically. Also, CHASS provided the time of their Information Officer, Claire Smith, to teach two 3-hour sessions, which consolidated much of the earlier information and also gave students the option to develop more advanced design strategies, such as the incorporation of tables and frames.

Varying student interest in the project was evident at this point. Some of the sites remained basic but functional, while other students developed fairly sophisticated layouts and continued work on them after the deadline.
Menu of all 1997-98 student websites

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IMPACT ON CURRICULUM
Time
A big problem is the amount of time which is still required for this undertaking on the parts of both instructor and students. Although Hood expected there would be time demands the first year, she was not prepared for the number of hours she had to invest outside of regular class preparation and teaching for this project. Things improved the second year, but there were still many new bugs to work out and new time requirements. Several students who kept track of their hours estimated they spent 50 to 60 hours on the websites outside of the other course requirements (presenting a seminar, weekly readings with written summaries and two major papers).

Can one justify this extra load on very busy people? It does seem worth it based on one student's comment: "I believe that the inclusion of the website component of the course was one of the most valuable experiences of the entire M.A. program." In reality, however, most of the class agreed that the course requirements were too heavy with the web construction demands included. So far content has not been sacrificed, but at the price of student overload. This will necessitate rethinking the structure of the course somehow to keep the basic curriculum intact while still doing the web assignment.

Content
Hood simply added web construction to the regular course assignments without realizing how much extra time the students would have to devote to it. In the first year, when a less complex website was expected of the students, time was not too problematic. In the second year, when each person was required to have a fully functioning site of their own design and construction, time became a major factor. Although the seminar is a full year long, it originally met only 2 hours per week. The addition of a third hour in the second year permitted some website instruction to be built into class time without sacrificing content.

As a theory course that introduces the students to the use of objects as historical sources, each person is required to produce an original piece of research on a topic of their choice. Beginning with the material evidence, they then move outward to include as many different types of data as possible. The first term assignment is an introduction to the research, including artifact analysis, annotated bibliography, and a strategy of work to be completed in the following term. Having built what she considered to be an appropriate amount of time into the second year of the project to teach the basics of web construction and image scanning, Hood required everyone to present their first assignment as a web site. She stressed, however, that content was more important than form at this point so that if for any reason someone was too challenged by the web requirement they could hand in a traditional paper. This did not excuse them from creating a website, it just gave them more time to tackle it.

Almost all of the students rose to the challenge and presented their first assignment as very credible websites they had created themselves, with images and basic navigational tools. Any content difficulties seemed to be more with the student's lack of familiarity with material culture methodology than with the mode of presentation. What is difficult to assess, however, is the extent to which some students were so intrigued and/or frustrated with the mechanics of web building that they sacrificed time they might otherwise have spent researching their topics. It is likely that some of this did occur.

During the second term, the students were expected to update their sites, but they were on their own in terms of scanning extra images, or adding finer points of design such as tables or frames. Although Hood had initially intended to evaluate the sites periodically throughout the term, she found that it was most realistic (both in terms of her time and the students') to do a concluding assessment at the end of the year about a week after the deadline for term work. The final project was to be a traditional paper in the hope that working back and forth between the two media would further enhance the students' awareness that there are important differences in communicating in these different formats.

Evaluation
One area which continues to be problematic is the grading of the websites. Not only did Hood have to evaluate the content, she also had to comment on and assess the design and construction of the website. Moreover, it is difficult to provide commentary, to make suggestions, and to correct grammar without a hard copy to write on. Thus every website had to be printed out in its entirety to permit the addition of written comments for all the linked sections before it was handed back. This two-pronged grading was incredibly time consuming (twice as much time), not to mention paper and toner-intensive. In the future each student will be required to hand in printed versions of their sites.

Written comments only benefitted individuals and Hood realized that the entire class would profit from her web critique to each of them. As a result, she set up a collective commentary in post-class sessions in a "smart classroom." Here she projected each site onto a large screen, making comments on the visual and organizational aspects and inviting further input from the class. Everyone willingly attended these extra sessions and seemed to learn from them.

A related issue has been determining the percentage of the course grade to be devoted to the website. In the first year it was 15% and the students got a good grade for just doing a basic site. Things had been so difficult, it didn't seem fair to critique them too closely. In 1997/8, because the website design was integrated more thoroughly with the research projects, the first term assignment presented as a website was worth 35% of the grade. In reality content was weighted over web construction, but this was counterbalanced by giving a separate web grade at the end of the year. One thing that became clear over the course of the project, however, was that some students put a lot of extra time and energy into learning more than just the basics and into thinking about how to design a good site. These students should be rewarded for the extra effort, while those who are not so inclined should not be penalized unduly. As a result next year will probably see a return to the assignment of separate grades for each component.

