New historicist and cultural materialist approaches to literature emphasizes the value of reading literary and non-literary texts from the same period as if they are in constant exchange with each other. Each version we present, whether through our lectures or the texts we assign, holds certain biases, focuses on individual intellectual interests, or otherwise produces gaps in historical narratives. History is a narrative that is always constructed, and even if we try to keep our own ideologies in check, we may unwittingly fall into pitfalls caused by practicalities, such as time constraints and overcrowded classes. With only one or two weeks to spend on , for example, should we concentrate on colonial exploration and expansion? Race? Servitude? Gender? Magic? Each is represented in the play, and each takes part in a wider early modern discourse that sought to define and place emerging categories within boundaries familiar to audiences of the time. Each has its own rich historical narrative as well as a complicated representation in the play. However, spending time covering one category through lectures, handouts, multi-media presentations and class discussion often comes at the expense of racing through or entirely omitting another topic of exploration.

Having students create wikis based on issues of social identity in the early modern period allowed us to address these concerns and develop an implicit awareness of motives for doing history. Although some have tagged the new millennium as the post-identity age, issues of gender, race, ethnicity, religion, class, sexuality, and (dis)ability still inform the lived material realities that students, in going about their daily lives, must contend with . Social identity was very much on the minds of early modern English people as well. In the years that make up Shakespeare’s life (1564 to 1616), there was an enormous output of manuals advising an increasingly literate public on how to be a good servant, wife, soldier, husbandman, magician, and king. Economic, religious, and other complicated paradigmatic shifts created an anxiety of identity featured in many of the plays. In the popular comedy , for example, male actors become women who then disguise themselves as men, servants imagine rising in station through marriage, and those of noble birth act in ways unsupported by traditional decorum. Creating wikis based on the identities that recur throughout Shakespeare’s plays would keep historical research focused and relevant both to our students’ lives and to the period we were studying.

Since many students came to class with some previous exposure to Shakespeare’s works, we asked them to generate a list of categories they had encountered in such plays as , , and and other texts we would read throughout the semester. The primary identities listed were Men, Women, Nobility, Servants, Religious Types, Professionals, Magicians and Witches, Colonizer and Colonized, Fools, Poor Folk, and Villains. Students then formed small groups of three to four members and chose a specific identity to focus on for the duration of the semester. Each group was then charged with creating a wiki based on the identity they had chosen. The wikis would include an array of primary and secondary sources that would serve as a research guide — a customizable course-specific database — that this and future classes could consult and continue to develop. We said very little about how the wikis should look or how the content should be organized. We wanted to give the groups as much creative freedom as possible in deciding what these resources would be with one stipulation: the wikis needed to include the types of historical and literary resources emphasized above. We hoped this approach would allow quality time to be spent on neglected topics such as the medical profession as represented by Lady Macbeth’s doctor, even if classroom discussion, as is typical, favored the play’s more glamorous villains and witches.

Moreover, we anticipated that amassing literary, historical, and critical materials focused on issues of social identity would provide direct access to what Jameson called the radical historicity of everything — that is, the notions of gender, poverty, race, ethnicity, etc., everything we may be tempted to think of as permanent . Indeed, these are the very topics the class was assigned to explore. In generating these topics, it was obvious that our students had already responded to the literary creations with some spark of recognition. According to Ulin, initial self-recognition is a factor built into literature itself by writers resisting conventions of referentiality in favor of abstraction [and] idealization, and is thus typically responded to by readers who have been taught to seek literature’s eternal verities in preference to anything of local or historical importance .

Shakespeare especially has achieved an appeal based in part on his artful capacity for abstraction. Students come to class expecting to relate (earnestly or cynically) to as the great tragic romance of all time since they have already become familiar with the play’s themes through work in high school and through popular culture. Historical interpretation has the potential to unlock difference in even the most familiar literary works. However, doing so forces us to engage in de-familiarization, which opens texts to additional possibilities for thinking about identity and presents us with the origins and implications of our own ideological moment. Pedagogically speaking, real historical work, which entails judging the perspectives of authors of primary documents as well as works of literature, can distance students from their preconceived notions as much as it can provide a background for them. For example, placing the suggestive, personal jests shared by Romeo and Mercutio within the discourses of male friendship in the period exposes students to different modes of male behavioral acceptability, which may offer options to some of the homophobic discourses circulating today. To witness other possibilities for understanding given identities is to dislodge stereotypes at their root, exposing each as a vacillating, ever-evolving qualifier that has little claim, if any, on an absolute negating truth.

