Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Thinking and Linking: Teaching with Hypertext

A "hypertextual" assembled book. 
British Library Board. All Rights Reserved (Shelfmark C23e4).
Image taken from here.
On Thursday I participated in the annual Center for Innovative Teaching / Educational Technology Conference, entitled "Transforming Teaching and Learning."  Last year, a group of undergraduates and I ran a session called "Arthurian Fan Fiction" and the year before that I gave a solo presentation called "Wikipedia in HEL," a talk that in many ways inspired the creation of this blog.  This year, a group of graduate students from my "Teaching English with Technology" (see our course blog here) and I collaborated on a session entitled "Thinking and Linking: Teaching with Hypertext."  I provided a theoretical introduction, detailing what I see as the benefits and limitations of using hypertext, and then the students, Melody Anderson, Brendan Holloway, and Alex McAdams shared the hypertext projects they developed in the course and have since revised based on some rethinking and application in their own graduate teaching experiences.  Here is the abstract of our session:


Thinking and Linking: Teaching with Hypertext

When we ask students to read course texts, we also expect that they make connections to related concepts, literature, or events.  Yet, students often do not make significant connections or record these connections in systematic ways.  This panel will address these problems through the pedagogical use of hypertext links, the ubiquitous facilitators of online networking and research that provide immediate and sustained connections between web pages.  While the development of hypertext links used to require knowledge of HTML, blogs and wikis now offer user-friendly interfaces that make linking an accessible educational tool for both teachers and students.  Moreover, hypertext linking offers new and interesting benefits and challenges for student thinking and learning that transcend the possibilities of face-to-face dialogue.  This session will confront the ways in which hypertext can mediate what Ann Berthoff calls "elemental meaning-making actions" within cyberspace.

Assistant Professor of English, Alex Mueller, and English graduate students, Melody Anderson, Brendan Holloway, and Alex McAdams will share both their rationale for teaching with hypertext and the projects they have individually developed using blogs, wikis, and webquests to enhance student engagement with course texts.  These applications include a linkable version of Ambrose Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," a Freirean hypertext for Composition 101 students, and an Uncle Tom's Cabin interactive blog site.  After these projects are presented, the panelists will engage the audience in a discussion about potential uses and possible abuses of hypertext across content areas and disciplines.

Below is the text I used as the basis for my introductory remarks and then what I had hoped to offer as some attempt at a conclusion, but as it turned out, we ran out of time.  I decided that I would rather have a conversation with the audience members rather than squeeze my thoughts in at the end.  That said, I would love to know what YOU think about my attempts to critique/compose through hypertext.  Or, if you prefer to see/hear a screen capture of the session, go here.  Of course, you could always do both!

