Teaching in a C-A Classroom
1. One of the first questions asked by teachers who are considering teaching in a ca classroom tends to be a variant of the following: "I'm already having a hard time incorporating all the content I want to include in my course, how can I now add teaching technology?" My answer to that question is usually something like: "That's not the way I look at it." The advantage to such an ambiguous answer is that it leaves a little bit of room (both mentally and temporally) to negotiate a much longer dialogue regarding the theoretical and practical aspects of teaching, learning, and the ca classroom.
2. The problem is analogous to the one I have increasingly sensed emerging in my attempts to analyze and critique "hypertext" in any of its multiple instantiations: fiction, poetry, nonfiction, web-commerce, or simply generic "electronic discourse(s)." While the way one frames the question is certainly a part of the problem, the fundamental questions one must answer first are more epistemological than rhetorical. The "old-school" model of teaching would have a central authority pour information and knowledge into the receptive (tabula rasa) students and rate the students based on the empirical evidence of their products.
3. Current research into distributed cognition , situated learning, and the classroom as an ecology has helped to begin a shift in the paradigm of education and change our way of seeing the learning context dramatically. The "authority," though certainly still an authority about certain types of information and knowledge, becomes a facilitator, or co-participant, of learning along with the entire milieu of the learner. This milieu is not restricted to the classroom and classmates alone, of course, but extends outward from that nucleus. Still, the teacher has little impact on most of the more exoteric elements of the learning situation.
4. The question becomes, based on current research on learning, "How can I develop a classroom (and course) in which the ecology in situ is optimized for the maximum transformation of information into knowledge?" It seems to me that a similar shift may need to occur in our thinking about what it means when we talk about "hypertext," and more specifically, "hypertext fiction." Jim Hollan and Scott Stornetta suggested in "Beyond Being There" (Computer Human Interaction, May 3-7, 1992, pp. 119-125), an article about telecommunications technology, that "telecommunications research seems to work under the implicit assumption that there is a natural and perfect state - being there [face to face] - and that our state is in some sense broken when we are not physically proximate" (120). They go on to argue that "requiring one medium to imitate the other inevitably pits strengths of the old medium against weaknesses of the new. At the same time, to the extent that the goal is imitation, one will not be led to exploit the distinctive strengths of the new medium" (121).
5. Just as Hollan and Stornetta point out that even the "tele" in telecommunications carries an implicit assumption about the underlying presuppositions of the research community in telecommunications, so the word "text" in "hypertext" telegraphs its own implications. Even Espen Aarseth's fine work in Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature only replaces "hyper" with "cyber," and the rubrics of his analysis still tend toward "text" as we have come to understand textuality.
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