Hi, Folks. Geoffrey Rockwell, one of the organizers of the * Teaching Early Drama with Modern Technology: the Message and the Media * session at this year's MLA, asked me to post to REED-L a one-page position paper about my upcoming presentation. So--here it is: "The Shakespeare Multimedia Project: Using Hypermedia to Teach Early-Modern Drama" As a final project in my Shakespeare class, I assigned what I called "The Shakespeare Multimedia Project," in which my students worked collaboratively to produce a hypermedia annotated version of a passage from a Shakespeare play. The Shakespeare Multimedia Project was "constructivist" (or "constructionist," as Seymour Papert puts it) in its pedagogical underpinnings. Such projects frequently involve collaborative work among students to produce something for public viewing. By working on the project, the students *learn by doing*, creating their own understanding of the material by actively working with it. Such a constructivist project transforms the learning environment, turning the classroom into a workshop for independent, self-directed study. Students become responsible for the successful completion of the project. They have to organize their time, they determine how extensively they want to annotate the passage, and they choose what alternate media to incorporate. The task itself becomes enjoyable, because students make it their own as they continue to work on it and incorporate materials into the overall design. Most importantly, students are learning to read and to interpret Shakespeare as they annotate the passage. They learn to understand Shakespeare's language and syntax because they themselves have to make sense of the passage to explain its significance to the readers of the hypertext document. They have to determine which words are unclear and provide notes to explain difficult words and ideas. The project erases boundaries between disciplines, creating the kind of "syntonic" learning that Papert advocates. In researching the relevant contexts to understanding the passage, the students combine English literary study, history, film, drama, etymology, and various other fields as they create links with their primary documents. They learn more about Elizabethan culture as they present those aspects of the culture relevant to the text. They also learn that literary criticism is inherently contextual, and that we cannot establish some "pure" realm of "truth" and "beauty" when discussing literary texts. Also in accordance with constructivist pedagogy, the classroom becomes an environment for true discovery. There is no one "right" interpretation of the particular Shakespeare passage. In fact, one of the purposes of the assignment is for the students to explore the many different interpretations possible for that passage. The students can consult different editions of the play, getting a sense not only of what details editors choose to annotate, but also the many different possible explanations editors and commentators can provide. There is no one "right" annotated version; students are free to explore as their curiosity directs them. The classroom thus expands beyond the highly controlled environment of the instructor-led discussion, in which "discoveries" are planned according to the prepared questions of the instructor, following anticipated lines. In working on their projects, students move beyond the instructor's knowledge of that particular passage and of the software as well, as they explore the various ways of presenting the material.