Commentary on Student Responses to the Course

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Students turn in an OLR at the mid-term. This record gives me an opportunity to gauge how the course is going and how the students are progressing and to check on their understanding of the OLR itself as well as the content of the class. Included with the record is a self-evaluation and the student's recommendation for a grade. Most of the time, the students are very accurate in their recommendations. They have a grading rubric which tells them what each letter grade indicates and are charged with arguing for the grade by giving examples and evidence. For this class, both the mid-term and the final OLR were "turned in" as web pages on the in-house (intranet) server. For most of the students, this was their first experience writing web pages, though using Claris Home Page (a WYSIWYG editor) helped in some ways, it also complicated things in others. The level of sophistication the students developed in their web pages over the semester was delightful to see. While I am not making their OLRs available to view (to protect their privacy), their essays (Project 2) and final projects are online. The following commentary includes some of their responses to the course in terms of the technology, hypertext readings, course reading packet, writing, collaboration, and my pedagogy.

Introduction | Technology | Reading Hypertext | Course Readings
Writing | Collaboration | Pedagogy

About Technology

In this class, there were only five students of the original 23 (several dropped for a variety of reasons) who stated in their original self-reflection (Part A.2) that they were comfortable with computers and computing. Three of those were computer science majors. Most of the students wrote that they felt intimidated or afraid of the technology component of the course. A fairly typical example is the comment of a student I shall identify as "Student A":

Finally, I have saved the worst for last: my technical skills. Computers are very strange objects to me. I enjoy using them when I have mastered certain things through close observations of other users; but when I have to do something new, I feel very intimidated.

Student I said:

As for my computer skills, there is not much to say. I am taking this class to learn more about this machine that is taking over our lives (as my parents would say). I want to learn more about the Internet, and how to write my own web pages. I am both excited and apprehensive. I don't have much experience with computers.

All of the students wanted to learn more about "computers," and each overcame their individual fears through hard work and collaboration with peers. Those who had more experience worked with those with less. By the end of the class, all of the students were quite comfortable not only with "computers," but with writing web-pages, navigating the Internet, the course folders, and several applications. More than that, the technology was not the focus of the course, though each student certainly had to learn technology along the way to understanding hypertext fiction better.

Introduction | Technology | Reading Hypertext | Course Readings
Writing | Collaboration | Pedagogy

On Reading Hypertext Fiction/Poetry

One often hears that reading hypertext is frustrating and disconcerting at first, that the reader tends to feel "lost." My students were not exceptions to these observations. Student D wrote, "Hypertext is very confusing to me. It was different from anything I have ever read. After the discussion in class, I now know that I am not the only person in the class that had trouble." The student was quite correct; most, if not all, of the students had similar difficulties. For instance, Student H said:

I find that the reading is very difficult. The ideas seem to be scattered and have no "process" behind them. Also, the content seems to very "deep" from the writer's point of view……it's almost as if we are seeing inside their thinking. I'm wondering if the intent is to just leave the reader frustrated? Maybe leave them thinking……did me!

Student I had psychological difficulty with following links rather than a proscribed path laid out by an author:

I got Victory Garden today. It is making more sense to me than Mothering did, probably because I'm more familiar with what was going on. I just keep following the same links. That is the traditional way to read a book and is what I am used to. I'm scared to click on a link because I don't want to get lost. I guess I need to open my mind up here and not be scared. Who cares if it makes sense, right?

Despite their difficulties and frustrations, we discussed the hypertexts and their reactions in class, and most of them began to suspect that there was more to this "new medium" than a single reading would reveal. In addition to the class discussions, the course reading packet helped to contextualize the materials. Later in the semester, Student H made this observation:

I thought I would go back and try to read "Mothering" again and see if I could understand it better given the information I learned from the articles, as well as, what I've learned in class. I felt I could read it better given what I know hypertext is about. I could now understand why she has such random thoughts. I guess like the material has been telling us, it is up to the reader to make sense of it……takes a lot of practice though, at least with Mothering. I also went back and looked at some links that had some hyperdocuments on them. I think I could appreciate more what the author was trying to do and I was able to understand them a little bit better the second time around. It is still kind of tough with some authors.

