Online Courses

These are my notes on topics of interest in online courses, developed as I surfed the web as part of an assignment for the Grinnell College Summer 1998 Hypermedia Studies Workshop.

Problems

I was quite surprised at the number of broken links I found on course pages, including broken links to what should be major sites. For example, George Landow used to maintain a "storyspace cluster" (and there are even links to it from pages at Brown), but it seems to be gone.

As is the case of many web readers, I found myself moving away from my main task. For example, I spent some time looking for Stuart Moulthop's electronic "Garden of Forking Paths" (it is not available).

Not in my discipline

The nature of authorship

I found the Duke University course on Democracy, Technology, and Authorship quite interesting. Among other things, students had developed a hypertext version of the declaration of independence that traces the changes to the document.

Since hypertext is supposed to raise problems with the question of "authorship" (e.g., who has really written a text that is primarily links to other texts), I found it instructive to see that the question of authorship of the declaration of independence is also quite tangled.

Writing

There seem to be a number of people who feel that hypermedia systems (most commonly Storyspace) can help us teach "regular" writing. I didn't bother to identify the individual courses, but I did consider that a topic worthy of discussion. [Bolter makes a similar claim in Writing Space.]

In my discipline

I wasn't sure that many computer science departments teach about the techonlogy of hypermedia, at least at the undergraduate level. I did, however, look at The World Lecture Hall for some courses. [A search using altavista gave too many non-useful hits.]

A failure

There seemed to be an interesting course on "Electronic Documents" in Finland. It was described as

History and structure of electronic documents. Hypertext, multimedia storage, design and implementation, SGML and other standards and structured documents. Syllabus, lecture notes, assignments, and links to related materials. By Karen Lemone, Espoo-Vantaa Institute of Technology.

Unfortunately, the links on the main course page don't seem to lead anywhere.

With some work, I was able to track a newer version of the course down at Lemone's home institution (WPI).

A distraction

Hal Abelson at MIT teaches an interesting course on Ethics and Law on the Electronic Frontier, but again it's not the kind of CS I was looking for.

Web sites

There are a few courses on webmaster-related web issues (as opposed to the thousands on "how to build a web page"). The ones I found seemed to be too much about the technology.

Concluding notes

I needed to have more time to look into these issues. It's likely that I could find some pertinant courses by doing keyword searches (or by stepping through noted department pages) to find information on courses in information retrieval.