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- From: SLATIN@UTXVM.BITNET
- Newsgroups: bit.listserv.mbu-l
- Subject: Students constructing hypertexts
- Message-ID: <MBU-L%92111008565135@TTUVM1.BITNET>
- Date: 10 Nov 92 14:55:00 GMT
- Sender: "Megabyte University (Computers & Writing)" <MBU-L@TTUVM1.BITNET>
- Lines: 78
- Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU
-
- I agree wholeheartedly with the proposition that students can create
- hypertexts. David Hogsettes' posting the other day (sorry if I misspelled
- your name, David) suggests one way; George Landow discusses similar issues in
- _Hypertext_. I've got a project going this semester as well: the students in
- my (upper division) 20th-c. poetry class have just spent several weeks
- building a series of HyperCard stacks that reconstruct what we've been calling
- the "poetic conversation," i.e., the interchange among poets and readers that
- I take to be constitutive of poetry (as of other discursive forms). I'll try
- to keep this description relatively brief.
-
- The project involves a combination of activities. We use InterChange as our
- primary medium for class discussion. Each week a new poet, and each week the
- students go to the library to find a short piece of documentary material
- which, in their view, illuminates the poet's participation in the
- conversation. They post their finds in the Mail and read one another's
- discoveries.
-
- Pre-writing for the hypertext project itself involves, first, review of the
- InterChange transcripts to identify principal threads running through the
- discussions so far as well as hot local issues (i.e., those specific to
- individual poets). This review is followed by a search of the Mail "archive"
- to identify useable material, and to pinpoint gaps that should be filled by
- subsequent research. Then students identify what should be linked with what.
- Having done all that, they then enter the materials they've selected into a
- series of HyperCard stacks, using templates designed by a group of graduate
- students working in our Computer Research Lab (the project leader is Margaret
- Downs-Gamble, a first-rate Donne scholar who's in the market this year if
- you're looking for someone: highest recommendation). Once the material'd been
- entered,i askedthem to create a "conceptual map" visually representing the
- relationships they're trying to describe or enact. I explained to them how to
- write simple button scripts (scripts are like miniature programs that cause
- specific things to take place, e.g., clicking on a button marked "Stevens
- Biography" will cause the card containing biographical information about
- Wallace Stevens to appear on the screen).
-
- They've done all that; my job now is to assemble everything and make sure the
- links work. Then I'll have to try to sort out an appropriate navigational
- scheme (navigation is a metaphor frequently used in discussions of hypertext,
- because the hypertext seems most easily represented as a 2- or 3-dimensional
- "information space" or "environment" (see yesterday's discussion: link here!)
- through which readers must find their way). This is the part where I least
- trust my abilities, actually. But I've promised the students, so I'll just
- have to work it out.
-
- Incidentally, or rather nt at all incidentally, work on this project confirms
- something Joe Amato (I think it was Joe) reported the other day: the women in
- the class have responded especially well to this project. Several who had
- been extremely nervous about the technology, both at the beginning of the
- semetser and again as we began work on the hypertext, suddenly "got it" and
- became as eager and excited as they had been anxious earlier on. And not only
- did they discover things about HyperCard that others in the class with more
- computer experience didn't (especially about its graphic capabilities), they
- also seemed newly playful with the computers themselves. During lulls in the
- work, they would sometimes open up the control panels of their Macs, playing
- with desktop patterns, color, mouse speed, and so on. That may sound trivial,
- frivolous, "off-task," and so it is-- for someone with a lot of experience who
- already understands how these things work and has a sense of control; but for
- these students, who had felt alienated by and from a technology that seemed to
- constrain what they could do, it is clearly non-trivial to realize that they
- can indeed alter the look and feel of the interface, tailoring it to suit
- themselves.
-
- And I must report, too, that the first time we went back to InterChange after
- a few weeks of working on the hypertext project was simply exuberant-- the
- discussion was lively, expansive, fast. I could go on and on, but I've
- already broken my commitment to try to be brief.
-
- I've discussed an earlier version of this project in a forthcoming essay, for
- anyone interested (I don't mean to keep blowing my own horn, and please tell
- me if you want me not to do this any more): "Is There a Text in this Class?
- Creating Knowledge in the Electronic Classroom," in _The Social Creation of
- Knowledge: Multimedia and Information Technology in the University_, Edward
- Barrett (ed). Cambridge: MIT Press, Real Soon Now. There should also be a
- piece by George Landow on student-authored hypertexts in there, and a number
- of other fascinating pieces.
-
- John Slatin
- UT Austin
-