The first issue of the new peer-reviewed venue, Romantic Pedagogy Commons, called "Innovations," is now available at Romantic Circles. It offers numerous tools for teaching, some that are technologically innovative, others that make use of more traditional classroom practices but transfer them to the web (online slide shows, for instance). These tools are primarily for enhancing Romanticism classes, but some of them apply to any literature courses. Mark Phillipson presents the Wiki as an anti-authoritarian class tool: it de-centers classroom authority and participants produce an on line text book, as it were, authored collectively by the class members. Jerome McGann and Johanna Drucker describe IVANHOE, a new program (still in beta testing) that stimulates creative reading practices and interpretive activity among students in a literature course.

Next month, Romantic Circles will launch a special section called Romantic Pedagogies, which will continue to expand well into the summer. Within this section, we plan to set up a "Romantic Commons" in which teaching issues can be discussed and teachers' materials shared with one another.

We plan to establish the section on a firm scholarly footing, including peer-review and MOO conference participation as part of each thematic-based "issue" or site produced. All Romantic Circles materials are peer-reviewed, of course, but we add this by way of indicating that we would work to ensure that people's work "published" and discussed in this site will be adequately valued by their home institutions.