Hypertext: Revolutionary or Restrictive?           
            We approach this session from the assumption that the aim of pedagogy is to establish a learning environment in which students actively produce meaning and exercise their creative faculties as they confront the complexities of the world around them.  The opposite educational posture, in which students passively consume information and receive knowledge, has been famously decried by Paulo Freire as the oppressive "banking concept" of education.  He describes these pedagogical deposits as cancellations of creativity: "The capability of banking education to minimize or annul the students' creative power and to stimulate their credulity serves the interests of the oppressors, who care neither to have the world revealed nor to see it transformed.  The oppressors use their 'humanitarianism' to preserve a profitable situation.  Thus they react almost instinctively against any experiment in education which stimulates the critical faculties and is not content with a partial view of reality but always seeks out the ties which link one point to another and one problem to another."[1]  As 21st-century teachers and students of English, it is difficult to ignore the resonances that a pedagogy – one that "seeks out ties which link" – shares with the educational possibilities of hypertext, which has the capacity to facilitate an innumerable number of linkages between related points and problems.   
            Hypertext, the digital strategy that associates chunks of text, image, or sound within an informally and intuitively structured retrieval system, has often been described as possessing revolutionary characteristics and operating as a synecdoche for the liberatory character of computer technology.  The inventor of the term "hypertext," Theodor Nelson even went so far as to suggest that "[t]he purpose of computers is human freedom, and so the purpose of hypertext is overview and understanding."[2]  From a Freirean perspective, Nelson's "overview and understanding" is the access to reality that hypertext affords by making transparent the links that already exist between global problems and deconstructing the elitist claims to higher knowledge protected by oppressive regimes.  In one sense this seems to be an accurate description of hypertext, which offers readers choices and multilinear itineraries through hyperlinks, equating "writing" with "reading" and allowing systematic connections to be made between seemingly disparate texts.  J. David Bolter argues that hypertext, the tie that binds what he calls the "electronic book," offers a more suitable approach to the complexity of the world than the structures of the printed book has ever been able to provide: "There is nothing in an electronic book that quite corresponds to the printed table of contents . . . In this sense, the electronic book reflects a different natural world, in which relationships are multiple and evolving: there is no great chain of being in an electronic world-book.  For that very reason, an electronic book is a better analogy for contemporary views of nature, since nature today is often not regarded as a hierarchy, but rather as a network of interdependent species and systems."[3]  For those of us who rely on printed books for our instructional material, we know all too well the limitations of working with such discrete objects, some of which are published in competing editions, offer little to no space for commentary, and provide little guidance in making even transitory connections between other printed texts.
            While many of us might acknowledge the advantages of information retrieval and networked data that hyperlinks provide, hypertext can also be highly limited and restrictive in its scope and operation.  A prominent digital scholar, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, confesses that her students often resist pedagogical uses of hypertext, condemning it as manipulative.  She adds, "Hypertext isn't really interactive, they argue; it only gives the illusion of reader involvement – and certainly only the illusion that the hierarchy of the author and reader had been leveled: clicking, they insist, is not the same as writing."[4]  From this perspective, hypertext is an oppressive form of narration, in which the author determines when and where the links will be, thereby limiting the number of pathways a reader may take.  When hypertext is simply read, the digital author arguably has even more control over the way a reader can approach the text than a print author, who cannot determine which connections the reader can make or which pages she will read.  Understood this way, hypertext embodies the Freirean "banking notion of consciousness," in which "the educator's role is to regulate the way the world 'enters into' the students."[5]  If teachers are content to simply create hyperlinked texts that their students will submissively click and follow, hypertext offers little opportunity to achieve Nelson's ideal of the "freedom" that the computer supposedly affords.
            As panelists, we cannot claim to have solved this inherent tension in the pedagogical application of hypertext, but we feel that a via media or "middle way" is not just possible  –it is desirable.  The projects that we will be sharing today emerged both from the graduate English seminar entitled, "Teaching English with Technology," and from our recent reflections upon our own teaching of literature and composition courses.  While we differ in our approaches to hypertext, we collectively see the use of such computer technology to be less about "freedom" than it is about "power," as Espen Aarseth has influentially suggested.[6]  This hypertextual power can be wielded in ways that can be certainly oppressive in their application, but if we envision hypertext less as text to be read than to be written, the cognitive power of linking can be applied by students powerfully within hyperspatial educational environments.

Conclusion: From Hypertext Critique to Hypertext Composition
            As these projects demonstrate, the possible pedagogical uses of hypertext are nearly endless, enhancing the teaching of reading and allusion, the exploration of new forms of commentary, and the incorporation of visual design into multimodal forms of composition.  They also collectively recognize, we believe, the limitations and advantages of such computer-mediated dialogue for knowledge production and textual critique.  On the one hand, these projects defy the banking model of pedagogy and engage in what Freire has called "problem-posing education," in which students interrogate the texts or real-world issues before them through juxtaposition, compilation, and critical commentary.  Freire offers the following formulation for these practices: "Whereas banking education anesthetizes and inhibits creative power, problem-posing education involves a constant unveiling of reality.  The former attempts to maintain the submersion of consciousness; the latter strives for the emergence of consciousness and critical intervention in reality."[7]  Terms such as "unveiling" and "emergence" and "intervention" share kinship with the progeny of hypertext such as trackbacks, hyperlinks, and wiki-edits, all of which facilitate the identification and deconstruction of digitally-mediated realities.
            When we commit to these pedagogical enterprises, we are in some sense championing what we traditionally call "critique," "reading against the grain," or even "peeling back the surface" as the preferable instructional modes.  Yet, since the digital world is a reality untenable and unmanageable for many of us, adopting a Freirean conviction to "unveil reality" in cyberspace is increasingly a futile exercise in chasing shadows, many of which may not represent any recognizable reality at all.  Moreover, acts of critique are often described in aggressive and destructive terms that do not suit the constructive work of linking, blogging, and wiki-editing that hypertext affords.  As Bruno Latour dramatically puts it, "what performs critique cannot also compose."[8]  Latour is responding to the pervasive assumption that once reality is "unveiled" the work of critique is finished, leaving little to no room for "composition" or reconciliatory work to be performed.  Using the metaphor of a critical "hammer," Latour explains:  "With a hammer (or a sledge hammer) in hand you can do a lot of things: break down walls, destroy idols, ridicule prejudices, but you cannot repair, take care, assemble, reassemble, stitch together.  It is no more possible to compose with the paraphernalia of critique than it is to cook with a seesaw.  Its limitations are greater still, for the hammer of critique can only prevail if, behind the slowly dismantled wall of appearances, is finally revealed the netherworld of reality.  But when there is nothing real to be seen behind this destroyed wall, critique suddenly looks like another call to nihilism.  What is the use of poking holes in delusions, if nothing more true is revealed underneath?"[9]  If we use hypertext as a tool of critique, we are adopting the Freirean model of "problem-posing," but if our use of this digital medium stops there, we will not be tapping its full potential to "repair," "assemble," or "stitch together."  Contra Latour's suggestion that a tool cannot both "critique" and "compose, we believe our projects have shown that hypertext can be used as both a critical hammer and a compositional needle and thread, which both "unveil" the many layers, allusions, and subtexts beneath the textual surface and "sew" together the ruptures that often arise through the process of critique.  If we are content to use hypertext for critical reading, making connections, or challenging assumptions, we are only applying a portion of its utility as a pedagogical resource.  In other words, if we are doing more passive clicking than active linking, we are not fully pressing the limits of our thinking or taking advantage of the many opportunities that hypertext offers for digital acts of composing and meaning-making.                                                        
                     