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COPYRIGHT
An issue yet to be resolved by us (and by the rest of the academic world) is copyright on some of the images the students are using in their websites. They copied some from the Internet , but scanned most from books, although some used their own photographs, the best way when possible, to circumvent copyright issues. One possible solution to justify legitimate educational usage would be to add password protection. The problem with this, though, is the severely limited access to the site by net surfers whose potential "visits" had proved to be a source of encouragement and excitement to the students. Another possibility might be to incorporate an abstract of each person's project on the course page with a link to their email address. Interested browsers could then make direct contact with the student. This seems less than satisfactory; hopefully as more academics grapple with electronic publishing we will work out other solutions.

Somewhat related is the issue of crediting references and of "footnoting". The students are still working out the most effective way to do this on their sites. So far hyperlinks to a list of anchored references in a separate file has been the most popular. By the end of the course, I found the students getting more creative with this in a way that permitted appropriate academic citations while not interfering with the layout of the site.

ONE SEMESTER?
Although this seminar has the luxury of a full year in which to incorporate the web building project, it could be accomplished in a semester. The reality to be faced is that however long the course, it will always take some extra work on the part of the students over and above the regular academic requirements. Perhaps the only way around this is to subordinate content in a course that would be designed first and foremost to teach web construction skills. This may be more feasible down the road as universities and faculty become more broadly convinced of the advantage of acquiring and teaching such expertise. Well-constructed syllabi, with judiciously placed web training classes and carefully conceived assignments, could be incorporated into a single-semester class without sacrificing content. A caveat is in order here, though. Not all courses (or their instructors) are suited for this type of exercise. One of the most important lessons we are learning from early applications of hypermedia is that the worst thing one can do is to use it just because it is seems new and trendy. It is essential to work out in advance whether or not the extra time and effort it will take will truly enhance the academic and pedagogical goals.

IS IT WORTH IT?
We would say yes, it is worth it, but would qualify our answer. Except in the case of instructors who have extensive computer and Internet experience and the time to put into teaching those basics, it definitely needs to be a collaborative effort. In this case, the instructor was not prepared for the many technical and logistical demands she encountered, and was fortunate in the first year that she had access to someone who could introduce her to the world of HTML and who had a paid connection with one of the University computing facilities. These facilities have subsequently expanded their resources, and, perhaps more important, Hood is learning how to navigate around them. Both CHASS and Information Commons have supported, and have indicated they will continue to support, the project in various ways.

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STUDENT FEEDBACK
In order to obtain a sense of the value of the web exercise, Hood asked the students to provide feedback through questionnaires administered about half way through the course and close to the end.

Early evaluation
About two thirds of the class thought that it was appropriate to teach website design in a course like this. All appreciated the training provided in one of its forms, but all felt that improvements could be made. Answering whether they would be willing to gain the skills outside of class time if it had been necessary, they were evenly divided - half would and the other half wouldn't. All but one student responded that the website exercise helped them think differently about the nature of their research, especially how they communicate it, and almost half the class felt that the exercise of incorporating visuals helped them think differently about material culture (which was Hood's original goal).

Final Evaluation
By end of the course every student thought it was a useful exercise. Time was a major factor, as was the need to do the coding manually. All are happy to have the acquired the skill and think it will help on the job market, and most felt it made them think about their research and how to communicate it in different ways.
Comments from the Class of 97/98

FURTHER THOUGHTS
Working on this paper has made us take stock and examine the value of this exercise. There seem to be several questions that anyone contemplating a similar undertaking should ask. They are posed below with some of the solutions that have occurred to us - there may be many more:

  • Do Humanities departments consider it important enough for their students to acquire this expertise to offer specific website construction courses?
  • To what extent can one justify time taken away from course content to teach design and construction of websites?
  • Is software like PageMill or Frontpage easy enough to manage (and accessible enough) that the students could bypass the need to learn HTML coding?

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    CONCLUSION
    Having read through the final evaluations there is no doubt that the WEBSITE PROJECT WAS WORTH IT, although this was less clear several months earlier. Adrienne Hood will continue to refine the ways in which she integrates this component into her "Topics in Material Culture" course so that less time needs to be spent on the mechanics of web construction and more can be spent on the conceptual and design aspects of it. She will continue the liaison with the computer support departments that was initiated, so fortuitously, with Jackie Spafford. As long as the course continues, it will be, as it began, a collaborative effort.


    ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
    We would like to thank the University of Toronto computer support groups, CHASS (Computing in the Humanities and Social Sciences), especially Chris Leowski and Claire Smith, and Information Commons, particularly John Bradley and Lynn Holden.
    The coding for this article was done by Jacqueline Spafford.


    After ten years as a curator of textiles at the Royal Ontario Museum, Adrienne Hood moved to the University of Toronto, where she is an Assistant Professor of Early American History and Material Culture. Her interest in the student web project developed from her museum experiences of communicating information in an exhibit format combined with thinking about how historians can communicate to a wider audience.
    [email protected]

    Jacqueline Spafford is a graduate of the MA program in Art History at the University of Toronto. She is interested in combining Art History with the internet and other multimedia applications. She currently works at the Royal Ontario Museum, and beginning Fall '98 will be the Visual Resources Curator at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
    [email protected]

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