The experience of Il filo di Arianna
[1] The experience of Il filo di Arianna, an Italian online magazine for teaching in high schools (hereinafter referred to as FdA), officially began in January 2009 after several years of experimentation (the very first website, no longer in existence, dates back to 2006).
The basic idea is simple: to bring together the Gutenbergian medium and the electronic medium to make the best educational use of both.
I would like to clarify right away that although this working style is, in principle, applicable to any field, I have personally only experimented with it in the subjects I teach in a high school near Milano, namely history and philosophy. Furthermore, it is only in the context of philosophy that I have been able to fully develop the ideas I will try to describe in this article.
As will be seen, it is actually a rather moderate proposal, as it only aims to make visible (one could almost say “objectify” in a Hegelian sense) what anyone who studies a little seriously does, through a not overly aggressive use of the technology available to many today. It could perhaps be described as a proposal in line with activism in a very broad sense, following the well-known formula that students should be “co-authors of their own knowledge” and not simply passively receive knowledge to then repeat it (assuming anyone has ever really thought that this is studying).
2] The elements that come into tension within the FdA system, in addition to the teacher and the students, are
a textbook and
an associated website.
As is known, the printed medium primarily offers stability: the information is always in the same place, favouring visual memory, and the unidirectional sequence of pages automatically organizes the flow of information into a “before” and an “after” (simply scrolling through the index of any philosophy textbook will teach you that Socrates comes before Plato and he comes before Aristotle), and this, in turn, provides at least a clue about the causal relationships between events (what comes “before” is likely to be the cause of what comes “after”); even the simple number of pages dedicated to a certain topic provides a clue about its importance (at least at a school level). In short, “a book is forever”: and it is no coincidence that certain teachers use the same textbook for decades.
[3] On the other hand, the electronic medium offers fluidity and processing speed: speaking in general terms, information can be located almost instantaneously through reasonable use of search engines and easily reorganized to produce a flexible and adaptable “output” for various situations (printing on paper, saving as a file, presentations in different formats, from PPT to Prezi), not to mention the fact that text can be easily integrated with images, videos, and audio.
[4] FdA is based on a continuous “back-and-forth” between these two worlds, in which students, under the guidance of the teacher, are called upon to construct their own stable text (called a “notebook-handout”), starting from a series of “semi-finished” materials made available on a dedicated website and partially duplicated in a textbook (Il filo di Arianna della filosofia) written by me and published on demand by the Milan-based publishing house, Ledizioni. The theoretical reference point for the project is Bolter and Grusin’s notion of “remediation,” that is, the reuse of the characteristics of one medium (print) in another (the computer screen) and vice versa. In fact, what FdA seeks to do is precisely exploit the characteristics of one medium by using the other medium, and vice versa: the Gutenbergian contents (the textbook and/or other sources) are made fluid and reshaped through the electronic medium to produce another Gutenbergian content (i.e., stable: the notebook-handout), whose authors, however, are not the teachers but the students (under the guidance of the teachers).
The main role is played by the website, which hosts all the stuff the students are expected to use. To be precise, the websites I have created and managed are actually two: one (www.ariannascuola.eu) built with Joomla 2.4 and completely open, and the second one (www.ariannascuola.org) built with Moodle 3.3 and accessible only after free registration on the platform. In the past two years, I have focused on the development of this second website due to the enormous potential offered by Moodle in terms of education. However, in the following pages, I will intentionally refrain from discussing the functionalities of this remarkable CMS.
In any case, the FdA project was conceived from the very beginning as something open to everyone (all original contents of the website are published under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license): not only can teachers freely access the available resources, but they are also encouraged to collaborate by publishing their own content (or by enrolling their classes, regardless of the school they belong to, in the Moodle version).
Between January 1, 2012, and May 20, 2023, Google Analytics attributes 808,153 page views by 320,174 unique visitors to ariannascuola.eu (the open website without registration) (with a peak of 7,439 sessions in May 2020).
[5] The entire system takes the form of a series of concentric circles. At the centre lies the core text written by me and presented to students both in the textbook and on the website. This core is quite stable. This duplication in a digital form and a Gutemberghian form is crucial because students can easily use the PC to download and reshape the same, validated stuff they have found in the book. In this way, the starting level is the same for all the students.
