HELMERS . MAPS

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The technical language of World Wide Web navigation is easily adopted by users of all ages. There are only a handful of key terms for web browsing and searching: 

For upper grades, the online web search engine and directory Yahoo! lists several web encyclopedias among its channels, among them is the PC Webopaedia, a searchable, accessible on-line dictionary. To reach them, the user should follow the links to Computing Dictionaries from Yahoo!, which includes the following nodes:  Yahoo, Computers and Internet,  Information and Documentation, Computing Dictionaries. While they contain useful technical information, however, these dictionaries tend to feature all computing words, from the familiar to the arcane.

One of the richest areas of the web for someone who teaches language is not found on any website, but is embedded into the very language of computing. This is the language of metaphors that constructs the virtual, electronic environment of the Internet. It is through powerful metaphors that we begin to assimilate the technology into everyday life. The information superhighway, home, salon, navigation, surfing, "splash" pages, bookmarks, these metaphors describe the Internet as a "fortress of knowledge" or an "ocean of information" (Browning in Stefik 56). Teachers should think about introducing these metaphors to students in the elementary grades before they start searching and working. What images arise in their minds from these metaphors? Do the words help the students see the web as a forbidding or inviting place? Why would writers make these word choices? 

Mark Stefik, author of the investigation of archetypes, myths and metaphors titled Internet Dreams, identifies four major conceptual metaphors currently in use to describe the World Wide Web: the digital library, electronic mail, electronic marketplace, digital worlds (another way of discussing virtual reality). And EdWeb Home Room creator Andy Carvin uses The Web as Tutor, The Web as Publishing House, The Web as Forum, The Web as Navigator. There is no need to select one metaphor and remain faithful to it; rather, teachers and students should recognize that the metaphors we use actually determine how we react to and use the technology. Luckily for educators, the reinforcement of maritime metaphors encourages us to see that we are voyaging and exploring rather than storming a Bastille of information.

In fact, some web designers stress the importance of metaphors for effective web layout and user navigation. Celia Pearce, web designer, author of The Interactive Book, and daughter of architect Peter Pearce, often compares web sites to theme parks such as Disneyland, where the entrance to the alternative world can be translated as a "main menu" offering the "first level of options," just as a main gate introduces children and their families to the Magic Kingdom, Epcot, Animal Kingdom, or any other Disney Theme Park. Each theme park has a towering structure that enables families to return and rendezvous. In Animal Kingdom it is the Tree of Life. At Epcot, it is the famous dome:

This image borrowed from Disney.com, which provides a visual gateway to the many facets of Disney.

Pearce's advice to designers of web page is easily absorbed into educational practice because she identifies concepts that teachers should stress as well. Students need to be reminded that aimless clicking is not an effective way to conduct research and that many sites are poorly designed:

[As a designer] I have to be aware of such things as vistas (what I can see from where), dead ends, log jams, endless, linear corridors that lead nowhere and provide no way out. I have to be aware of how long you will move down a path before you need the opportunity for a change of scenery or scene, and how many options are appropriate to offer at that juncture. I have to provide you with a means of finding your way back to your entry point, and an easy path to the exit. (Pearce 28, my emphasis)

The notion that the web give us endless corridors is a blessing to postmodernists and a labyrinth of the most unpleasant kind to teachers. In cyberspace, no series of cultural continuity structures experience and understanding. Edward Linenthal, writing in his study of American battlefields Sacred Ground, contends that "Americans do not--indeed, could not--live in a cultural environment in which all space is perceived to have the same value" (1); yet, no series of spatial or temporal "differences" structure experience and understanding on the web either. "The delineation between past, present and future, between here and there, is now meaningless," writes Virilio (31). Literary critic Mark Nunes attributes this to the lack of an actual or metaphorical "frontier": "connections between nodes precede the attempt to explore this terrain, meaning that every ‘journey’ in cyberspace is a repetition and a retracing of steps" that the author has prearranged (318). Some educational critics argue that even hypertext --widely touted as "generous" in its possibilities for linking (Tolva) -- is not interactive "because there is no intrinsic feedback on the user’s actions: the information in the system does not change as a consequence of the user’s actions on it" and therefore the author only follows paths determined by the site’s author. And thus, among the more cynical, "travels" through the distances of the Internet are what the French postmodern critic Jean Baudrillard calls "orbital," going around in circles: "the perpetual tourism of people who no longer undertake voyages in the true sense, but simply go round and round . . . within circumscribed territory" (Baudrillard qtd. in Nunes 316). The alternative to such malaise is not to "surf," but to construct the space.

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Send mail to Marguerite Helmers, helmers@uwosh.edu