This was not an unusual occurrence. Most of the students ended up re-reading the hypertexts after class discussions and reading more of the articles in the course packet. Student H made this observation about what s/he would write for Project Two:

I have decided to talk about how hypertext changes both reader and writer and requires a much more in-depth commitment from both. I'm not sure if I will stick to this proposal completely. I might take this idea at a different angle in the actual paper. I have a lot of ideas running thru my head but I really think it would be good to focus on how the reader and writer are affected by this new medium called hypertext.

The experience of most of the students in the class might best have been summed up by Student A after reading both Eastgate titles (twice) and trying to write in Storyspace:

I figured out the concept of hypertext today. It can be like a jumble of memories. You know the main idea, the main concept. And you can randomly pick at someone's brain and find a memory. In no particular order. Just like a ramble almost. Like this pouring forth of emotion in a non-chronological order. Kind of like what a therapist might hear. And memories don't always need a timeline. It might even be the order in which someone would remember their own life. A memory pops up here and there and you sit in on it and you read what they're thinking. You piece together their pieces and you slowly understand. The fragments are a mystery at first; complete randomness. And slowly things begin to click and a story forms somewhere in the chaos.

This kind of emergent knowledge (as opposed to simply regurgitated information) is exactly the kind of outcome I always hope for in my teaching. Of course, part of Student A's process came out of the course reading materials, which is the next section.

Introduction | Technology | Reading Hypertext | Course Readings
Writing | Collaboration | Pedagogy

The Course Reading Packet

Many of the readings in the course packet are fairly sophisticated and not easily comprehended. Student G's observation after a class discussion of the week's readings was far from atypical:

I felt very frustrated and overwhelmed with five highlighted articles and no direction. I used the advice in class to write down main points of each author but I still felt overwhelmed by my inability to choose what I need and don't or who is really saying what. I have noticed that I have a very hard time reading these articles. Most of the time I think an author has a certain viewpoint but it is actually completely the opposite.

As Student D observed (above), "the course packet readings helped me . . . to understand" the hypertexts and later observed about the additional three readings that, "I learned some new material about the writing and reading of hypertext. The three articles that I read for the project proposal helped clear up the new questions that I had about hypertext."

One of the processes I like to use in class to help open up class discussions is a synchronous "chat" in the Daedalus Integrated Writing Environment (DIWE) called "Interchange." This program, developed by former UT graduate students, allows for either one large group or several smaller groups to chat online. Very often, students who normally stay quiet in f2f (face to face) discussions find their voice in the experience. For the discussion of readings, or development of group projects, the Interchange is a very useful tool. As Student A put it:

Today we did a chat discussion in class. I'm used to talking on chats, so it wasn't that weird for me. Anyhow, I didn't know that people in the class actually had ideas, because no one ever said anything, but they did today. It was really cool, because the shy people had neat things to say. It made me a little less wary of group work and stuff. It was also neat how you can hold several conversations on the same topic at once and you can be in all of them at once too. Plus, if a topic dies, then there are two more waiting and there are always new ones coming up. This was with only four people too. It was just neat.

Student D observed:

On the 17^th we used the interchange program. This program allows for people to talk to each other within seconds. It was very helpful with my project because I could get other people's point of view on the subject of traditional writing vs. hypertext. This also helped in narrowing down the subject for my project.

These "chats," in combination with the f2f in-class discussions, helped the students to wrestle with the very new medium of hypertext and the difficult concepts in the course packet readings. In addition, they were presented with hands-on (embodied) experiences about which they were reading. Many of the students experienced significant "shifts" in their attitudes and outlooks about their initial reactions to both hypertext and the course readings. Some had even more expansive experiences; again, a quote from Student A:

I was reading the Joyce articles and there was a very profound statement in there. Something about hypertext doing your imagination's job by filling in visuals and voices that the reader used to come up with on their own. I thought how sad that was initially. I tend to write by painting with words. I have a visual image in my head and I let other people see it through my words. This is quite challenging and I love writing in this manner. But then I saw how pictures could enhance your words at the same time. They could add more to vague words. You could make words so vague that without the picture there was no meaning, but with the picture there was. Kind of like a title that completes the essence of poem and states the real intention.

While we might call the student's attention to the problems inherent in the idea of knowing an author's "real intention" (as I did in my reply to Student A's OLR), it seems clear that this student was actively participating in and involved with the material. I should probably point out that this student was not unique in this experience. Such involvement also reveals itself in the experience of the students with writing in this course, which is the next section.

