Untitled - witz cultural

320HYPERTEXT 3.0 offwhat the class is doing. At one institution at which I've taught, class websitesproved valuable informational and recruiting tools. Many universitiesprevent public access to course websites either because they contain materialsfor they have paid a subscription or, in other cases, because instructorshave illegally used copyrighted materials without permission. Still, that's noreason to close offthe entire site.Third, a course website is almost always associated with a particular instructor,and only very rarely will others in the same department use it, whichmeans in practice that the time and energy that go into creating a website cannever be shared or leveraged. For that reason I would urge departments andinstitutions to create broader sites llke The Victorian Web and The PostcolonialWeb that many courses and instructors can use. For example, a website withmaterials about eighteenth-century Anglo-European culture could be of usenot only to courses in English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, and otherliteratures but also to those in nonliterature departments, such as art historyreligious studies, social and political history music, philosophy, and so on.Websites, like all hypertext, are fundamentally modular. Therefore, suchsites can grow slowly and only in certain areas. I find that people are far morewilling to contribute a small module to an ongoing enterprise, such as thiskind of a website, than to begin creating a body of materials by themselves.The next step away from course-based websites involves creating departmentalor institutional ones that include more than administrative information.When I served as the founding dean of the University Scholars Program(USP), an interdisciplinary honors college at the National University of Singapore,we created the usual institutional site with information about admissionsand sections for all disciplines and courses. We also used hlpertert asan institutional paradigm.l0 Courses ranging from writing, ethics, and theculture of Islam to physics and statistics raised questions with students aboutconnections oftheir classes to other fields. The site for Science, Technology,and Societyin addition to including lists ofcourses offered also had briefintroductionsto the relations of technology, particularly information technology,to literature, computer science, ethics, and so on. Since Singapore is amultiethnic, multiracial society, many courses tried to reflect that fact, incorporatingmaterials from two or more cultures. Thus an introduction to politicaltheory included both European political thinkers and those from Islamiccountries, a course in the history of cosmologies included India, China, theMiddle East, and Europe. Like the sitemapsinTheVictorianWeb,the USP sitewas designed to suggest to students the many different ways of approachinga subject, not all ofwhich any one person could cover.