Early Medieval literature, notably that from the British Isles, from Ireland, and from the Scandinavian World, is replete with legendary and mythic elements which can be linked to an evocative material record. The Scandinavian saga tradition, in particular, is chock full of gods and goddesses, heroes and valkyries, monsters, magic, trickery, and treachery. This literary tradition reached its apogee in the great Icelandic sagas; written in Old Norse in Iceland, mostly in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, about forty of these long prose narratives detail the lives and times of the settlers of Iceland and their families, of their friends and enemies, of their victories and defeats. The so-called “Family Sagas” of this tradition, furthermore, clearly and engagingly link the landscape of Iceland—stunning fjords, majestic glaciers, ubiquitous hot springs, and moonscape lava fields, to name just a few signature features—with specific characters, events, and themes of this narrative record. In other words, just as the sagas breathe life into the dusty ruins and rusty weapons of the Viking Age, so to do the places and relics themselves, in all their glory and grandeur, evoke the stories which comprise their history. These sagas recount events between the beginning of the colonization of Iceland in 870 AD and the official conversion of Iceland in 1000. Moreover, the saga tradition as a whole represents without doubt the greatest extant treasure trove of Germanic myth and legend; further, the sagas are an invaluable part of Medieval literature generally, and indeed, the saga tradition rightfully belongs firmly within the canon of great world literature: the Penguin Classics list alone illustrates what perennial favorites the sagas are!

At this point our project comprises hundreds of multimedia images (linked panoramic photos, static photos, digital video clips, explanatory text, etc.) of nearly forty sites in the North Atlantic; most of the material is from Shetland, Orkney, and the Isle of Man, but some is from Scotland and the North of England. Many of these sites have some relationship to the Viking Age or are in any case easily linked to the Norse tradition. One problem in bringing these sites to life for narrative-minded students, however—even with the benefit of breath-taking panoramic visits and punchy, memorable video clips—is the lack of a coherent narrative trajectory through which one can perceive a story linking disparate sites. We are tackling this challenge in two ways: First, the inclusion of the dozen or so saga sites in Iceland—sites which are clearly linked to compelling and memorable stories—will assert a narrative organizing principle through which we can arrange the whole collection. Second, our development of an IF portal through which students can engage the various sites superimposes a narrative structure on the entire project as a whole. Thus, while more research-driven students and colleagues can just as easily access the sites through menus of categories, those more compelled by an alluring narrative arc will be offered an alternative way through which they may interact with the materials. Thus, through its multiple portals and many related media, this project promises to engage learners and researchers of different needs and styles.

Project Pedagogical Concerns:

Overview of Pedagogical Goals:

The pedagogical goal of this project that would seem to be most clearly applicable to a wide range of projects in very different disciplines involves the nexus between collections of digital objects with student needs and use: In other words, what we are developing that may be of the most use to other instructors involves a self-conscious development of the nexus between student writing assignments, instructor digital asset management, and the shared pedagogical goal (and avenue) of student engagement.

Key Pedagogical Points :

• This project uses emerging technology but is text-based.
• This project combines student writing assignments with multimedia collections.
• This project is designed to engage students on textual as well as visual levels.
• This project involves what might be termed a “hermeneutics of retrieval of information.”
• This project is designed around coherent and demonstrable narrative and pedagogical trajectories.
• This project requires students to gather information, but it also requires them to exercise and/or develop intellectual skills: This project requires a student to make leaps and to quantify one’s own intellectual journey as well as to enact a virtual scavenger hunt through space and time.
• Central to this project is a reflective component for each student: How did I solve the puzzle? What clues did I unearth? What intellectual tools did I utilize/develop? What did I learn about the Medieval North Atlantic World, of course, but, moreover, what did I learn about how and what I learned?
• In the long term this project should require the instructors to assess how a writing assignment may take advantage of new technologies at the same time it transcends such media.

Pedagogical Methodology:

This project is designed to combine new gaming methodologies with an older, text-based interactive milieu which privileges the written word, both as utilized and as generated by the student players of the game. A fundamental principle underlying this project is the concept that these student players are highly literate people (although often literate in highly electronic, highly varied, and constantly evolving ways): The key is to capture such forms of literacy in engaging ways and then to use these as platforms for learning. Text-based IF is an ideal vehicle for such a project, because, unlike point-and-shoot games, it’s all about the written word, and indeed, our combination of static and digital images with text-based interactivity actually can be used to help students to teach themselves about the differences between the static and the fluid word: literate manuscript versions of oral formulaic narratives are like screenshots of video clips: such an image may be evocative, even suggestive, but clearly can not be a comprehensive representation of the original. Further, we will use multiple clips from the same site, for instance, to illustrate how different versions of the same story might contain slightly (but crucially!) different information. Most critically, any assignment designed around a project of this type must require a reflective writing component wherein the student is required to discuss her intellectual journey as well as her movement through the various steps of the game. Thus, although this project engages and utilizes emerging technologies in what we hope are vibrant, compelling, and visually-stimulating ways, gathering, interpreting, and generating a coherent textual matrix for the digital collections must be as much a part of the student experience as it is central to the instructor’s task.

Project Timeline:

Summer 2006: Travel on-site to gather additional digital materials.

