Sir Gawain And The Green Knight Text Analysis

A recent trend in secondary and tertiary education is to combine traditional analogue learning with online learning environments. This phenomenon is known as “blended learning”, the goal of which is “to blend the best aspects of real and virtual environments” and to focus on the most beneficial aspects of both traditional and digital learning in order to offer students a diverse learning environment (Concannon, Flynn and Campbell 502). In the academic field of humanities, students have access to many traditional and digital resources. However, the goals and aims of these resources differ greatly, as not all of them are suitable for educational purposes. In addition to this, it cannot be concluded whether digital learning bears greater benefits

The Norton Anthology of English Literature, published by the W.W. Norton & Company publishing house is a widely used collection of canonical English literature. According to the preface of its ninth edition, the goal of the Anthology is “to bring together works of enduring value and to make them accessible, comprehensible, and pleasurable to a wide range of readers” (Greenblatt et al. xiii). Volume A of the Anthology features a modern translation of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” by Simon Armitage. The chapter starts with an introductory text explaining the origins and content of the story. The actual text of the story is displayed as a poem, as the line lengths have been kept similar to the original text. At the bottom of the page, there are a couple of notes explaining terms, imagery and literary or cultural references. In addition to these notes, the text features line numbers in the margin, which enables the reader to quickly reference a particular line, stanza or word. These features increase the ease with which students are able to navigate the text, since they can quickly find the information they are looking for. However, while the Anthology promotes accessibility, traditional learning using books carries several benefits as well as disadvantages. The largest disadvantage of traditional learning using books is the lack of portability. Books can be too heavy or impractical to carry

As Melissa Terras describes, “crowdsourcing [is] the practice of using contributions from a large online community to undertake a specific task, create content, or gather ideas” in order to “improve the quality of, and widen access to, online collections” (420). A well-known example of an online community based on crowdsourcing is Project Gutenberg (421). The latter project offers the text of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” for free in several downloadable formats, including PDF, HTML and EPUB. This allows users to save the text on their devices and access it whenever they want, instead of being limited to situations in which they are able to access the internet as is the case with the e-book published by W.W. Norton. In this sense the portability of the Project Gutenberg edition surpasses that of the W.W. Norton e-book. Stan Ruecker, in his article on using interface as a mediating actor in the field of digital humanities, stresses the importance of interface in digital resources (397) and that a wrongly designed interface can discourage users from using it (406). While the online environment of Project Gutenberg has a clear interface, the e-book itself does not. Comparing it to the Norton e-book on this aspect would thus be unfair. One argument that remains, however, is the adaptability of the Project Gutenberg