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| A "hypertextual" assembled book. British Library Board. All Rights Reserved (Shelfmark C23e4). Image taken from here. |
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.
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