While critics such as Richard Lanham suggest that the "electronic text" changes consciousness, my students defined the Web's uses very much in institutional terms. At home, they used the web to find out sports scores and concert dates and make travel plans. Secondarily, they used the Web for research. In the context of a core course, however, they see the web as a source of information: the web site should to reproduce items discussed in class, provide further information (succinctly!) and to help them study and do well on exams. All other uses are extraneous, even distracting.
These findings suggest to me that a shift in pedagogy would help. I probably need to integrate more material not "covered into class" into the class requirements and do more to coordinate what I do with the web site and what the teaching assistants do in their sections. My efforts to get the students to use the web and the Usenet group to produce conversation, internal dialogue, and exploration were less than satisfactory. Then exercise on using Holy Maidenhood and the Wife Of Bath's tale, an exercise that made me swell with pride because of its cleverness and insight, was regarded as homework and produced a significant amount of anxiety. One student actually became incapable of processing the instructions for writing the brief analytical essay!
I also need to think more about showing students how to use the web site. Disturbingly enough, from my own observation, I would say that weaker students had more trouble than stronger students in distinguishing the "web as edification" from the "web as study tool." I noticed several students laboriously printing out material that was meant to be supplementary immediately before a test.
Some of my inability to get the students to use the Web site to explore the literature further and to think independently has to do with the dual focus of my course, which combines cultural literacy with critical thinking. Some of problem, I think, has to do with the culture of large classes at the University of Georgia. Several students asked me to make available my own lecture notes, as their biology teacher did, despite my efforts to suggest that English classes involve active production of meaning rather than the consumption of information. The very existence of published lecture notes also contributes to the idea that knowledge is consumed. Finally, students at the sophomore level, for many reasons ranging from the emphasis of a core curriculum to (perhaps) William Perry's model of intellectual development, may seek definite answers more assiduously than other students do. They are, in Perry's terms, "Edenic" learners who seek definite answers and believe in "right" and "wrong." On a more sympathetic level, they feel that they lack knowledge and want to acquire it. For instance, only one member of the sophomore class found the elaborate section on 1 henry IV to be the most useful feature of our web site. My Shakespeare students, by contrast," liked very much the links to other sites (to Genealogies of English Monarchs and to the Barron's Booknotes) that appear in the 1 Henry IV section of the Web site. They clearly used the Web very differently than my sophomores did, but of course, they were writing more interpretive papers.
Does the Web change consciousness? Not this past quarter, it didn't. Students' attitudes toward the WWW were conditioned by the ideology of a core curriculum, by the culture of large classes, by their own level of intellectual development and undoubtedly, by the paradoxes of my own curriculum and pedagogy. How they use the Web will probably tell us less about the role of technology in education than about the role of technology in their lives already, about our relation to our students, and about their relation to the institution of higher education as a whole. Nevertheless, I am eternally grateful to the student who said: "I enjoyed it. This class was the first time I'd ever used it and it was a postive experience."