Cybercomp: Researching The Differences Between Print and Hypertext
To answer this question, I want to turn to the work of my Cybercomp class. This course was a section of English 110, the standard first-year composition course at Queens College. As part of the English Department's ongoing efforts to provide our students with access to computer-mediated communications; in the Spring of 1998, we ran six sections of ENG 110 that were designated as online writing courses. The aim of these courses was to provide students with an introduction to composition and the opportunity to explore how traditional ideas of composition were changing/evolving in the context of technological changes. In addition to meeting in the computer lab once a week, the six courses took “cyberspace” as theme. In my section of Cybercomp, I had a number of students who had been enrolled in my English 95 courses the previous semester. Thus there was some continuity within the group of student-researchers-writers. For me, the ENG 110 course carried on the investigations about hypertext which my students and I had begun the previous semester. I tried to invite the ENG 110 students to see themselves as building not only their own knowledge but also as continuing the research begun by their peers.
I want to present a few excerpts from the research papers the ENG 110 students wrote. These essays explored the concept of the difference between hypertext and print through a close reading of one or two sources. Beyond that the students were free to choose the content of their sources and the format of their essays. The subjects ranged from the representation of basketball online compared with basketball in newspapers and magazines to the effects of hypertext on learning (that is, textbooks compared to websites).
The students' conclusions included wholesale endorsements of hypertexts and computers:
When I first started using the Internet, Web pages and word processors on my computer, I was a little skeptical and a little reluctant to make the transition. However, I quickly became aware of the many benefits of using computer text and technology: the speed of receiving and sending information, the conservation of space when saving a box's worth of documents on a single disk, the ease of having the computer look up synonyms, spell check the work and locate repeating words in a sentence, and lastly the number of trees saved by recording information on disk rather than paper is environmentally more sound. The Internet is the quickest, cheapest, most environmentally conscious and most efficient way of obtaining and exchanging information. With it, we can save trees, save time, save space, and most of all allow literacy to evolve to a higher level, and give us “a glimpse of the electronic future.” (Smriti Kapoor)
However, students also showed an interest in balancing knowledge gained from the Web with library research:
Sure the Internet is great when we have to do a research paper on frogs but what do we, college students, do when we have to do our papers on Colonial Latin American Women from 1640-1800? When doing my research all I found on the Internet after hours was “Latin American Women played an essential part in history.” How was I to incorporate this statement into my history paper? At the library I found a librarian specialized in Latin American History who was able to direct me to indexes, reference books and instructed me in how to find articles. All this was found in the library. I spend as much time in the library as I did on the Internet and in the library is where I found all that I needed to write my paper comparing the Colonial Women of Brazil and Mexico. We know that we live in a modern world of technology where information is at our finger tips but not all the information. We still have to refer to printed text to find all the information. Eventually we will get to that postmodern world where printed text and the library are ancient artifacts, this may happen further in the future when our children will be in college. However, “librarians predict that books will never disappear” (Wilson 2). We will just have to see for our selves, but as for now follow my advice--library NOW and Internet LATER. (Judith Soriano)
One of the most moving (and well-researched!) essays I received was from a student who had been in the Introduction to College Writing course in the fall. He ended his paper by acknowledging that technology was changing the shape of our knowledge, but he also elegantly underscored the need for “imagination” and “interaction between the machine and the user.” Those of us working in computers and composition would be well served if we remembered his points. He wrote:
We should use the technology available to us and expand our knowledge on the information provided to us, not on the one thing that provides us with the information (computer). We have to try and use these machines as a way of helping us get through the fascinating world of literature and other interesting fields of study, which till now have been on paper. We shouldn't just use this equipment to do the work for us, that's just pure laziness. We should use our imagination and enable an interaction between the machine and the user to get the job well done. Moreover, as human beings we characterize ourselves as hard working individuals, which are the one's responsible for running this world. This the most important job of all was given to us not to any kind of machine. And till now, it has been done very well by means of a pen and a piece of paper. Why not keep this tradition alive, and in our new modernized world, use computers as a resource (tool) to help us fulfill this task. Not using it as a means of doing the job for you. Reading hypertext should open our imaginations, should continue to challenge our imaginations. It can replace books. It cannot replace the ideas from old books, instead it must transform them. (Juan Cardona )
an extended discussion of, and more excerpts from, student papers