One of our biggest challenges in designing this project was choosing the appropriate medium to achieve our goals. Wikis were a candidate because of their easy editing functions and low learning curve. However, there is also a stigma attached to wikis thanks in large part to the ongoing debate over the value of Wikipedia. The lack of accountability and formal training of many Wikipedia users, as well as the absence of a peer review process, often frustrates educators when its error-ridden entries are cited as authoritative in research papers. A recent example of this sort of backlash is the case of the Middlebury College History Department’s decision to ban Wikipedia citations. Brock Read writes that The problem with Wikipedia in the eyes of many scholars is its open editing system. The site permits unregistered, anonymous users to edit content alongside more traditional contributors . Read goes on to quote Don J. Wyatt, Chairman of the History Department at Middlebury College, who says, Wikipedia is very seductive: We all are sort of enamored of the convenience and speed of the Web. From the standpoint of access, it’s a marvelous thing. But from the standpoint of maintaining quality, it’s so much less . This point about convenience vs. quality will be discussed later, but for now we want to focus on the openly accessible quality of wikis and why this makes them such useful tools for collaboration.

For better or worse, wikis coerce users into making connections with other users and with the material they present, and despite the ongoing debate over accuracy, wikis are being increasingly used by educators who like the ease with which they can put collaborative pedagogical values into practice. Most notable among these values is the opportunity for students to work together, beyond the confines of the classroom, to negotiate language use and the idea of discourse and enact a public presentation of knowledge through the blending of image, text, and sound (; ; ). Our choice to use wikis was made for similar reasons, but perhaps most important was how their flexible functionality would provide students a venue through which they could engage with historical contexts first-hand. More than just presenting the typical list of disembodied facts delivered nervously during ten-minute oral presentations, the process of creating wikis would allow our students to forge important connections between historical acts and literary representations as a negotiating group. In so doing, they would produce a kind of narrative that has its own vested interests in their particular take on the world as well as on the early modern period. In other words, they would be taking the same kind of postmodern intellectual risk of historians whose work inevitably entails taking a stand on key theoretical issues and is an intrinsically theoretical as well as empirical enterprise . Moreover, this kind of interpretation would be expressed through students’ ability to add value through their use of and interaction with resources by taking an active role in remixing them and exploring new connections and contexts.

The notion of context is worth discussing a bit more in-depth. One of the most common criticisms of Web 2.0 applications is that they devalue information through a lack of context and individual voice. Jaron Lanier, in his critique of Wikipedia entries, writes, Accuracy in a text is not enough. A desirable text is more than a collection of accurate references. It is also an expression of personality . He continues, When you see the context in which something was written and you know who the author was just beyond a name, you learn so much more than when you find the same text placed in the anonymous, faux-authoritative, anti-contextual brew of the Wikipedia...You have to have a chance to sense personality in order for language to have its full meaning . Wikipedia contributors generally operate anonymously, and when a large number of anonymous users contribute to a single site, the result is what Lanier calls the hive mind . For this reason, many of these sites have a tendency to seem more ephemeral and nebulous than traditional publications, a point that illustrates how, even as we move rapidly toward a more digital culture, we still cling to established notions of stability and authenticity. Ingrid Mason addresses this idea, writing, Authenticity is crucial to society’s understanding of historicity, whether measured in terms of centuries or seconds. She adds that Digital culture wants to continually revise its past as much as project into its future . A tension exists between the notions of fluidity and fixity but, while both are important, it is fixity that gives information a sense of direction and purpose. In quoting John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, she states that fixity frames information. Further, The way a writer and publisher physically present information, relying on resources outside the information itself, conveys to the reader much more than information alone. Context not only gives people what to read, it tells them how to read, what it means, what it’s worth, and why it matters. Context, in other words, creates a sense of the past, present, and future — cultural and social, fixity and fluidity — on a continuum, irrespective of technology

