Basic E-mail, Library Research and Internet
These classes taught basic e-mail skills (compose, send, forward,
copy and file e-mail messages and construct an address book), introduced
students to the library catalog Polaris (which I followed up with
a specially constructed class library page after watching students' struggles with the electronic
catalogues) and explored the internet as a medium where raw information
(different to the processed information in a library) existed to tempt
and confound.
I attempted to place students' electronic skills firmly within the
culture and history of writing to emphasize that activities they undertook
on their own and/or for fun, and quickly acquired expertise at, seemed
part of college culture, not separate from it.
GMU students seem all too ready to accept the judgment of cultural
doomsayers, whether parents, politicians or the pundits in between,
that they form an illiterate generation. Several of my students, for
example, spend more than an hour a day responding to e-mail, yet never
think of it as writing or as an indication of literacy. We talked
about the intensity and frequency of e-mail exchanges, and their similarity
to those of earlier cultures, for example, the classic middle-class
Victorian correspondences, often held as emblematic of a highly literate
society.
We approached scripting hypertext with
a history of the book, and its much longer history as an illustrated
artifact (like a web page) than as a text-only artifact. In both cases,
I tried to stress that the skills and opportunities accessible to
only a tiny minority in earlier centuries were now in theory available
the majority of the US population (though still restricted by the
cost of computer access).
Some students fell in love with, and excelled at, electronic communication:
others found even basic e-mail difficult and I had to schedule several
individual classes (an activity that continued throughout the computer
sessions) to go over and develop class work. But we did achieve a
basic, common terminology (URL, World Wide Web/Internet, etc.) for
the remainder of the computer classes and a modicum of keyboard and
search facility.
Warm-Up Exercises
1) Using the Milton
guide to Understanding and Decoding URLs write a short note on each
of the following web sites detailing the information you have gleaned
about the site from its URL. Where is the site located geographically?
What kind of information would you expect to find on each website?
What points of view or biases might you need to watch out for? What
precautions might you as a researcher need to take if you decide
to use information from each of these sites? Cite your evidence
carefully.
2) Choose one of the above web sites and conduct a preliminary,
one-paragraph analysis noting down the information you can find
on each of the following categories: authorship; publishing
organization; point of view or potential bias; currency of information.
3) Look at the following sites on the TV show Seinfeld.
Which do you think would be most reliable and why?
******
For most students these three weeks were the hardest part of the
computer section, with most trauma centering on the warm-ups. One
typical journal entry read, "I hated it at first," though
the writer did add "but now it's getting easier to use these
resources, and I'm happy I'm no longer computer illiterate."
On the submission date for the final evaluation, both classes recorded
the lowest attendance of the entire semester. Nearly one quarter failed
on their first try at an evaluation, although all but two redid the
project to gain credit.
I realized rapidly that:-
a) I had not modeled the evaluation process extensively enough.
We had worked in the initial internet class primarily on searching
which is primarily a visual skim, requiring a look, skim, link and
look again sequence. Now I had reversed expectations and demanded
close reading and control over linking.
Initially, most student saw a blue link and clicked on it without
fully reading the assignment instructions, then couldn't work out
what to do next. The deciphering of components of a URL (important
as a way of working productively through search hit lists, and of
gleaning information about site origins and potential biases in
the course of a linking trail), via the analysis and interpretation
of as little as two letters, required attention to detail and lateral
thinking most students found taxing, even with a comprehensive guide,
and on-call assistance.
b) The assignment was cascading the students through multiple thinking
and organizational tasks I had not anticipated as problems and on
which I had not focussed in class.
Tasks we tackled en route, therefore, included control
and method (thinking before acting, reading and following instructions),
applying previously researched knowledge to a new task or sequence
of slightly different tasks, textual analysis ( deciphering
the URL and examining vocabulary and sentence structure to pin down
a page's purpose - advertising, propaganda, advocacy, self-advertisement,
psychological persuasion, downright deceit, etc.), thinking laterally,
taking useful notes on information, process and original ideas
and keeping all three separate, planning ahead and maximizing
time management.
This experience suggested to me that many of the 'problems' of new
technology are not technology problems per se but tasks which
highlight students' lack of experience in more basic thinking, researching
and organizational skills, which the computer sessions brought into
much sharper focus than classroom work on more familiar assignments.
For this reason (and those detailed below), this unit of the computer
classes worked as much as an intensive introduction to the requirements
of college thinking and writing work as to the internet and its pitfalls.
If I taught this course again, I should try to begin it earlier in
the semester, expand the time spent on this unit, and address directly
the non-technology issues the exercise uncovered.
Other Results
The Research Process
The second part of the exercise, the selection and evaluation of
a site relevant to the student's research project, took each student
through an accelerated version of the entire academic research process,
although I only realized this as I worked through students' writing
and journals at the end of the semester, and assessed some of George
Landow's comments on teaching via hypertext in the light of my own
experience.
