Harvard Humanities Students Discover the 17th Century Online

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By JENNIFER HOWARD

Cambridge, Mass.

On a cool, sun-flecked October morning, Stephen Greenblatt steps up to the podium in a classroom off Harvard Yard and launches into the day's lecture. With a few clicks on a notebook computer, the eminent Shakespearean scholar sets the image of a globe spinning on the screen behind him. It's earth, circa 1633, and across the face of it an imaginary English ship, the Revenge, sails from Ouidah, on the West African coast, to Barbados. In its hold is a cargo of African slaves, bound for the hellish sugar plantations of the West Indies.

With some help from Google Earth and an array of other digital props, all the world's a stage in Mr. Greenblatt's latest venture: a course titled "Travel and Transformation in the Early 17th Century." The class — listed as Humanities 27 — is a leap both for the professor and for Harvard University.

The product of an intense, months-long collaboration between computing specialists, graduate students, librarians, and scholars, it makes innovative use of all the tools and technical know-how a major university can deliver. That includes a course Web site far more extensive and interactive than undergraduates usually encounter, with texts, images, artwork, music, a library's worth of geographic, cultural, and historical resources, even a virtual ship tour.

But the digital elements aren't just a song and dance to keep students entertained. They are a vessel for Mr. Greenblatt's latest scholarly thinking. More than that, they are a central element in the university's campaign to refashion teaching in the humanities.

Harvard has entered the final stage of its multiyear evolution from the static core-curriculum model to what it hopes will be a hands-on, interdisciplinary species of general education. With its blend of digital innovation and scholarship, "Travel and Transformation" may be the humanities course of the future.

Mr. Greenblatt envisioned a course that, as he sees it, "attempts to break down the boundary between the literary and the nonliterary, between history and literature. It's important to understand how the boundaries are fracturing." Humanities 27 satisfies the English department's pre-1800 core requirement, but it is by no stretch of the imagination your standard great-works course, even though students do read three Shakespeare plays during the semester.

Charting a New Course

The 60 or so undergraduates enrolled in the course attend lectures twice a week and meet in smaller classes as well, but they are expected to do much of their learning online. The course announces itself as tech-friendly right from the start, with a 13-minute course trailer as highly produced as any PBS promo.

There's a course pack, too, but many of the required readings can be found only on the Web site. Students blog their responses to each week's assignments; blogging counts for 20 percent of the final grade.

The technology helps Mr. Greenblatt recruit students as partners in a semester-long act of imagination: the voyage of a fictional fleet of three ships — the Revenge, the Resolution, and the Prince Hal — that sails from London in 1633. They set course for Sierra Leone, where they intend to buy slaves. The Revenge reaches its destination and sails on to Barbados. The Resolution, blown off course by a storm, makes it to Brazil, then through the Strait of Magellan to Mexico, then across the Pacific to the Spice Islands, around the Cape of Good Hope, and back to England. The Prince Hal suffers a shipwreck off the Moroccan coast and becomes the prey of Barbary pirates, who sell its crewmen into slavery. A few are transported as far as Istanbul.

Each twist of fate sets up another cultural encounter in which the English seamen, and the students tracking their progress, have to think on their feet in alien and unpredictable settings. The voyage sets Shakespeare's Tempest alongside West Indian, West African, and Islamic cultures and the flora, fauna, and climate of the New World, courtesy of guest lecturers from the relevant disciplines. If it works, students will take away a sense of how cultures interacted and collided in the early modern period, around the time of Harvard's founding in 1636.

It took a substantial investment of what Mr. Greenblatt calls "the insane resources of Harvard" to make this imaginary journey possible. The university's Instructional Computing Group spent much of the summer creating the multimedia 17th-century world that students experience. A handful of other undergraduate courses have Web sites with content as rich as Humanities 27's, but those sites have grown over semesters or years.

"It's incredible we were able to pull this off in such a short amount of time," says Philip Desenne, a senior instructional-media developer and one of the chief tech gurus involved. "It was a brand-new course, with a lot of innovative content that had to be added."

Much of the heavy lifting was done by the university's Presidential Instructional Technology Fellowship program, which helps professors think up nifty digital applications for the classroom. It also provides career-building summer employment for graduate and undergraduate students.

The computing group handled nearly 40 projects this summer, but Mr. Greenblatt's had special status. The course got a big push from Diana Sorensen, Harvard's dean of humanities, who encouraged faculty members to dream up courses inspired by the cross-cultural Silk Road Project. That project, founded by the cellist (and Harvard alumnus) Yo-Yo Ma, has a five-year partnership with Harvard. Another professor proposed a course set up as a journey that would take students through a series of cultural encounters, and Mr. Greenblatt adapted the idea to the 17th century.