Introduction | Technology | Reading Hypertext | Course Readings
Writing | Collaboration | Pedagogy

Student Observations on Writing

In general, my approach to student writing is to focus on argumentation, organization, and elements of style (including discussions of ethos, pathos, logos, and audience), rather than mechanics, spelling, or the more rudimentary aspects of their writing. Of course, in some cases that is not possible. For instance, one of my students was an ESL student and required a certain amount of work with basics:

As far as my background is concerned, I was born in Guatemala, so my first language was not English, but Spanish. I never did learn Spanish grammar. Prior to this class, my experience in reading was minimal. To be very frank, I only read when I had to. --Student F

For the most part, however, I will make editorial comments on mechanics only a few times on their work and refer the student to a writing handbook, which I always recommend they get if they don't already have. If several students seem to have similar problems, I may use a single class session to discuss grammar and punctuation. In the main, I don't focus on those issues but prefer to talk in terms of persuasion and audience. If the student is genuinely interested in their topic, this seems to work far more effectively than "red marks" on a page.

I have also found that using Storyspace and teaching web writing is a great way to help students recognize organization and structure in ways that are more difficult in traditional classrooms. As Student A wrote in an observation after working with Storyspace:

I also learned that the structure really says something about the piece (this is within storyspace). It can be a representation of the way things happen in life. Like with my abuse section I put it in a circle to represent the cycle of abuse and making up and abuse again.

Obviously, we know that structure "says something about the piece" in all literature, and in all writing; however, getting students to become aware of that on more than an abstract level, to personalize the information and transform it into knowledge, is not often as straightforward as we might hope. Later in the semester, this same student wrote:

I think that the organization of my paper is going good. I had a hard time figuring out how I would put the different concepts of personae shifting together in one paper, but I fixed that by taking out one of the topics and by trying to keep a general theme running through all of the different aspects of personae shifting.

It is not usually a simple matter to determine just how a student makes the bridge from "information" to "knowledge," but this student later made this claim in her final self-evaluation:

When I wrote in story space I was forced to take small pieces of my work and make them fit into a larger context. Grouping my work has allowed me to recreate old pieces that I had already written and it has created a new avenue for my creativity. Organizing my second project has also helped; because I specifically tried to make the paragraphs flow and tried to keep a main idea running throughout the paper. Writing for this class has really made me focus on the layout of my ideas, rather than just my raw thoughts. I have never done so much cutting and pasting before. The whole idea of first letting your thoughts spill out on to the paper and then organizing them has allowed me to become a more structured writer.
Besides getting help from other people, I have also learned to do a lot on my own.

Collaboration plays a critical part in my pedagogy with respect to writing instruction, so the next section focuses on the student responses to that strand of the course.

Introduction | Technology | Reading Hypertext | Course Readings
Writing | Collaboration | Pedagogy

The Students and Collaboration

Collaboration is an essential strand in all of the courses I teach, and this was no exception. Aside from the theoretical importance of collaboration as an instance of situated learning and legitimate peripheral participation (see: Lave and Wenger), there are other aspects just as vital. For instance, I usually introduce synchronous chats early in the semester. We use the Daedalus Integrated Writing Environment (DIWE) application, a portion called "Interchange," at the CWRL for these chats. One advantage to this kind of collaboration is that it gives a "voice" to students who often, otherwise, do not participate. As Student A observed:

Today we did a chat discussion in class. I'm used to talking on chats, so it wasn't that weird for me. Anyhow, I didn't know that people in the class actually had ideas, because no one ever said anything, but they did today. It was really cool, because the shy people had neat things to say. It made me a little less wary of group work and stuff.

Starting these early, and continuing to use the process throughout the semester, also helps to form class cohesion and helps to bring everyone into the conversations that take place face to face later on. This kind of process is much more difficult to achieve in a non-c-a classroom, of course.

Because I don't focus on "teaching the technology," students learn early on in the class that collaboration and teamwork are essential. As Student I put it in their OLR self-evaluation:

Participation and collaboration play a large role in this class. Not only is it essential for me to ask for help when I need it, but sending e-mails, adding links to the addlinks page, and sending responses to each other all play a part of the learning experience. The students are all in this together and even though we are all on different levels, we all must stick in it together in order to benefit.