Fall 2006: Input new materials and update existing materials; develop seamless interface.

Spring 2007: Develop course-based Pilot Version of project.

Summer 2007: Develop course-based Pilot Version of project. (Conference demo of Pilot Version in-progress: 13^th Biennial Conference of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists)

Fall 2007: Fee course release: Fee refashions existing course and implements Pilot Version of project. (Conference demo of Pilot Version in-progress: EDUCAUSE)

Spring 2008: Fee teaches restructured course utilizing Pilot Version of project. (Conference demo of course-based Pilot Version: 43^rd International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI)

Summer 2008: Trouble-shooting and editing as needed: Project Version 1.0 launched on web. (Conference demos of Version 1.0: 15^th International Medieval Congress, Leeds, England; NITLE Conference)

Project Outcomes:

A Course-based Pilot Version of the Project;

A sample course, complete with syllabus, schedule, and assignments structured around the Pilot Version;

Formal student course evaluations and instructor peer observation reports of sample course and of its utilization of Pilot Version;

Web-based Version 1.0 of project;

Electronic student course evaluations and instructor peer reviews of Web-based Version 1.0 of project;

5 Conference Presentations demonstrating the Project at various stages of completion.

Project Assessment:

Students in the sample course will provide anonymous feedback on the course itself and on its use of the course-based Pilot Version through a pilot electronic assessment instrument; likewise, a number of instructor peer observers will comment on the course and its use of the Pilot Version through an analogous instrument. Access to the 1.0 Web Version will be managed so that we may track the number of users and individual and group outcomes; we also plan to develop iterations of the survey and assessment tools to allow remote instructors and students to give direct anonymous feedback about the project. After the conclusion of pilot project we plan to develop a marketable dvd-rom version, and we plan to use the outcomes data to refine this further iteration of the project.

Project Dissemination:

We plan to disseminate information about and demonstrate aspects of this project at several major international conferences (see Timeline for details). After the completion of the 1.0 web version of the project, we hope to involve as many interested collaborators as possible from the pool of interested CET instructors in the construction of the published dvd-rom version. Thus, the initial costs of the project will prove increasingly cost-effective in the long run, as more and more instructors, classrooms, and students interact with and actively learn from these rare and remote resources.

Project Technology and Terminology:

The digitized images that make up the pedagogical matter of this project take three forms:  1)  Linked Quick-Time Virtual Reality (QTVR) panoramas which allow the virtual traveler to scan 360 degrees from a series of vantage points at each site;  2)  Static images which allow that traveler to examine more closely details of important aspects of each site;  3)  Video images which capture sounds and activities at each site, and offer the opportunity for the traveler to unearth some explanatory voice-over information about the historical and cultural context of each site, context that provides clues for the solving of the concurrent virtual adventure quest.  By combining digitized video footage, QTVR panoramas, static images, and simple maps of sites, one can create compelling virtual tours. “Virtual” simply means that such electronic representations are quite evocative of the actual sites, and that they are to some degree interactive.  These panoramas are “interactive” in that (by clicking and dragging the cursor on the screen with one’s mouse) one may “interact” with the images.  Most simply put, by clicking and dragging the cursor, one can look around 360 degrees from the vantage point the creator chose when recording a panorama.  The traveler chooses the pace and the direction of examination, drawing upon the finite number of images filmed by the creator of that panorama. By “multimedia” I mean that the project is composed of a combination of text, static images, streaming video, and sounds, rather than of text alone.  The inclusion of short documentary-style informative video clips created at many sites, for example, helps both to elucidate points of interest and to draw the traveler more fully into the virtual experience;  further, creating “hotspots”—which allow a traveler to click on various objects in the QTVR panoramas—allows for much richer and more informative tours. The project is interactive on one level in that it is composed utilizing hypertext links that allow a traveler to navigate through a series of related documents according to that traveler’s interests and needs, rather than moving only in a traditional linear fashion. Moreover, the project achieves another level of interaction through its use of Interactive Fiction. “Interactive Fiction” (IF) is a rather traditional genre of computer gaming that recently has seen a resurgence of interest concurrent with a revitalization of gaming software. IF technology allows us to link our multimedia teaching tools into a matrix of narrative text which empowers each participant to reason through a series of clues, to plan and take virtual journeys as a result of puzzling out these clues, and to combine a survey of sites and artifacts with an adventure quest that ends only when that traveler finds the key that unlocks the mythic hoard.

Project Credits:

This project was conceived of by Christopher R. Fee and implemented by Fee, James Rutkowski, and their collaborators. Substantial support has been provided thus far by Gettysburg College through the Office of the Provost, the Faculty Development Committee, the Department of English, and the Department of Instructional Technology. Early iterations of some virtual content were funded through A.W. Mellon funds administered through Gettysburg College and the Central Pennsylvania Consortium.

Copyright:

The project as a whole, including all digital video, QTVR panoramas, and digital static images compiled by Fee, Rutkowski, and their collaborators, all textual content, the design, structure and format of the individual pages, and all related work, is copyright 1999-2007 Christopher R. Fee, James Rutkowski, and Gettysburg College. The copyright holders severally reserve the right to display and to modify all work herein in any way for non-profit and educational purposes.

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