The Four Questions about Hypertext (English 95)
As a class we began with four questions:
Questions two and three parallel those asked in Hypertext and Cognition, an anthology of essays based on a symposium held as part of the Fifth Conference of the European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction (EARLI) (Rouet et al. 6-7).
As we move through this section of the essay, it is important to remember that the students examining these questions have been placed in a developmental classroom. Their writing has been diagnosed as failing to meet the basic competency needed for college-level work. According to critics of CUNY as an open university, these students are “lazy” and do not belong in college. Even advocates of basic writing programs such as Karen Greenberg have labeled these students as not ready for mainstream college-level work (69-71). The students' work in the following sections demonstrates that not only are these students capable of doing college-level work but also that they should not be funneled into remedial-based, gatekeeping programs--rather, I would argue, the analyses and work these students produced shows that they belong in content-specific, fully credit-bearing courses. When students are invited to answer the same questions that academic experts are asked, when students engage in meaningful and knowledge-producing discourse, they exceed our expectations and prove John Dewey's old insights on effective education as experience-based education.
After an hour-and-a-half meeting in the computer lab during which we use some basic search engines and each student locates an intriguing site, I ask students the first question--”What is hypertext?” At first confusion prevails. Puzzled looks. “What do you mean `hypertext?'” Zvonko Vasic asks. “You've just been reading what the experts call 'hypertext,'” I say. “I want you to describe in as much detail as possible what you've just encountered. Write about the experience. Describe what you were reading, what it felt like to search the web, to read in this format.” Slowly keys begin to tap. These are not the rapid key strokes of highly proficient typists or writers who know exactly what they want to say but the tentative, explorations of students learning and thinking. After fifteen or twenty minutes, most students have a good screen full of words, mostly paragraph definitions, a few narratives of their experiences, good ideas, thoughts, and, of course, lots of typos but don't worry about that yet.
The act of reflecting on the fundamental materials and qualities of a mode of communication is something that I would find difficult to do if we started with a printed text. Imagine asking students:
Yet when asked these questions about hypertext, about the web, most students give genuine responses. There is, of course, my favorite response in which Chris Riviezzo defined hypertext as “Writing with lots of coffee at 3 a.m. when you have a paper due at 8--that is, HYPER!!!!!!text!!!!).” Generally, however, students are curious to know what you're getting at; they want to know how they should answer; and, they're pleased to find out that you're asking them because you're really thinking about these same questions. I've talked with my classes about my response to Sven Birkerts's The Gutenberg Elegies, Richard A. Lanham's The Electronic Word : Democracy, Technology, and the Arts; and Neil Postman's Conscientious Objections: Stirring Up Trouble About Language, Technology, and Education. This encourages a sense of a shared project, of taking part in an intellectual investigation, and in the production of real knowledge (rather than the sense of answering formulas, writing seemingly meaningless essays where the instructor already “knows” all the possible conclusions and is only interested in the form, the how-it-is-said of the essay).