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I must admit that, up until recently, I hadn’t found much use for the internet in my literature and composition classes. This semester, however, I attempted to do something challenging with my introduction to literature course. I chose to teach the very dense murder mystery Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl. What makes this book such a challenge for me and my students is that it contains hundreds of cultural, historical, and literary references that my students are unlikely to be familiar with. This is also what is so appealing about it. On any given page you can find mentions of Baudelaire, Kandinsky, Captain Queeg or Sal Mineo. Also, the table of contents reads like a literature syllabus; each chapter is titled for a different major work, from Othello to Metamorphosis. This one book provides the opportunity for students to become acquainted with pieces of cultural and literary history that they may have heard of, but know nothing about, in a more intriguing package than “Buckman’s Lectures on 20th Century Popular Culture.”

However, the novel assumes a level of familiarity with these pieces of cultural trivia that is sometimes a stretch for me, much less my students. So, if I wanted to use the book to increase their cultural vocabulary, it was going to require some work. I decided that the students and I would build up a collection of cultural references over the course of the semester.

Though the sheer number of references in the book made it impossible for students to look up every unfamiliar mention, the investigation of cultural references was a major part of the class. I wanted them to create cultural reference logs in which they report on some of the references from the novel that are new to them. I also wanted to have these logs available so that the students could share their findings. The idea is to collectively build a useful reference library for the course.

I toyed with several online venues for the logs, and finally, LTS introduced me to Blogger.com. In the first week of class I had each student create a blog and collected their blog URLs on the course WebCT site. Every week I posted a preliminary list of references from the book in WebCT. The students each chose four of these references to investigate and report on in their blogs each week. Soon many students in the class could list the major films of Audrey Hepburn’s career, describe the work of Jane Goodall, or explain the significance of Che Guevara. They weren’t all learning the same things in the same depth, but they were all learning something. The students also started taking ownership over the information they reported on. If a topic they had investigated came up in discussion, students often expounded on it for the class. Also, the cultural references in the novel can sometimes act as clues in the book, and the reference logs worked as a key for unraveling the mystery.

Unfortunately, the weekly blogs eventually became unwieldy. We cut back to one, longer reader response entry every two weeks. However, beginning the semester with cultural reference logs, as well as my weekly lectures on the works listed in the table of contents, established the course as a project in cultural literacy, not just a literature class. At the end of the semester many students told me how proud they were of their blogs and how much they learned from the process. In the future, I intend to incorporate blogs into all of my classes as a collection point for student learning. It gives the students an opportunity to contribute knowledge to the class in a way that I have not experienced before.