Untitled - witz cultural

277RECONFIGURINGLITERARYEDUCATIONglamour for several reasons. First, some have found that the need to deal withseveral disciplines has meant that some or all end up being treated superficiallyor only from the point ofview ofanother discipline. Second, such teachingrequires faculty and administration to make often exlraordinarily heavycommitments, parricularly when such courses involve teams of two or moreinstructors. Then, when members of the original team take a leave or coveran essential course for their department, the interdisciplinary course comesto a halt. In contrast to previous educational technology, hypertext offersinstructors the continual virtual presence ofteachers from other disciplines.A11 the qualities of connectivity, preservation, and accessibility that makehypertext an enormously valuable teaching resource also make it equallyvaluable as a scholarly tool. The medium's integrative quality, when combinedwith its ease of use, offers a means of efficiently integrating one's scholarlywork and work-in-progress with onek teaching. In particular, one canlink porrions of data on which one is working, whether they take the form ofprimary texts, statistics, chemical analyses, or visual materials, and integratethese into courses. Such methods, which we have already tested in undergraduateand graduate courses at Brown, allow faculty to explore their ownprimary interests while showing students how a particular discipline arrivesat the materials, the "truths of the discipline," it presents to students as worthyof their knowledge. Materials on anti-Catholicism and anti-lrish prejudicein Victorian Britain created byAnthony S. Wohl, like some of myrecentlypublished work on Graham Swift and sections of this book, represent suchintegration of the instructort scholarship and teaching. Such use of one'sown work for teaching, which one can use to emphasize the more problematicaspects of a field, accustoms students to the notion that for the researcherand theorist many key problems and ideas remain in flux.Hypermedia linking, which integrates scholarship and teaching and onediscipline with others, also permits the faculty member to introduce beginnersto the way advanced students in a field think and work while it givesbeginners access to materials at a variety of levels of difficulty. Such materials,which the instruclor can make easily available to all or only advanced students,again permit a more efficient means than do textbooks of introducing studentsto the actual work of a discipline, which is often characterized by competingschools of thought. Because hypertext interlinks and interweaves avariety of materials at differing levels of difficulty and expertise, it encouragesboth exploration and self-paced instruction. The presence of such materialspermits faculty members to accommodate the slower as well as the faster, ormore committed, learners in the same class. I've often been asked if the verv