From: SLATIN@UTXVM.BITNET
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.mbu-l
Subject: Students constructing hypertexts
Date: 10 Nov 92 14:55:00 GMT
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
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU