Summary of course taken

My Masters is in Medieval and Renaissance Culture around the period 1350-1660. It is a one year full-time course or two years part-time and involves working with many old manuscripts, reading copious documents and writing at length.

Description of strategies used

I built my own computer and use a 19" monitor with a scanner. To not use technology, it would be absolutely ridiculous. I would hate to go back to the situation where I would have to, say, write by hand an essay, then type it up, then put it onto a skin and then you test it (which we used to do years ago). No, no, I don’t want to go back to that! It was monstrous! On a word-processor you can just write it – and say “I don’t like that” and change it round. It’s made life so easy.

An example of an assignment would be to translate a testament of Roger White Aware made on 30 January 1348 - using the technology, I scan it in Word, and check it through - because sometimes it doesn’t like some of the ‘U’s and things as it is in Latin. It tends to lose them especially if there are any inflections over the words... Then, you just go through and put the translation in English beneath. Or, you can have the PDF which you downloaded from something like JSTOR, and open them up in the program and it will then transfer them from a PDF to Word. On that occasion what I wanted was all the tables which I needed when I was doing my dissertation. However, if you have access to PDFs, it’s a great way to plagiarise if you’re not very careful.

You asked of any particular instances or examples where technology had a really positive or negative effect on my learning ...

I suppose, really, the first time I got into JSTOR and MUSE, seeing what was there. As far as I’m concerned, the whole basis of a historian is the amount of work which has been done which you can’t get your hands on. Journal articles, what people write, and you can’t afford all the magazines. But, when you see them all sitting there...JSTOR is an amazing thing!

Then if I want an article in JSTOR, what I do with them is I will trawl through on a search, I save the citations on the ones I want – I might look at one or two pages and think that – some of them I don’t even look at the pages, and take the citation – then I take the citation into EndNote and then, when I’ve got the link back, I can always go back down, look at that one and say, “Right, let’s pick that one up and have a look at it now” at my leisure. Trawling first, picking the citations, saving them into EndNote which drops the link straight in for you – and just come back and pick it up.

One of the greatest things I have also managed to get hold of – recommended to me by one of my tutors, was a CD Rom which contains the Rolls of Parliament translated from the Latin and French into English, from the reign of Edward I to Henry VII. That, to me, is the finest bit of kit – it cost me £50.

The technology has been useful. I couldn’t have done what I’m doing without it. That’s definite. My advice to any student is 'Learn the technology'!