The second circle is represented by all the materials exclusively found on the website www.ariannascuola.eu (or www.ariannascuola.org). These materials can be of any possible type: presentations, concept maps, original texts, in-depth texts, photos, images, drawings, self-produced podcasts, videos, and so on. This second circle is very fluid and grows continuously year after year, adapting to the availability of new computer tools. In the Moodle version, this second level also includes all the exercises and collective work carried out by students. In many cases, the materials are downloaded from the Internet and published on my website to ensure access regardless of whether the original page remains available or not (typical examples are newspaper articles). But in many other cases (perhaps the majority), the materials were specifically produced for FdA.
The third circle, finally, is represented by the galaxy of content present on the Internet, which is reached through targeted links anchored to specific pages of the FdA website. This circle is even more fluid than the previous one because, as known, materials published on the Internet have their specific lifespan, and often official contributions (such as a journal article published in PDF) cease to be available a few months after their publication or can be accessed at a different URL. This cloud of references must therefore be continuously updated, and often the changes are so sudden and unpredictable that they almost render this work futile.
[6] FdA could also be described as a road network in a country, with the main framework formed by highways indicating the central core, the grid of state roads representing the content hosted directly on the website, and the branching of local roads symbolizing the infinite richness of the Internet. In any case, I want to make it clear that FdA has a multi-level structure, which allows for stability and fluidity to coexist.
[7] On the side of stability, the central core of the text published on the website is duplicated in a printed format, namely an actual textbook, although very slim in pagination (each of the three volumes consists of approximately 120–130 pages in B5 format) entitled Il Filo di Arianna della filosofia (Ariadne’s Thread of Philosophy). The choice to publish a physical textbook is the result of several factors: first of all, it aims to reassure the school apparatus with a familiar object perfectly integrated into bureaucratic mechanisms. Il Filo di Arianna della filosofia, despite being published on print-on-demand (and therefore not available in bookstores), is registered with AIE (Italian Publishers Association) and is officially adoptable. It is possible to “fill in the box” in the May class councils where books for the following year are chosen. From a regulatory standpoint, a crucial reference is made to Law 128/2013, which for the first time opened up the possibility of stepping outside the confines of traditional school publishing. Secondly, there is the possibility of reducing the costs of textbooks by staying within the prescribed limits without moral or bureaucratic acrobatics (indeed, in 2013, this was the fundamental reason that led to the approval of my proposal in class councils).
[8] But how does the educational work with FdA actually take place? In reality, the standard lesson is quite traditional: the topic is presented to the students using a classic Google presentation or, if not available, directly projecting the relevant FdA pages. In any case, it initially involves a frontal lesson.
Depending on the available classroom setting, the students can follow different strategies: if the lesson takes place in a computer lab and the students have access to a PC, they are encouraged to split their screen into two windows, one for the FdA page and the other for their Word/LibreOffice file of their notebook-handout. The contents are transferred in real-time from the website to their individual page through a simple copy-paste, and the students immediately begin the elaboration process (see below). If the lesson takes place in a normal classroom, the students follow along on the interactive whiteboard and take notes either on their individual devices (laptop or tablet, and in some rare cases even using their mobile phones) or in their notebooks, deferring the downloading and elaboration work to be done at home.
[9] What does the work assigned to the students actually consist of? In this case as well, the process involves a series of gradual levels. The simplest level involves the consistent formatting of materials downloaded from the website and/or the internet. The notebook-handout is actually a book in which the student is a co-author and, therefore, they must adhere to the editorial conventions in place (which should be taught at the beginning of the course). Commonly used word processors (such as Word and LibreOffice for Windows, Pages for Apple) are more than adequate to achieve decent results (after a minimal initial training cycle for the students).
