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Walt Whitman Goes 2.0
on May 7, 2009
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Incredible. I see nothing in here to suggest that the students in these courses will actually read Whitman's work. Certainly any reading they do will be...
Incredible. I see nothing in here to suggest that the students in these courses will actually read Whitman's work. Certainly any reading they do will be perfunctory if their time is to be spent twittering, flickring, and YouTubing.
Maybe it's just as well. As with any serious poet, Whitman's work requires time, patience, and concentration if one is to enjoy it, understand it, and learn anything from it. Since the courses described here are constitutionally hostile to such an undertaking, why even try? Students can get Whitman's "vision," whatever that is, from a video.
on May 12, 2009
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And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
—Walt Whitman
One of the most influential poets in American history, Walt Whitman and his works are still revered and discussed in the halls of academia throughout the country.
And the importance of his work — namely "Leaves of Grass" — to literature, history and philosophy in America is relevant more than 150 years after the first poem published.
Whitman, and his vision for interconnectedness and unity, is being transformed through Internet users who are changing the way in which the man’s words — his works of art — are shared, disbursed and discussed.
An idea is born
If Whitman was alive today, he’d find that his work, previously circulated solely on bound book pages, is now accessible on millions of Web sites. 
One such site is The Walt Whitman Archive — a comprehensive resource about Whitman's life and work. This site is a groundbreaking humanities Web project and serves as an incredible repository of Whitman materials and scholarship, according to Matthew Gold, an assistant professor of English at the New York City College of Technology at the City University of New York (CUNY).
However, The Walt Whitman Archive is static. It doesn’t take advantage of the read-write Web, and is, therefore, considered Walt Whitman 1.0.
For anything to be considered 2.0, social networking tools must be used. In the case of Whitman, social networking helps create his ideal sense of democracy and discourse — it unites students, classes and schools, enabling them to learn more about the works of this American poet.
CUNY’s Gold is creating what he refers to as "Walt Whitman Web 2.0," a modern progression of teaching Whitman.
Whitman Goes 2.0
With funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities' Office of Digital Humanities, Gold created a program titled, “Looking for Whitman: the Poetry of Place in the Life and Work of Walt Whitman.” This program is a series of courses at four partner colleges — New York University(NYU), Rutgers, University of Mary Washington and CUNY — to engage students in online and real-world investigations of Whitman's work in a geographical context.
The colleges at which the fall 2009 series of courses will be taught are at different ends of the educational and socioeconomic spectrums.
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http://www.convergemag.com/artsandhumanities/Walt-Whitman-Goes-20.html
Comments
on May 12, 2009
Incredible. I see nothing in here to suggest that the students in these courses will actually read Whitman's work. Certainly any reading they do will be perfunctory if their time is to be spent twittering, flickring, and YouTubing.
Maybe it's just as well. As with any serious poet, Whitman's work requires time, patience, and concentration if one is to enjoy it, understand it, and learn anything from it. Since the courses described here are constitutionally hostile to such an undertaking, why even try? Students can get Whitman's "vision," whatever that is, from a video.
on Oct 7, 2009
Tom, your assumptions couldn't be further from the truth: these are all college-level (and, in some cases, graduate-level) courses, and students are doing a tremendous amount of reading for them, even as they also work with Web 2.0 tools to respond to that reading. I invite you to visit the course website (http://lookingforwhitman.org) to see their impressive work.
