Newsgroups: bit.listserv.mbu-l
Date:         Wed, 11 Nov 1992 19:50:19 CST
From:         Wes Chapman <WESCHAP@VMD.CSO.UIUC.EDU>
Subject:      Re: is the end of "the paper" in sight?

I would be interested in hearing what assignments people have given which ask
students to write hypertexts of their own. My own half-brained efforts follow.
Looking back, I see that I was more concerned to find topics that were
especially suitable for graphic representation than I was to find topics that
were particularly suitable to hypertext.  In retrospect, I think this was a
good non-decision; any topic can be the basis for a good hypertext.
    All of the following were assignments in first-year writing courses; in
every class, students had access to a scanner and Hyperscan.  For each class, I
spent slightly more than two 50-minute courses teaching students how to use
Hypercard (by walkin them through the process of creating a simple stack,
explaining concepts an processes as we went). All of these assignments were
worked on collaboratively by groups of 4-5 students.
1) "Create a hypertext presentation on some aspect of Donald Duck, Howard the
Duck, and/or Ariel Dorfman's discussion of Donald Duck."[following this core
sentence was a list of specific suggestions: tracing one of the the DD
conventions identified by Dorfman through a series of comics, comparing the rep
resentation of the world in DD comics with the representation in Howard the
Duck, etc.].  Most of the best hypertexts I've gotten came out of this topic.
Some students said that they didn't mind writing in a new medium, didn't mind
writing on materials unlike any they had ever worked on before, and didn't mind
engaging in a new and alien kind of analysis, but would rather not have had to
do all three at once--a very reasonable objection!--but I think that the utter
strangeness of the experience helped them.  It also helped that we had
discussed at length Dorfman's argument, and had in a prevous unit looked
critically at a hypetext (the ABC News Interactive Videodisc on Martin
Luther King).
2)  "Your assignmen is to create, as a group, a hypertext analysis of an
advertisement or group of advertisements.  Your goal is to identify what the
ads reveal about our society."  [Following this, a lengthy description of
questions to ask about an ad and working assumptions about the ways in which
ads are created.]  Some good stacks from this assignment, and some bad ones
as well.  Ads work well for as subjects for graphic representation, but I
hadn't adjusted to the difference in sophistication and intellectual ambition
between my former students at Cornell and my students here at Illinois
Wesleyan.
3)  "Your assignment is to represent a small, more or less coherent body of
knowledge, including some original contributions of your own, in a hypertext."
In class I explained this more fully; the idea is to link verbatim transcripts
of texts about their chosen topic to each other and to their own writing, and
to provide an interface for the reader which would allow her to navigate
through the material.  The former is designed to get the students to see their
ownwork as part of an ongoing conversation; the latter is designed to help
them see that the selction and organization of texts in a course or field
are interpretations in their own right.  I don't know how these will turn
out, since my students are working on them right now. I already know one
thing I will do differently next semester; I'll have larger groups or perhaps
even the whole class at once work on these projects; the density of information
required to make such a project take off is pretty high. If I do that I'll have
to modify the interface requirement.
  I'll be interested to see the rest of you do with your hypertext assignments.

Wes Chapman
Illinois Wesleyan University
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU