One of the aspects of hypertext that seems to perplex my students
the most is its lack of linearity. Barthes
reminds uf, of course that textual linearity is an illusion,
but it is one that is unwittingly and frequently thrust upon
K-12 students. They are taught that all stories have a beginning,
a middle, and an end. That all paragraphs have a topic sentence
that usually appears at the beginning of the paragraph. They
are told that ideas progress logically from a main idea to a
supporting detail. They are often taught how to outline. Many
teachers mistakenly lead students to believe that writing happens
through a series of discrete steps rather than as a recursive
process. Traditional reading tasks that require students to answer
questions at the end of a selection also seem to help foster
this sense of linearity--that there is one right answer to a
question and that reading response is more or less a matter of
guessing what the teacher knows or what the author means. Students
have few opportunities, especially after they enter middle and
high school, to relate text to their own personal experiences.
Many teachers still directly intervene in students' attempts
to interpret literature. And, it is fairly common practice to
begin at the beginning of a literature anthology and progress
through it it, especially in survey courses such as American
and British literature. Texts that encourage browsing, such as
magazines or almanacs are less priviliged in English classrooms
than literature anthologies or canonical novels.
And while many of the literate activities students perform
outside of school disrupt this assumed linearity, students often
seem to expect that schoolish tasks should abide by more linear rules. And so authoring hypertext
webs can be an unsettling experience for many of them. Students
often have to be coaxed into expanding their webs. After selecting
key words and phrases, they don't know what else to do. I show
them, during the initial poetry web
project, that they can use key terms in those lexias to expand
their webs, that a lexia defining the word "plunder"
can link to another one that explains how Spanish soldiers searched
for gold in their New World and an explanation of how that search
impacted indigenous people. This freedom to move beyond the text
is often a new one for middle school students.
The poetry web
project, which is the first hypertext project my students engage
in, is perhaps the most difficult. Not only are they learning
the software that we use, but they are wrestling with several
kinds of boundaries. They wrestle with my rather open-ended expectations
regarding the length of their webs. I allow them to first travel
though several poetry webs completed by students the previous
year. I explain that I expect them to create at least 20 lexias
or nodes if they want to get an A. But I don't define what needs
to go into those lexias. I allow the models to help students
define the task, and I prefer to let them wrestle with the problem.
I also expect to carry on hundreds of little conversations with
students, both on-one-one and with the whole class, about their
struggles and the meanings they are constructing during those
struggles with their emerging texts. And they wrestle with their
existing definition of text and how it fits with the kinds of
text they are creating for their webs. While it would be luxurious
to discuss the nuances of textuality with my students, I can
seldom do that, mostly because middle school students are generally
not ready to have those discussions. They are less concerned
about the definition of text and its boundaries than they are
with using a computer to create the very kind of text that does
challenge its boundaries. Thirteen and fourteen year olds are
not interested in Richard Lanham's predictions
that hypertext will democratize education and expand the boundaries
of rhetoric and poetics. They want to play.
And I let them.
In a traditional classroom, structure is used to organize
student perceptions about a particular unit of study. And it
is generally the teacher or a textbook that channels student
attention toward that structure. But because of the disruption
of structure inherent in hypertext, students are challenged to
view discrete parts of a whole in a different way. Roland
Barthes (S/Z, 1974), of course, believed that in the
ideal text none of those discrete parts should take precidence
over another. And that is one of the defining elements of hypetextuality
(Landow, 1997).
Eventually, this seems to have a liberating effect on many
of my students. Part of that may be because they no longer have
to guess what I, as their teacher, believe to be important. They
are free to follow their own interests and make their own decisions
about what is important in the poem they annotate or the biography web they create. One student who
annotated Mary TallMountain's "Hands
of Mary Jo" made very few links from the poem itself.
But because she was interested in weaving and beading, and one
of her links lead to information about those arts, she expanded
her web by including more information about that. She was free
to explore her budding interests in those arts.
The poetry web project is a good
one to start with because it allows students to progress through
their chosen poem from top to bottom if they choose. The structure
of the poem gives them a scaffold upon which they can build a
web. Some actually research key words and phrases in their poems
in this way, marching through them one after another. A student
using Shirley Hill Witt's "Punto Final"
may look up information on the Spanish Conquest first because
"Spaniards" is in the first line of the poem. And he
or she may conclude the research with a definition of "LaVieja"
because that is a term used toward the end of the poem.
A few students learn very early that there is a freedom here,
not only in the way they can conduct their research, but in the
way that an unknown reader will browse their webs. The beauty
of hypertext is that there is no set sequence for a reader or
a writer (Bolter, 1991, Joyce, 1995, Landow,
1997). One student wrote in his response journal that "hypertext
is sorta like how you think." And while they cannot articulate
that they as authors will be sharing their agency
with unknown readers, the act of creating hypertext documents
helps them realize that there is an audience that they need to
consider. Students know from the beginning that their work will
ultimately be published on the world wide web and this knowledge
places them in a more authentic author's space. Traditionally,
of course, students have produced text primarily for a teacher.
In more workshop oriented settings students may write for other
students in the school and may be encouraged to seek out other
publishing venues. But the ease of web publishing helps encourage
students to play with multi-linearity.
My students seem to work very hard to "get it right."
They know their work will ultimately be published and they are
very motivated to make their webs worthy of public viewing. I've
had a number of students come up during their lunch hours to
work on their webs. And students often stay after school. It
seems to me that the level of concern that accompanies publishing
helps emerging writers think more deliberately about their audience
and play with textual structure.
But that does not mean that all students fully embrace the
freedom that multi-linear text offers
them.
