‘One day when I was twenty-three or twenty-four this sentence seemed to form in my head, without my willing it, much as sentences form when we are half-asleep, ‘Hammer your thoughts into unity’. For days I could think of nothing else and for years I tested all I did by that sentence [...]” William Butler Yeats (cited in Frank Tuohy, Yeats, 1976, p.51 )

 

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PROJECTS

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SUBJECTS, TOPICS

 

This semester we have an opportunity to be on the cutting edge of the new reading and writing. Those who choose to do so will be working together to some extent, contributing parts if not all of their projects to a joint project, rather like builders of the great monuments of the past: pyramids, temples, cathedrals, and centers of government. (Hence the extra relevance of one of our unifying symbols, the carpenter's hammer.) Unlike cathedral builders, however, each contributor will be named. You will have a chance for not only personal "immortality," therefore, but also that kind of awesome collective "immortality" embodied in the great monuments of the past. We will be working with students of the past and the future, and a graduate student in educational psychology, Alex Games, as well as the Center for Instructional Technology.

   AND  it will be more fun, because you will playing a video game, albeit an old-fashioned text-based quest explorer game with images and, if you wish, artificial intelligence, sound, video, animation, etc.

  The game is housed in what is known as a MOO, a multi-player object-oriented game. "Object-oriented" in our case simply means we are able to create new spaces and characters.

 The Center for Instructional Technology is supporting this project because it may help solve these pedagogical goals:

1. Developing the ability of students to write about space, place, and personality.
2. Increasing the students' knowledge of and connections to this campus and this town -- their own place, their second home, their alma mater.
3. Developing the students' historical imaginations, freeing them to explore other places, other times.
4. Conveying to a Texas-bound student the experience of other countries, especially their important places and buildings.
5. Encouraging Texas students to access the radically different sense of time and history embodied in the architecture and customs of a culture of the Eastern hemisphere.
6. Enabling Texas students to experience this semester a very different university experience, Oxford, with a thousand years of history.
7. Inspiring students to feel the presence and support of their predecessors, the "ghosts" of the past associated with the places and spaces around them here and elsewhere.
8. Technology's Role:
9. To simulate places, spaces, and personalities as much as possible and to provide a platform for writing about them.
10. Expected Outcome:
11. A relatively permanent MOO architecture that can be used for many different literature, language, history, geography, and architecture classes.

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1. The first project is to be an exploration of the relation between place and the life and works of a famous person associated with the universities of Texas and Oxford, especially how the spirit or legacy of the famous person is embodied in the campus as place. If you contribute to the MOO you create a place associated with a person and/or a ghost dialogue, preferably someone in your proposed major or concentration. If you create a website you must either (1) connect the person with yourself , as in a dialogue between you and his or her ghost or whatever, as many previous projects have done, or (2) present a dialogue between ghosts from two or more different institutions. Extra points are given for (1) choosing someone in your proposed major or concentration; and (2) conversations with more than one ghost. If there is any doubt about the association between the person you are considering and the universities of Texas or Oxford, consult with the instructor before beginning the research.

A good, scholarly example, set in Oxford, is http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~bump/VSA/BRITTANY.htm

A simple, but effective example in a U.T. setting is http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~bump/VSA/ElizabethJudeghosts.htm

For other examples see

http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~bump/VSA/

2a. The second project can be a continuation of the first, or an exploration of another famous person along the same lines, or, for website authors, an imitation of a literary account of college life applied to U. T.

2b. In the second option, parodies or imitations must be focused on your own experiences of this class, U. T. academic life, and your own experiences of places that we have or will visit. You are to work in as many exact quotations as possible from the original (with quotation marks and documentation) and by thoughtful, insightful parallels or comparisons between the experiences in the literary account and your U.T. experience (again with documentation).

A good example is

http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~bump/VSA/ada/intro.htm

For other examples see

http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~bump/VSA/Texas.html

http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~bump/VSA/Hardy.html

http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~bump/VSA/Beerbohm.html

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U. T. Alumni

 

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