The formal assignments are exercises: intended to help you develop the intellectual strength and dexterity that you will need for more advanced college study. That is: You may never turn to the subjects of the Renaissance and Reformation and book history again (and you may indeed vow that you will never wish to do so—though I hope not), but the skills that you develop here will be readily applicable to a wide range of further endeavors, academic and other.

This was always the goal of Hampshire College: to impart knowledge, but above all, to train the mind for independent thinking in a rapidly changing world—not unlike the one you are studying:

—"To reconstruct the human purposes of education, so that young men and women can find acceptable meaning in a technological social order and acceptable order in subjective cultural freedom."

—to "give students, for whatever use they themselves can make of it, the best knowledge new and old that we have about ways [we] may know [ourselves] and [our] world."


• The first assignment can be likened to jumping into a swimming pool. Now that the fear is gone and you're immersed in the subject, you can concentrate on finding the best way to navigate in this new environment.

Subsequent assignments develop specific skills, in keeping with both the goals of the course and the Hampshire College Division I learning goals.

• The documentary analysis, for example, returns to a more modest scale. It teaches you how to approach the building block of any work of research: the primary source.

The other assignments teach you to build an interpretation based on multiple primary and secondary sources.

• The oral presentation is a sort of warm-up for a research project: You will be responsible for leading class discussion on a given day. Rather than producing a full-blown paper, you will make a selection of statements and questions that both reflect your interpretation and initiate dialogue with others.

The remaining assignments are closely linked, in the interests of both pedagogy and convenience. Here you will also encounter a mixture of collective and individual work. You have already been exposed to the former through our in-class discussion exercises, but now you will test your collaborative skills in a more formal manner. We will also learn collaboration by drawing upon the guidance of our Internet Coordinator and Reference Librarian.

• The class will be divided into three teams, each of which will produce a web page reflecting one phase or aspect of the circuit of communication that takes ideas from originator to recipient.

At the same time, you will be working on two related projects:

• a modest research paper
• an original artist's book (employing traditional craft techniques), the subject of which will be directly related to the research paper

Having completed both, you will also integrate the results of your research into the presentation of the most relevant web page(s).

• A final retrospective essay will allow you to pull together what you have learned about the culture of the word.

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