Writing a Dream Class for the World Wide Web
Jayne Gackenbach
Grant MacEwan Community College
This paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Association for the Study of Dreams, Berkeley, Calif., 1996.
Having taught credit and noncredit dream classes numerous times over the last 20 years, recently Grant MacEwan Community College asked me to write a five lesson, non-credit dream class to launch their World Wide Web (WWW) course offerings. In this presentation I will talk about the course I designed and the unique opportunities as well as limitations of offering such material on a web site.
The course was conceptualized as an overview of dreams for the general Internet public. Thus the course I wrote is a five lesson introductory module. If there is sufficient interest further detailed modules will be offered.
One of the major differences between this course and other courses typically offered on the Internet is that this is offered on a WWW site and not simply sent as e-mail. The advantages of this method of delivery over e-mail is that it allows the student a higher degree of control over what material they want to read and what aspect of the assignments they are interested in pursuing. Thus each student tailors their own course. This mode does not preclude simply downloading a lesson/assignment or e-mailing same to students. However, writing the course with the interactivity inherent on a web site page did present unique problems and opportunities.
Because of the potential for numerous registrants in the course the use of the web page format allows maximum individuality. For the first offering of the course which is planned for the spring of 1996, at the end of each lesson students are asked to do an assignment to be sent in by a prearranged date. Once a body of data is gathered on these assignments students can proceed through the assignments at their own pace and receive feedback on each assignment based on previous enrollments and normative data. Before the due date for the second assignment, they will be e-mailed the summary of the information gathered in the previous assignment. This cycle will continue until the end of the course. The majority of assignments will be in the form of answering closed ended questions regarding the students dreams. By using this device the classes aggregate statistics can be fed back to the individual student which will allow he/she to contextualize their dream and further interpret/understand its potential meaning. The information from each registrant for each assignment will be linked so that information from previous assignments can be used to feed back to the student body more detailed information about the response/reaction to the current assignment.
Throughout the course the perspective of who is an authority on ones dream will be that it is the dreamer. This will be repeatedly stressed in order, as much as possible, to keep the responsibility of what the student derives from the course about their own dreams very much within the psychological perspective of the individual student. Furthermore, the e-mail addresses of the class participants will be held confidential. Not until the course is over will they be given the opportunity to contact other students and then only those who wish to be contacted.
At the end of the course students who show an interest, will be given the opportunity to enroll in further dream modules which explore some aspect of dreaming in more detail. If they desire they will also be put in touch with others on the net who enrolled in the course in order to continue their dream work in a supportive group setting. In the next section is a brief summary of the five lessons and assignments for the course entitled, "Unlocking the Secrets of Your Dreams".