the academic campfire
The essence of storytelling is in the act of passing it on. If it is not received, then it is in a sense, not given. Certainly it does not survive for long without constant retelling. Which makes the education of new storytellers vitally important to any culture. Schools and universties will always have a responsibility in preparing new generation of storytellers, and here the campfire has a central role just as it has always had.
http://www.usask.ca/english/faulkner
Peter Stroicheff and his team in the Department of English at the University of Saskatchewan have edited the text of William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury for the Internet. Its interactivity makes it possible to re-order the text and to connect passages in chronological sequence, as opposed to the sequences as written. Intertextual links are provided as well giving access to a much greater range of information than is immediately accessible in the original printed form.
The Internet Shakespeare Editions is a project of Michael Booth at the University of Victoria, Department of Theatre. His team has edited the 1623 Folio for the Internet. In addition, the site serves as an excellent database for Shakespeare-related information. Hypertext is used to index various parts of the website and to interconnect the Folio text with related data both within and outside the site.
The 1623 Folio or First Folio in print form is illuminating source material for any Shakespeare scholar, providing spelling, punctuation and capitalization that is different than modern editors allow. But it has usually been reserved for the most advanced devotees. There are some 100 extant copies of the origninal 1623 publication, some of them in varyiing degrees of repair and legibility. So the Folio has really been only practically available in facsimile form. The volumes are large, expensive and generally not that easy to find. And if found, the typography is substantially different than a modern eye is wants to read, and it takes some time to be able to understand the text fluently. All this serves to discourage beginning scholars from attempting to read the source material.
The Internet Shakespeare Editions is typical of the easy and broad access that the Internet provides for scholarly material. Not only can the material be readily located and retrieved, but the typography allows more fluent understanding of the text without sacrificing the idiosyncratic spelling and punctuation that are very helpful to the actor/storyteller.
http://www.creativewriting.ubc.ca/programs/lowres.cfm
The Creative Writing Program at the University of British Columbia has a history of nurturing storytellers is several written genres. The primary method of instruction is the writers' workshop. Students continuously produce work that is presented in class to be discussed and critiqued by the teachers and fellow students. Traditionally of course, these meetings are face to face, but the Program has recently inaugurated a new distance education option. Using existing website resources, chat rooms and email correspondence, students from many different locations around the world can participate in writers' workshops that are similar to the face-to-face workshops. There have been many previous examples of online curriculum delivery, but this is significant because it is specifically concentrated on the art of storytelling.
It is also significant that in the use of the technology it more closely resembles the way in which storytellers would gather around the campfire. Writing is often avery solitary occcupation, and this method of instruction allows the solitary writer to occasionally make contact with hir peers in order to get a response. of course writers have always sought each other out to share and compare their rescent work, but those meeitngs have always been dependent on which writers are close enough to make contact. So when a strong writers' community devveloped, it was invariably a local phenomenon.
Locality has no significance in this context, and writers from anywhere on the planet can meet and share their work. Writers' communities can clearly develop online but they will be focussed around common themes and complementary material, rather than physical proximity.
WebCT is a privately held company providing software and system support for online education or E-learning. The company has published a whitepaper entitled "Learning Without Limits" which, while commercially extolling the virtues of WebCT, does address the implications of establishing an online learning community.
http://www.ibritt.com/resources
Kate Britt teaches adult Secondary Education in Vancouver, British Columbia who maintains a resource website for other online educators. She is employed by WebCT, but this resource page contains input from a variety of sources.