It is our contention, however, that the pedagogical applications of Web 2.0 technology under consideration here provide an outlet through which educators can entice students to look beyond fixed notions of authenticity and create new contexts that emphasize flexibility in a way that is relevant to the current culture of information. James Hilton speaks to this point when he compares current trends in the information seeking behavior of college students to what he calls the rip, mix and burn era of music: Today’s students want to be able to take content from other people, they want to mix it in new creative ways — to produce it, to publish it, and to distribute it . He suggests that students raised in the digital age tend to think of value in terms of their ability to remix and personalize information. The experience of contributing to a wiki does just that — it encourages students to explore and make their own connections instead of relying on authorities whose work is typically bound in the age-old symbol of authority: the published book. For this reason, we asked our students to combine information gathered from traditional sources such as books and journals with additional or differently explored primary sources, literature and images from online digital collections. By engaging with document creation from the ground up, they would be authorizing a vision of the past that related to their findings as well as their points of view that would be made apparent, finally, through their visual presentation as well as their written interpretation. In other words, instead of relying solely on the research paper in which students often mimic authority by reproducing formalized structures, wikis would encourage them to rethink their approaches to research and to defend both their points of view as well as the form through which they choose to organize and present their findings. As James Hilton suggests, allowing students to actively remix and personalize their research would help them find their voices as scholars fully engaged in the act of knowledge production.

Viewed in this light, consensus can be seen, not as a final goal, but as a starting point from which students are encouraged to look for gaps in knowledge, imagine alternative interpretations, and contribute to the ever-changing, adaptable structure of the wiki. This point recalls John Trimbur’s classic essay, which is worth examining here. Playing mainly off the ideas of Kenneth Bruffee, Trimbur notes some of the most commonly cited benefits of collaborative learning: it democratizes the classroom, allows students to share in decision-making, and teaches them to take an active role in group life. The desired effect, advocates claim, is to reach consensus through an expanding conversation . He adds that in Bruffee’s social constructionist pedagogy, the language used to reach consensus acquires greater authority as it acquires greater social weight: the knowledge students put into words counts for more as they test it out, revising and relocating it by taking into account what their peers, the teacher, and voices outside the classroom have to say . But it is this idea of consensus that worries some critics, who claim that the use of consensus in collaborative learning is an inherently dangerous and potentially totalitarian practice that stifles individual voice and creativity, suppresses differences, and enforces conformity . Trimbur asserts that the debate framed in these terms presents an either/or scenario that misses some of the more nuanced aspects of consensus. He doesn’t want to dismiss the notion outright; rather, he wants to revise it, as a step toward developing a critical practice of collaborative learning, and continues to argue that consensus can be a powerful instrument for students to generate differences, to identify systems of authority that organize these differences, and to transform the relations of power that determine who may speak and what counts as a meaningful statement .

Trimbur’s words echo a point made earlier about how historical interpretation has the power to unlock difference and, in so doing, can open a text to a greater array of possibilities. Consensus, then, becomes a source of conflict rather than a mere act of assimilation: Redefining consensus as a matter of conflict suggests, moreover, that consensus does not so much reconcile differences through rational negotiation. Instead, such a redefinition represents consensus as a strategy that structures differences by organizing them in relation to each other. In this way, Trimbur continues, consensus cannot be known without its opposite — without the other voices at the periphery of the conversation . Proponents of collaborative learning might claim that this argument distorts the goals of social constructionist pedagogy by disrupting the conversation to force change in people’s interest, but Trimbur adds that we need to look at collaborative learning not merely as a process of consensus-making but more important as a process of identifying differences and locating these differences in relation to each other .

We hoped to avoid the afore-mentioned pitfalls and use the technology in a way that would not only illuminate the interpretability of historical materials, but would promote the sort of difference that Trimbur is concerned with. It is one thing to present students with abstract theory, but quite another to have them engage with the phenomenon from which theory is created, and forms of history — be they literary, social, economic, or otherwise — are written from particular positions and involve judgments made in the present about who and what is important in the past. Our students would engage with difference on three levels: first, through researching how identities of the past were qualified by others, and second, by experiencing how these identities were interpreted by a playwright interested in representing them for entertainment purposes in a certain place and time. Third, the kind of substantive group negotiation engendered by wikis would enable students to recognize their own positions by having to account for the alternative perspectives of their classmates. Together, they would hone their skills of inquiry by practicing them through collaboratively constructing a text, engaging in a kind of meta-historical conversation while working in a new kind of classroom sphere . Encountering interpretative practices on both textual and interpersonal levels would enable students to fully engage with the way apparently seamless veneers of history are built from multiple negotiations.