It probably doesn't hurt that they are also aware that, as one of the course strands, collaboration is one of the ways they will be evaluated for a final grade. Another benefit that students receive from their collaborative efforts, however, is in peer evaluations of their works in progress on a regular basis. Confirming the experience of many teachers over the years, Student C wrote:

I received some good criticism from my classmates. I now see several things I can do to improve the paper before our final evaluation. I learned as much by reviewing my peers as I did when I received their criticism.

My own intuitive sense is that student learning is compounded by collaborative participation in shared projects; that is, students learn more from what other students learn or already know when they work together to learn it, and they learn more than they would have if they had worked alone.

However, it is not enough simply to stick a group together and tell them what product they must produce. Which of us has not been in a collaborative situation in which a few people produced but everyone got the same credit? Students need a vested interest in the project and motivation to collaborate with their peers. Allowing the students to develop topics in which they are interested helps. Showing them that their own OLR will be the main determinant of their grade, not the performance of peers or the product the group produces, also helps. However, I am convinced that giving the students at least the perception that they must "sink or swim on their own" is central to creating a real learning environment in which students must not simply take in and then repeat information, but have to transform it into knowledge. Of course, one must be prepared for the protestations of students like Student J:

I honestly dislike the amount of self-exploration that is required for this class. However, the lack of guided instruction and overabundance of forced, sink or swim, discovery has developed my confidence and independence in my use of Storyspace and Claris Homepage. I'm sorry to note that my confidence and independence have grown at the cost of my knowledge and understanding of the material covered in this class.

Interestingly enough, this student also showed marked improvement in both writing and analytical skills over the course of the semester, not to mention "the material covered in this class." Although, in fairness to the student, there was probably some validity to the complaint, as I discuss in my retrospective.

Often, the "A" students are the ones who most object to this style of teaching. I wonder if many of these "A" students have learned more about regurgitating what the teacher wants than anything else. As a student said in a private e-mail reaction to me after the semester ended:

I want to say thanks for the class. I know that I had my share of complaints, but most of them stem from the lack of brain stimulation in other classes. It had been a long time since I truly had to think and work in class. It's easy to look back and say that I enjoyed the class.

Other students responded to the pedagogy I employed in a variety of ways, and that is the final section of this commentary and covered more in my retrospective.

Introduction | Technology | Reading Hypertext | Course Readings
Writing | Collaboration | Pedagogy

The Students on The Teaching

Most of the students responded quite favorably to the OLR, though not all liked the self-reflection involved as one can tell from the quote from Student J (above). A more typical response was that of Student M:

Overall, I think the course is setup in a different way that allows for the student to grow at their own rate. Also, I feel the OLR is a better way of evaluating the grade of the student.

In fact, most of the evaluation was done by the students themselves in Part B.1 and B.2 of the OLR in which each had to critically evaluate their learning in terms of the grading criteria, the strands of the course, and the five dimensions of learning (confidence and independence, skills and strategies, knowledge and understanding, use of personal experience, and self-reflection). As I mentioned earlier, the students are usually very accurate in their self-appraisals.

The students did work very hard. We had one student who switched to a pass/fail grade because his other course work was so heavy and he feared not being able to keep up. Yet, even this student was highly involved, worked heavily on his group project, and probably would have gotten an "A" in the course had he not switched. Why? Well, Student O wrote in the course evaluation:

Great course, I think the teaching strategy of throwing students into the course load is an excellent to optimize learning and retention. An by allowing students to pursue what topics they choose it keeps them interested. [sic]

This certainly speaks to my commitment to a "sink or swim" style of teaching (or "teaching" as one student wrote above). But beyond that, I believe that the students actually had fun learning, and felt that they had learned it, not simply taken in information. They struggled, complained, worked hard, and learned. In the end, perhaps my favorite response was from the evaluation written by Student P:

This class was beyond frustrating; however, this is the most fun I've ever had in a class at UT. I have learned so much. I've also found a new medium of creative expression. Hypertext has improved my writing dramatically (creatively + scholarly). I will really miss doing this next semester.

However, as successful as I felt the class was, there is room for improvement and change. That is the topic in the final section, In Retrospect.

Introduction | Technology | Reading Hypertext | Course Readings
Writing | Collaboration | Pedagogy