Project Overview: Havel at Columbia

CUArts Initiative Access: Open to all Released: September 2006 VIEW PROJECT

Havel at Columbia is a multimedia resource that features video interviews with a range of scholars and friends of Vaclav Havel, including Lisa Anderson, George Soros, Brad Abrams, and Chris Harwood, who contribute their insights into his legacy as an artist and political leader. The website also contains a wide range of material about Havel's life and art, including a timeline of events, image glossary, and archival films.

Deployment: Havel at Columbia

To push beyond simple access to the range of assets in the environment -- to create more concrete means for personalized engagement -- the Havel Notebook was proposed as an authoring tool embedded into the Havel at Columbia website. The Notebook would provide students a personalized space in which to collect, analyze, rearrange, and present multimedia selected from broader contexts for purposes supporting their analysis and performance of Havel material. As much as possible, material 'collected' into such personalized spaces would be viewable from within the framework of the notebook, making it a fully functional presentation tool to a student wishing to demonstrate specific video clips or images, say, in a designated order.

When the Havel Notebook feature was added the week before the start of Havel’s eight-week residency at Columbia in the fall 2006, CCNMTL conducted in-class demos for a range of courses that planned to use this aspect of the website. Courses that got that support were from departments ranging from Theater, International and Public Affairs to the College Core Curriculum. In addition to in-class demos, instructional guides were provided in the Havel site as well as “model” notebooks developed by CCNMTL’s faculty partners to inspire and shape the student approaches.

Figure 1: Notebook help guides available in the Havel site as well as a PDF document.

Figure 2: History Instructor Chris Harwood provides a summation of Havel's career as a dramatist; both interspersed narrative and video/image assets promote deeper engagement in the history described. Harwood assigned the notebooks in his course “History, Literature, Film and Dissent in Eastern European Culture.”

Figure 3: Barnard College Theater Lecturer Amy Trompetter taught a class around Havel’s play, “The Beggar’s Opera.” Before assigning the notebook to her class, she put together a model notebook which covers teaching Havel’s Vanek plays and staging his play “The Beggar’s Opera.”