We were also interested in what impact this technology would have on the information seeking behavior of our students. As stated above, we sought to embed research methodology into the general discourse in what might be thought of as an integrated approach to information literacy. While an in-depth analysis of information literacy is beyond the scope of this essay, it is worth noting that one trait many such programs share is that they treat research methodology as something that can be taught outside of, or as an add-on to, course content. The problem with this approach is the assumption that, after being exposed to what are often referred to as one-shot instruction sessions, students will be equipped to navigate a complex maze of resources and make appropriate course-specific choices. However, a number of studies have shown that, by and large, this is not the case. Davis and Cohen, for example, conducted a citation analysis of research papers in an introductory-level microeconomics course at Cornell University from 1996-1999. Their findings showed a fairly significant decrease in the number of traditional scholarly sources (books and journals) used by students during this time. In general, students cited fewer books in 1999 than they did in 1996. Comprising nearly one third (30%) of total citations in 1996, book citations dropped to less than one fifth (19%) in 1999. This translated into a decrease from 3.5 books per bibliography in 1996 to 2.2 in 1999, with the median citation number dropping from 3 to 1 . Although they didn’t analyze the type or quality of web documents cited, one might surmise that a general increase in Internet usage during this time played a factor in the shift away from books and journals. As a result, the authors conclude that, since students are very literal when it comes to requirements, instructors should be more prescriptive with the types of resources they would like to see students use .

To test this hypothesis, Davis conducted a second study in 2000 in which he implemented three recommendations based on results from his 1996-1999 study. Those recommendations were stricter guidelines about what types of sources students should be allowed to use, the creation of scholarly portals to guide students to authoritative sources, and more instruction about how to critically evaluate sources . However, even after implementing his recommendations, Davis’s second study yielded no new results: The results of the 2000 update suggest that the professor’s verbal instructions had little (if any) effect on improving the scholarly component of research papers. The number of traditional scholarly materials cited this year was similar to previous years. Bibliographies grew, but only in respect to additional web sites and newspapers. When viewed as a percentage of total citations, the scholarliness of bibliographies continued to decline Davis’s response to these disappointing results was to suggest that A possible crisis in undergraduate scholarship is at hand and that librarians and professors should work more closely and provide more clearly defined expectations in their assignments . In a similar vein, Robinson and Schlegl also found that library instruction alone has little, if any, effect on the type and quality of sources that students use. Building on Davis’s results, they designed a similar study based on what they call instruction and encouragement (typified by Davis’s approach) and their own instruction-and-penalty approach. They ultimately found that instruction and encouragement has very limited effect on the quality of student research, but instruction-and-penalty does have significant effects . When penalties were enforced, the quality of the bibliographies was closer to what Davis and Philips had seen in 1996 .

While the original results from Davis and Philips may have been surprising, the results of the Robinson and Schlegl should be less so. Penalties are no doubt a strong motivational tool, but they don’t address a larger issue that is at stake. Jason Martin recently surveyed 200 education majors at the University of Central Florida to determine what impact library instruction was having on sources used by his selected group of students. Martin concluded that, not only is there no clear association between library instruction and the type of sources used, but that student behavior is not so much informed by what they know to be right or wrong as it is based on comfort and convenience. His results revealed that, while 79% of the students surveyed acknowledged that library resources were generally more reliable that Internet sources, 52% of the respondents based their decisions more on convenient access than on the authority of the sources . However, instead of promoting a more prescriptive approach to instruction, Martin points out that, while more restrictions may prevent Internet sources from being included in the final product, this is only because students know they will be penalized if they do so, and there is no saying they won’t rely on the Internet during the research process, or that they won’t revert back to their old habits once the specific assignment is over. In other words, they would not have gained a deeper understanding of the critical importance of using academic sources . This deeper understanding gets to the heart of one of the key components of information literacy: self-reliance. Instead of using library instruction to guide students through portals of pre-approved, authoritative sources, it is our contention that the best approach is to encourage students to be self-reliant, critical researchers. As the culture of information continues to evolve and become more complex, and lines between library catalogs and the Internet become increasingly transparent, distinctions between what counts as scholarly and non-scholarly will also become less obvious. In such an environment, emphasis should always be placed on the ability to seek, access, and assess quality information, but this should be done in a way that accounts for the wide variety of new and emerging sources of information.

