This interactive piece was inspired by a year of teaching myself Old English, and my interest in the interactive ethnography, The Long Day of Young Peng.
In early 2018, I began to read the Old English elegies: The Wanderer, The Seafarer and The Ruin are strikingly painful and human poems from around 1000 years ago. I was free to learn the new (old) language however I wanted. I found that I failed when I made myself read dry passages about grammar. I succeeded when I spoke phrases aloud, made guesses at their meaning, traced patterns and narratives, and only turned to declension tables when I was motivated by a specific vivid example.
I came into contact with The Long Day of Young Peng through my job as an academic developer. The Long Day is an interactive ethnography designed as a teaching tool.
It makes use of many of the things I admire in teaching, things which I’d benefitted from in my own learning: narrative, richness and vividness, interactivity, empathy and identification.
This piece was a chance to bring Young Peng and Old English together. It was also an opportunity to create a short interactive piece using Google Slides. Links between slides provide basic branching, and one can adjust fonts and images with ease. Google Slides is a potentially useful tool for anyone making interactive resources.
Featured image by Inja Pavlić on Unsplash
