Copyright © 1997 by Margaret Peaslee.
(This article, and the photographs that accompany it, are available exclusively at MendelWeb, for non-commercial educational use only, and appear with the kind permission of the author. Although you are welcome to download this text, please do not reproduce it or the photographs without the author's permission.)
Years before the invention of the World Wide Web, a number of educators were drawn to computer-based hypertext and hypermedia systems as a way to solve three problems inherent in traditional classroom instruction: the visualization of course content; demonstrating the connectedness of course materials over time; and integrating student interpretation, and particularly student writing, with assigned texts and commentaries. While the Web has already made clear the power of hypermedia as a visualization tool in education, its current appeal and use seems rooted in the promise of access to materials, rather than the earlier notion of connectivity, and too often one encounters mere presentation, rather than integration, of student work on the Web. MendelWeb is an attempt to blend the freedom and scale of the Web, with the earlier, richer notion of connectivity, and the earlier idea of integrating different voices in a structure modeled on the "communal" (hyper)text described by Catano and Scholes nearly two decades ago (Catano 1979).
What has any this to do with Margaret Peaslee's exciting essay, "In the Footsteps of Mendel"? Peaslee's Mendelian travelogue -- "Mendelian" in the literary sense -- and the wonderful photographs that accompany the text, provide a welcome and informative connection between Mendel's 19th century life and work, and the Brno of the middle and late 20th century. Peaslee's presentation also joins an ongoing "discussion" among the various materials at MendelWeb, about our image of Mendel and his achievements, and about our sense of his importance, not only in the history of biology but in history more generally. More importantly, perhaps, the approach to Mendel and his work in Peaslee's text is noticeably different from that of some of the other commentaries at MendelWeb (e.g. Sapp's "Nine Lives of Gregor Mendel"). This is not primarily because Peaslee's essay belongs to a different genre than an article prepared for an academic journal, but because the questions she wants to address, and the issues she finds most significant in a study of Mendel's life, are different than those of the other authors. The piont is an elementary one, but it emphasizes the way in which Mendel (and thus the materials at MendelWeb) can be "read" in different ways, as well as how connections between primary and secondary texts, as well as between formal and informal voices, can be made present to students, all at once, using hypermedia.
The texts and images at MendelWeb have been selected, composed and constructed to "talk to one another," (to borrow a phrase from Gray 1985), and Peaslee's essay and the photographs clearly talk to Mendel's paper, to the texts in the Essays and Commentary section of MendelWeb, as well as to some of the materials connected through the MendelWeb Timeline. As exciting, of course, is the way these texts talk back to "In the Footsteps of Mendel".
Finally, it is a great pleasure to publish Peaslee's essay at MendelWeb along with Vítezslav Orel's "Heredity Before Mendel". Peaslee describes her meeting with Dr. Orel in Brno, and provides not only images of Orel and Dr. Anna Matalová, but pictures of some of the sites that are mentioned (but not illustrated) in Orel's 1996 biography of Mendel. This is a rather explicit demonstration of how the linked materials at MendelWeb uniquely inform one another, and I am most grateful to Dr. Peaslee for making her essay and the photographs available here.
Copyright © 1997 by Margaret Peaslee.
(This article, and the photographs that accompany it, are available exclusively at MendelWeb, for non-commercial educational use only, and appear with the kind permission of the author. Although you are welcome to download this text, please do not reproduce it or the photographs without the author's permission.)