All of which raises, of course, the question of *how* social change is possible.
- Johndan
So I wonder if the "freedom" allowed by the web versus disk-based hypertexts is a little too much for some of the pioneers of the form because of what they are losing out on with this form.
- Steve
It's mostly access, certainly, and yes, let's definitely use the textual space metaphor.
- Geoff
On screen, it seems, there is a whole lot more room for play/shaping/making room(s)...and, a few posts later:
Composition as composure - Kathy
My sense of things is that social change happens when the need for it becomes visible, and that a lot of social change which needs to happen hasn't because the people who would benefit from it are invisible, cut off from our institutions: whether that be access to our classrooms via enrolling on campus or via the wires; whether that be in coverage they receive in the press and other media; whether that be in any consideration given to them when economic decisions large and small are made.
Yet hypertext suggests that things can be linked, nodes can be created, space can created in unique ways. There's a lesson in that. So if the working poor can't afford to get to college, can't even find the *time* to get to college, how the learning they need or would like be given a space to happen?
So what I see about hypertext heuristics and instantiations is that we're learning how to link, how to connect things in new ways, how to bring things together. Charles Dickens gave Joe Gargery a wonderful line, something about how "life is made of so many partings welded together." I think we're seeing w/ this technology metaphors for welding together things that were formally seen as apart, ways to make those a part instead.
But we can't do that by fiat, by one author (those of us who teach, say) decreeing what the links should be, where and when and how they should occur. If the connections between nodes of learners are going to matter, there's got to be some collaboration and the freedom to move in a common area.
So, for example, we see writing centers moving off campuses, consulting with people in high-school and grade schools and community centers about what people in those places know and want to know about computers and writing, about literacy and society. Cargnegie Mellon shows kids in their neighborhood how to use mediation and nonviolence to resovle issues and define problems, they show them how to present ideas and to work within the neighborhood to improve it.
Others have taught classes in Union halls, moving the learning to where the learners are. I think of these models as metaphorically, operating as a kind of collaborative hypertext writ large, writ into life itself. We go one further. We can create free materials, free learning tools online; we can tailor and collaborate on what we create and move that stuff into places where people need them, the way Friere and others have. We can help people get computers by writing grants, and we can create connections that way as well.
I think there will always be a place, some need, for the kind of intellectual work we do now, on campuses and in our classrooms. And that's all good stuff, but I think the more interesting and innovative stuff is going to happen on the edges, in the margins to use a print image. Hypertext says to the reader that you don't have to write in the margins anymore. You can take this text and put it on *your* desktop (either by disk or by downloading the pages from the web), and write anywhere you want, write yourself into or out of the text. We can also do as Anne and Kathy are suggesting, create ways for people to not only work alone, on their desktops, but also to place those reconfigured and reshaped text back where others can get them.
And right now the best way for most others to do that is via the WWW because it's still easier to do that than to get published by some place like Eastgate. Yet most others is not all others and it's certainly not the others most in need--because most disadvantaged and invisible--of that kind of opportunity and means for writing themselves into the larger culture more fully.
Writing as reading, not simply clicking in passivity, and showing folk how to write in these places, and helping them get the tools to do that, wherever they are and whomever they are, in ways that are generous and compelling and not condescending and coercive, that's where the challenge, and I think the more interesting work is to be found.
--
Nick Carbone, Writing Center Director
CSU Writing Center (http://www.colostate.edu/Depts/WritingCenter)