Professional researchers, whether academics, journalists, policy-makers
or writers, understand via experience the difficult balance between
the directed and the intuitive, the dogged plodding and the inspired
guessing, that characterizes good research. A dead end is, to us,
more a step forward than a setback. For many beginning college students,
that balancing act, perhaps because it involves the irrational, is
difficult to comprehend.
As teachers, we can discuss tactics in class, invent classroom exercises
and allocate out-of-class tasks to facilitate the research process.
But we are absent at the critical moment when the student goes to
the university library for the first or second time, or sits up late
on a roommate's computer to try Altavista. We are absent when the
student finds three books in the catalogue and finds none of them
on the library shelves. We are absent when the student finds the perfect
article on a database but discovers Fenwick does not have it and encounters
the consortium system or inter-library loan for the first time, usually
too close to a draft deadline for comfort. We are absent when s/he
turns up 4000 hits on an Altavista search and spends a couple of hours
wading through wholly irrelevant personal pages for useful data. (All
student reports back from library or internet research exercises I
have set.) Discouragement and desperation for any information, however
dubious, are natural responses.
In the computer classroom, I was there whenever students ran into
problems. I could help to design searches. I could stimulate lateral
thinking to open new search routes or themes. I was there when students
had linked too furiously and had lost their best source, and could
not decipher their notes or had lost their key print-out. I could
suggest recovery plans, and help set up clearer record-keeping. Most
importantly, once I imparted a technique, the student could try it
out at once, and keep practicing it, with my help if necessary, until
more confident.
In addition, working on the web students experience multiple sources
of information much more quickly than they would in a library, thus
sharpening immediately their ability to discriminate between resource
types. In working with library-based resources, the information is
both static and dispersed. Student researchers, in English 101 often
working on their first college research essay, have to go to the information.
In the computer lab., however, reserchers are static, and information
comes to them. Without the time-consuming trips to the library, to
the shelves, back and forth to the Johnson Center, or off campus to
a consortium library or the Library of Congress, students are much
more eager to jump out of a dead-end and try another research tactic,
thus turning the exhausting of one trail into a sign of progress,
not defeat. Starting the research process in the computer lab., therefore,
seems to offer a model of some of the positive outcomes of imaginative
research that might encourage students to persist with more difficult
searches over multiple locales.
Classroom Dynamics
The three-class session on internet evaluation also completely destabilized
emerging classroom power structures. Those gaining good marks for
conventional writing and making the 'right' English class responses
often found computer work alien, and showed much less enthusiasm than
those who were aware writing was not a strength. Those who were falling
into the role of class clown, class dunce, silent person in the back
left-hand corner suddenly found their tongues and their expertise,
and a quite different group excelled in the computer classroom.
The exercises also broke down barriers between students, and between
students and myself. Of necessity, I moved from person to person,
and sheer frustration often prompted students who would never otherwise
acknowledge difficulty to ask for help. Students who had never spoken
to each other shared tips, both in class and after class, and several
students became protective of less expert students, checking on whether
they were keeping up, or understood the next stage of the assignment,
which helped both the computer phobics and the ESL students in class.
In addition, students often 'worked out' what they should be doing,
or 'discovered' a short cut I did not know, which enhanced confidence
and reinforced thinking and intitiative-taking.
Thus not just learning, but also teaching became a collaborative
exercise. I spoke much more one-to-one in the class than from the
front of the classroom, and often a student and I would problem-solve
collaboratively, trading ideas as we progressed. Although taxing,
these sessions in the computer classroom grew into the most rewarding
teaching I have completed.
Subsequent Work
Proof of some of the effectiveness of my 'torture' (as one student
named it), came first in individual pieces of work, such as the final
internet evaluation (which includes the critical
textual shift of the writer from being a viewer of hypertext to a
reader of hypertext) and an increased attention to textual detail,
as in the essay extract (which examines
the key words in Toyota's advertising on its web site), then in our
Library class, which followed the internet evaluation, and finally
in the research papers.
The cross-over of internet evaluation skills to text-based evaluation
was very encouraging. Most students came to the Library prepared with
the assigned lists of books and articles. Students used the Library
more confidently, and few tried to meet the exit requirement of two
useful research resources with wholly irrelevant material happening
to contain one key word resembling their research subject. Even more
encouragingly, students whose book and article searches proved fruitless
were much more eager than usual to explore online resources and CD-Rom
databases.
Several students used full-text newspapers; others ranged through
the BFI's Film Index, Ethnic NewsWatch and indices of articles and
book reviews, usually without my prompting. Students also showed much
more confidence in approaching reference librarians (whom I had warned
in advance about the exercise I was planning to conduct and who were
therefore very tolerant of the deluge of enquiries) and applying effectively
the guidance they received. Students' researches on databases often
pushed them back towards text sources: for example, the Film Index
contains bibliographies of books and articles on films and directors,
as well as a basic outline of contents and careers.
Finally, very few students cited personal home pages on their research
projects without an explanation of why, and most used consistently
relevant and apposite (in academic level, content and credibility)
sources for their research projects.