[1] Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (New York: Continuum, 1993), 54-5.  Our emphases are marked in italics.
[2] Theodor Nelson, Computer Lib/Dream Machines (South Bend, IN: Self-published, 1974).
[3] J. David Bolter, Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1991), 105.
[4] Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy (New York New York University Press, 2011), 98.
[5] Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 57.
[6] Espen J. Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 82.
[7] Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 62.
[8] Bruno Latour, "An Attempt at a 'Compositionist Manifesto,'" New Literary History 41 (2010): 471-90, at 475.  It is important to note that Latour's "composition" does not refer to "writing," but rather to intellectual work as a whole, which he suggests should adopt the virtues of assemblage over critical acts of what he calls "creative destruction."
[9] Ibid.
     
    

Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Blogging and the Complexity of the Academic Ecosystem

Peter Taylor forwarded to me and other participants in the "Infrastructures and Agents" Inter-College Faculty Seminar in Humanities and Sciences (ISHS) an interesting article from the Chronicle that addresses the "virtues" of scholarly blogging.  Among the many fascinating issues raised, such as scholarly productivity, the perceived value of digital publications, and public engagement, I was intrigued by the claim that our "academic ecosystem" is "more complex" than it was before.  I must admit that much of me wants to agree with this statement.  After all, the possibilities for digital scholarship seem to be endless, from the standard digital essay, to the blog, to the wiki-compilation, to the video mashup, to the audio remix.  And I generally think this "complexity" is a great thing because it expands the nature of what scholarly work can be and makes visible the research that has often been obscured from public view.  That said, I worry about fetishizing of this "new" complexity, mostly because it participates in what I think is an irresponsible adherence to the myth of progress, the notion that we are always improving upon what had come before.  Moreover, this perspective may encourage us to assume that our academic ecosystems were once quite simple, which I don't believe was ever the case.

I want to know what you think about this.  Is it fair to suggest that new digital forms of writing, such as blogging, increasingly complicate our methods and networks of knowledge production?  Does "complexity" helpfully characterize our current academic ecosystem?    

Thursday, March 22, 2012

I'm not not saying you shouldn't not read this . . .

It's been some time since I've posted something here, but Dr. K (in her usual style) pointed me towards this recent article on words of negation that I'm guessing HEL folk will find very interesting.  What bothers some of us about statements such as "He don't do nothin' all day long" is based on the prescriptivist grammarian's logic about how negative words cancel each other out.  However, this article demonstrates that the history of most languages indicate that words of negation emerge as expressions of emphasis.  In other words, when we hear someone say "He don't do nothin' all day long," we all know that the speaker means emphatically that "He doesn't do anything all day long."  Only the literalists among us would assume that the speaker was just being clever with words of negation.


Students of Chaucer (and yes, I'm talking to you all in ENG 381!) will recognize the preponderance of such emphatic negations from the descriptions of the pilgrims in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales.  Chaucer describes the Friar by saying, "Ther nas no man no wher so vertuous" ("There never was no man nowhere so virtuous") and the Knight by claiming "He nevere yet no vileynye ne sayde / In all his lyf unto no maner wight" ("He never yet no vileness didn't say / In all his life no manner of man.").  We don't need to count the number of negatives to guess that Chaucer is characterizing both as virtuous men (although, we know from the rest of his description of the Friar that this assessment is suspect).


I'm curious to know, however, if such superfluous negatives or other words noted in the article such as "literally" bother us.  My father used to get after me for asking "Where are you at?"  What he didn't know was that I was just using "at" for emphasis.  Okay, I may not have been not un-conscious of that at the time . . .