Early in the semester, an introductory session was dedicated to forming the groups described above, setting up accounts, and familiarizing students with the key wiki functions. During this session, students were also given a list of expectations for their online creations (see appendix 1). We created loosely constructed guidelines to allow the groups as much freedom as possible in deciding what should be included in their wikis while keeping the material task-relevant. After some initial apprehension from students who, after being told for so long not to use wikis, were surprised that they were being asked to create one of their own, this open-ended approach provided insightful discussion on the cultural importance of Shakespeare and of intellectual presentation more generally. As Doug Brent suggests, the online environment gives students ample opportunity to figure it out from the inside, not the outside . In creating a historicist study guide for future researchers, our students would be gaining an insider’s view of scholarly production. We also hope that this less prescriptive, open-ended approach would provide insight into the information seeking behavior of our students, what they value as emerging researchers, and gaps in their skills that would help us develop better research projects in the future.

In addition to the introductory session, the collaborating librarian, who also provided behind-the-scenes technical support, visited class regularly to provide instruction about using databases such as MLA and Early English Books Online (EEBO), and to conduct several workshop sessions later in the semester to help students in a more informal manner. During these sessions, we made a conscious effort to focus on strategies for seeking and assessing information gleaned from a wide variety of sources. Since special emphasis had been placed on primary sources, we talked specifically about how to search for such materials, not only through the UCF library catalog and databases, but also in the ever-increasing number of digital collections and other online resources. This approach would help us break free of the scholarly/non-scholarly dichotomy, which typically prompts students to rely on what is available in a single library collection, and focus more on research as exploration in interactive environments.

Calandra and Lee speak to this point in a recent article about their Digital History Pedagogy Project: In seeking to position students as active learners who are regularly constructing knowledge, the Context for learning becomes important. Advances in digital media have led to the development of more complex, authentic, and engaging learning environments and tools. Through the use of such digital media, digital history can enable students as they attempt to construct historical understandings which reflect the complexity of the past The is very much grounded in constructivist pedagogy, but is also influenced by recent scholarship in multimedia learning. For example, they cite Richard Mayer, who suggests that a learner can be viewed as a knowledge constructor who actively selects and constructs pieces of verbal and visual knowledge in unique ways . They add, citing Mayer, that meaningful learning occurs when learners select relevant information from what is presented organize the pieces of information into a coherent mental representation, and integrate the newly constructed representations with others . In the same vein as James Hilton (quoted above), they encouraged physical manipulation of digital media by the learner that supports active, meaningful learning; but that also produces tangible, shareable knowledge representation created by the learner . Their emphasis on manipulation and active learning in the digital environment speaks directly to our project and encouragement of students to construct their own understanding of the past, as it pertains to the life and times of Shakespeare, while promoting a more interactive approach to enhancing information literacy skills. As will be discussed in greater detail in the following section, the effects of this approach could be seen early on as students began exploring outside research almost immediately and their findings regularly became part of a more nuanced class discussion that shifted from the expected emotional, relatable appeal to a deeper, more historicized understanding of Shakespeare’s works.

In their Jim Dwight and Jim Garrison suggest that hypertext and hypermedia technologies like wikis are poststructuralist in nature, open[ing] new realms of creative possibility by rejecting the notions of a fixed and final telos, absolute original, or ultimate fixed center (or foundation) to any process . Our students’ engagement with the collaborative capacity of wikis supports this claim. Less abstractly, interactive technologies that have the capacity to engage multiple voices and sources can challenge the ideological neutrality of fact, a foremost concern in poststructuralist historical and literary thought. The key issue for us was not collaboration's impact on factual accuracy - the concern many have about projects like Wikipedia - but rather a new perception about the plausibility of objectivity in interpreting history. What follows is a partial account of the meta-discourse drawn both from student wikis as well as the final reflective essays written during the last week of the course.