Scripting Hypertext
In this section of the course, I asked students to read about and
explore existing hypertexts and then turn their intensive analysis
essay, on a current advertisement or an advertising campaign, into
a script for a web page, complete with a breakdown of possible links
(internal and/or external) and any graphics that might enhance their
conclusions. I compose two class exercises: the first
concentrated on the history and creative potential of hypertext, and
included links to literary, research-based and creative hypertexts;
the second included caveats, and more
detailed instructions on composing a simple text for the medium.
I stressed that each essay should be cut, rethought, and rewritten
as necessary to create the most effective web site, and that simply
retranscribing the essay in a different format would not gain credit.
Again, as in the internet evaluation section, this exercise cascaded
several outcomes I had not anticipated.
Students had to produce first a plan for their web site, and then
a full script. Students were familiar with the two-column vision/sound
script format from earlier writing exercises in class, and I suggested
a three-column script format, comprising text/links/graphics, for
the web page script.
|
Text
|
Graphics
|
Links
|
| The ad. campaign for the
new Honda Prelude began in Fall... |
photo of car
Honda logo
|
Link to Honda site
Link to Prelude analysis section
|
That produced a lot of crumpled pages and slow writing. Those students
progressing fastest were visualizing each page of the web site on
an 8" x 11" page and actually writing out their text in
blocks on the page around putative graphics and links. On our second
session, I asked several people to show this work to the rest of the
class, emphasizing that this was not an idea I had had, but which
I thought might be useful for us all. Most writers immediately adopted
it.
This method of hypertext scripting turned the text into a visual
sequence of analytical or argumentative units, each with its own shape,
and integrity, and its own visible pattern. Many of my students come
to class as self- or teacher-diagnosed 'visual learners' and in classroom
exercise after classroom exercise demonstrate an acuity and subtlety
in reading pictures that only transfers with intense effort to the
written word. Working with hypertext, students started to see a paper
more clearly as the sum of its component parts, not a monolithic identity
running seamlessly from line one to the final period. This visualization
of the text, and the students' dynamic response to it, became the
most important teaching element in this section.
Results
Argument and Evidence
For example, the 'Tommy' student always produced good ideas and arguments,
but the argument often wander, and repeated itself. This exercise,
however, resulted in a much clearer breakdown of an argumentative
structure. She also rewrote much more concisely: although the script
summarized some arguments too much, the reduction of a 1500-word paper
to three or four pages of hand-written text, which included suggestions
for pictures, did indicate to students how many excess words cluttered
their essays.
The typed web page came from a student who possessed a very sharp
eye for telling detail but who used his observations descriptively,
rather than analytically, in his papers. When he wrote his hypertext
script, he broke his text into introduction, description of ads.,
analysis and conclusion. By visually assessing the size of the sections,
he saw that the analysis section comprised less than one-third of
the paper, an indication of why his grades were staying low. In the
final paper, written as the class worked its way through the hypertext
exercise, this student deployed his gleaned details much more as effective
evidence.
The model of a web page also helped students distinguish between
evidence critical to their arguments and the evidence and ideas they
had collected (often with great effort) which were no longer relevant
by the time of writing. Looking over final research drafts, I was
able to ask students, for example, whether evidence and detail would
deserve to go on the main pages of a web site, or whether it should
be relegated to a 'background' page for readers, which seemed to help
several students establish an effective evidence hierarchy.
Publication
Two students decided to build web pages as a way of gaining more
credit. The first, writing on the social dynamics of a chat room used
the medium mainly to link readers to the relevant sites. The second,
who had never properly revised a paper all semester and was struggling
to gain a C, showed me a preliminary draft, a hypertext draft and,
after my final set of comments, e-mailed a request grammar and spelling
corrections. The incentive of publication (probably allied to fear
of failing) produced his first real argument of the semester, secured
by identifiable, textual evidence.
Judgment
By the last weeks of the semester, students were much more comfortable
with the medium and accomplished in its uses. Both 101 sections had
started the semester polarized between the book and library lovers
who suspect the computer and internet enthusiasts who claimed they
never need to go to the library again. When I asked students for a
critical assessment
of the strengths and weaknesses of reading/researching via hypertext,
the majority met in the middle, in a series of more mature, balanced
responses: the 'little blue words' as both link to new information
and fatal temptation to wander off-task; the potential value of the
net's information currency (its 'updated' quality, as one student
called it) and the value to some students of learning via information
'in short bursts' or with 'explanations attached', both seen as characteristics
of hypertext.
Confidence
Final presentations analyzing a favorite web site reflected this
maturity, both in handling the technology and in assessing multiple
levels of written and visual information. No one had problems pulling
their site (except for the slowness of the server); most identified
levels of persuasion and manipulation embedded deeply in the sites.
For example, one student presented two professional wrestling sites
as constructing 'a sort of a soap opera' to appeal to both readers
of the site and viewers of the televised bouts. Another demonstrated
how Honda delivered hard-sell advertising under the guise of customer
information and appealing hi-tech trickery. The information highway
was no longer a transparent shining path but a cultural construct.
Navigate with care.
Return to Idea
or to Origins
Go
to Conclusion