Scholars in the humanities often pay lip service to interdisciplinarity, but "Travel and Transformation" exists only because specialists from so many different areas worked together to build it. The teaching staff and experts in other fields helped flesh out the Web site's content, while the tech team came up with material — rare images of West African life, for instance — that Mr. Greenblatt's crew had never encountered before. Throughout the process, content and technology built off each other.

"We didn't want to do something just because it was new technology but because it could be applied," Mr. Desenne explains. At every turn, the tech team asked "What is the pedagogical value?"

Of Harvard's 1,500 or so undergraduate courses, some 1,100 have some kind of Web presence. Among faculty members, "there's an increasing awareness that they need to do something with the Web site," according to Annie Rota, interim director of the computing group.

The leaders of the tech effort, including Ms. Rota, Mr. Desenne, and Kevin Guiney, an instructional-computing specialist, say they have never worked harder on a project. (Mr. Guiney hopes that Humanities 27 will be "a calling card for this kind of course.") Now they are tracking user statistics for the Web site, to figure out which modules get the most traffic and how to refine the content to maximize its usefulness — and how what they've learned might be transported to other courses.

All of them sound as invested as if they were teaching alongside Mr. Greenblatt. "It's not often we get to sit in on the planning stages," Ms. Rota points out. "As the curriculum is getting revamped, we're hoping that we get more involved."

According to Dean Sorensen, that's the idea. The core overhaul aims not only to keep students engaged and immerse them in the learning experience, she says, but also to satisfy the faculty's growing sense "that we have to talk to each other more."

Navigating a New World

Interdisciplinarity can be dangerous. Throw too much material at students, and they may ignore it — or drown in it. Michelle C. Simon, a junior English major from Florida, found the Web site "overwhelming at first." But, she says, "if you go at it piece by piece, it starts to come together. It's all relevant. It's so well researched."

Madeline Haas, a sophomore from Cambridge, finds it almost too rich. "We're covering so much stuff, and we have only two lectures a week," she says. "I wish this were the only course I was taking."

No matter how deluxe the technology, it needs a guiding intelligence to bring it all together. Mr. Greenblatt's formula appears to work. Ms. Simon describes how in the lectures, on the Web site, and in the readings, "you see a pattern of men discovering a new world all over the world."

"This class relies on your imagination a lot," Ms. Haas says. "He's done an incredible job of getting you inside the mind-set of different people."

When he lectures, Mr. Greenblatt gets students laughing about the odoriferous conditions aboard 17th-century ships and then, minutes later, brings the room almost to tears with his account of slaves "dying in their shackles in the incredible stink and filth" of a slave ship.

"The more bells and whistles there are, the more it's like a performance they're seeing," Mr. Greenblatt explains after class. "I'm trying to take seriously what's called the 'visual turn.' "

A Scholar's Voyage

"Travel and Transformation" is a classroom version of Mr. Greenblatt's star turn in Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, his fanciful, best-selling exploration of the elusive mind of the playwright, published in 2004. The course adopts what the professor describes as Shakespeare's strategy "of taking things and adapting them and changing them and launching them into the world, with the idea that they will be refashioned."

The founder of New Historicism, a critical approach that reconnects literary works to the social and historical currents of their time, has never much cared for boundaries. The technological element gives him fresh ways to explore that Shakespearean fascination with what he calls "restless movement," the portability and transmutability of language, images, and ideas.

"We know that cultures don't sit still," Mr. Greenblatt says.

In the lecture hall, up on the screen, Google Earth gives way to a European woodcut of a New World scene — an image that looks Edenic, until Mr. Greenblatt points out the human body roasting over a fire in the background. "They're barbecuing," he says. "This is an image that is transportable, that will tell Europeans what has been found in those first wild years."

As he explains in visceral detail, the scene depicts a fiction. The European colonizers were the ones guilty of savage behavior. And Mr. Greenblatt moves on to the testimony of the Spaniard Bartolomé de Las Casas, whose Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies is a devastating catalog of European savagery. After the audiovisual display, a few stark words of Las Casas's testimony linger on the screen.

The juxtaposition of audiovisual and digital elements ultimately guides students back to the beginning — back to primary sources. "It becomes part of a different mapping, cognitive and actual, of these texts," as Mr. Greenblatt sums it up afterward. "The trick of this course is to do it in such a way that the students get it."