[10] The second level of elaboration consists of adding materials chosen by the students themselves to the original text downloaded from the website. Factual information (such as the biographies of philosophers deliberately omitted from the basic manual, their portraits, or the list of their works) represents the simplest form of integration. The next, more complex level involves adding and assembling new texts onto the base text (such as excerpts from the works of philosophers or critical texts). The students are explicitly encouraged to manipulate the original text downloaded from the textbook (which can always be found in its original form in the printed manual): they have to add contributions from the site’s repository or certified links provided by the site, as well as remove or summarize contents if they deem it necessary. This process is usually guided because the teacher indicates and suggests which texts to take from the site’s repository, but it remains true that students are allowed to freely explore the site, choose the stuff, download it and use it the best way they can.
In this assembly phase, all available materials are used: images, concept maps, diagrams, screenshots captured from videos, etc. The resulting text from this operation is not simply a transcription of lecture notes (although they are present, only as extemporaneous elaborations or comments on text passages), but rather an assembly that each student produces based on their personal trajectories, resulting in slightly different constructions. While risking oversimplification, the best metaphor is perhaps that of LEGO bricks: each brick has its autonomy and consistency, and yet they are used by different students to create different constructions each time. This phase of the work also includes the recovery of traditional notes taken during the teacher’s frontal lesson. If the students have followed all the indications described earlier (i.e., they are working with a split screen between a window displaying the original text on the website and a word editor window where they are building their own notebook-handout), they are invited to directly insert these contributions from the teacher into their own text as a sort of interline commentary, reminiscent of old scribes.
[12] At a higher level of interaction with the text, there is the construction of a sort of “critical apparatus” through the use of bold to highlight keywords and footnotes, ranging from biographical notes to the definition of a term in common Italian usage, and anything else the student feels necessary. Once the idea of the “sacredness” of the textbook that must be repeated identically is dismantled, everything becomes possible. This work can be partially done in class, but for the most part, it needs to be done at home because it represents a moment of personal reflection during which pure curiosity or the awareness of not knowing the meaning of a term, the role of a mentioned character, or the location of a place should prompt the student to insert the information after a quick search on the Internet. The more sophisticated students also apply marginalia to the text at this point.
[13] Furthermore, the last level is represented by personal content (observations, reflections, criticisms) created by the students themselves. This aspect is obviously the most delicate, and only a few manage to develop it objectively. My suggestion is to add these texts in separate paragraphs characterized by a 5% gray background, so they can be immediately identified during the notebook check.
The notebook-handouts must be submitted in PDF format a few days before the exams for evaluation. I upload them to my tablet and then directly highlight the points I want to discuss further with the student using a stylus on the PDF file. The evaluation work is not as immense as it may seem because it mainly involves checking the presence of text blocks, the sequence in which they are rearranged, the accuracy of the footnotes, and the presence of images, graphs, or concept maps. The percentage of completely new text that needs to be read thoroughly is usually modest.
To print or not to print? This dilemma emerged over time because ten years ago, I was determined to have the reorganized, aggregated, and deepened work done by the students printed on paper (even just on A4 sheets to be compiled in a booklet). The costs of this operation were real but still lower than those of a traditional textbook. In this way, the circle envisaged by my theoretical framework was completed: the Gutembergian text, once disassembled and reassembled according to a different and individual sequence, was brought back to the stability and permanence of paper. On the other hand, I noticed that a growing number of students did not have a printer at home, not for economic reasons, but simply because their families preferred to use the office printer. At the same time, the number of students who, in addition to a laptop, could also use a tablet and stated a preference for studying directly on it (after composing the notebook-handout on the laptop) increased. The crisis associated with COVID made things more complicated, making access to office printers less easy and increasing the number of people who worked solely on electronic devices. The situation regarding this point is fluid, and I do not have sufficient data to provide a clear judgment.
An evident characteristic of working with notebook-handouts is the possibility of collaborative work. In fact, in the years before the COVID crisis, it was possible, during the years I taught the fifth grade, to create a collective philosophy book that was printed on-demand and presented at the State examination as documentation of the work done. Throughout the year, I assigned students the responsibility for a chapter (or a part of a chapter for the more engaged authors), and in May, I would gather their contributions and send them to the Ledizioni publishing house, which, with prior notice, managed to deliver the copies on time for the oral exam.
If you want more examples, look here.
To contact me, write to this address: martino.sacchi@liceo-melzocassano.edu.it