Collaborating on the historically specific identities at play in Shakespeare’s works coerced students to contend with challenges inherent in postmodern knowledge production. This project, with its requirements to link image with text, illustrated how Shakespeare always comes pre-packaged as a cultural icon before students enter our classrooms. Further, it provided students the opportunity to appreciate Shakespeare through his works as a uniquely talented but, like ourselves, politically and socially invested human being. Students also recognized gaps inherent in knowledge acquisition when solely depending upon their professors as authorities. By recognizing these gaps, they were encouraged to explore both primary and secondary resources, text and image, in an attempt to challenge established interpretations of these works and make new connections — a potentially overwhelming task given the unwieldy nature of Shakespeare studies. As a result, our students grappled not only with issues related to historical and literary interpretation, but also with the breadth and scope of what they could hope to achieve in one semester. Our response was to emphasized quality over completeness and to encourage students to rethink their approaches to research and to become more savvy users of information. After some initial anxiety, we found that they were, in fact, using a relatively high level of resources, especially when compared to other previously cited studies. For example, while the average number of citations in our project is on par with the Davis and Cohen study (12.3 per wiki to their final result of 11.9 per paper in 1999), the ratio of scholarly materials used (books and articles) in each project was much different. While David and Cohen saw a decline from 30-19% in three years, we recorded a much higher 43% of total citations from books and 22% from articles for a combined total of 65%. After weeding out books and articles that were from popular or otherwise non-scholarly publishers, we were left with 48% from scholarly books and articles. Additionally, nine out of the twelve groups consulted primary sources for a total number of thirteen citations among those nine groups. We included these in the scholarly category primarily because they demonstrated proficiency using an academic database (EEBO). Along with a few academic web citations, this brought our final scholarly/non-scholarly total to 59/41% (see appendix 2 for a complete breakdown of the citations).

Our scholarly/non-scholarly ratio is much lower than in the Robinson and Schlegl study, which achieved 86% using the instruction + penalty method that we previously argued against. It is also worth noting that, while we were happy with the results of the catalog and database searches, those results didn’t transfer to the quality of online searches. 24.5% of all citations were from the Internet, which averages to about three web citations per wiki. This number is not overwhelming, especially considering we were working in an online medium, but relatively few of these citations were academic (only four out of 36 total). Although this is clearly an area to improve upon in future classes, we believe the results are significant enough to support our assertion about the value of integrated library instruction — that by making discussion about research methodology part of the general discourse throughout the semester, students would become comfortable enough with the library catalog and databases to use them at a higher rate than we have seen in previous studies.

Another area to be dealt with is the problem of subject specialization described above. This problem posed a challenge to one of our key hypotheses: that employing open source technology would assuage some of the gaps we experience in trying to provide enough period coverage while also attending to theoretical apparatus and students’ experience of meaningful connections to material. Collectively, the project did start to accomplish this task. However, as stated above, because they were so focused on their own creations, there wasn’t sufficient time for extensive crossover and exploration. One possible explanation for this trend might be that the groups striving for too much coverage, thereby resulting in entries that were often too general or uneven. In fact, many students asked about what we thought the wikis should look like and how long they should be, always striving, it seemed, for a sense of finalization or fixity described by Ingrid Mason who, again, asserts that there is a distinct connection between the notions of stability and authenticity .

It would be possible for a wiki, or a community of wiki users, to strive toward a finalized authoritative edition, but, as Schroeder and den Besten point out in their analysis of the Thomas Pynchon wiki, these projects seem to have more value when they adopt a more playful approach which treats texts as having endless scope for further work . They further add that wikis promote competition to complete the task which, they say, would not occur if the wiki entries were organized alphabetically or by topic as in a traditional scholarly bibliography . The unevenness of the entries, and the open-ended nature of the medium, expose gaps in knowledge and encourage users to fill in those gaps and make new associations. Wikis seem to be most effective, then, in projects that rely on interpretive rather than purely informative entries and where endless detective work is called for, and this may apply to other areas of e-research or online collaborations . The concerns our students had about completeness, and the affect this had on our project, points to an issue that is common among undergraduate researchers: an approach that focuses on compiling citations from recognized authorities as opposed to genuine interaction and discourse with those well-establish ideas. Texts and interpretations are often seen as being authoritative and not sources in which to locate difference and expose gaps in knowledge. Projects that employ open source technology, such as the one described here, have the capacity to release texts from what often seems like interpretive closure and, in so doing, they can reopen the seeming finality of printed materials as well as historical narratives.