December 2000 Dan Schnaidt, ACM for the Humanities, interviews Professor Antonio Gonz lez of Romance Languages and Literatures about his course Web site and its usefulness in teaching literature. Interviews with faculty members are a new feature in ITS News, designed to highlight the interesting uses of technology on campus. A transcript of the interview appears below. Before I constructed the site the students didn t have as much context . . From a pedagogical point of view, it s particularly useful.
Students relate to the visual more immediately than to other artistic expressions.
I should be clear that my treatment is not what you would get in an art history class. The students read Ortega y Gassett s essay Concerning Point of View in the Arts, which helps us to focus the relationship between literature and painting in a particular way. There are over 200 poems on the site. The act of reading on the screen is crucial for the course. An example is the way context is provided for Antonio Machado by the use of selected images.