Date: Tue, 4 Feb 1997 20:40
From: Randy
Frank asked toward the end of class if Afternoon would be a constructive hypertext. I said no. It would be exploratory.
I should qualify that. I went back to my office and reread Michael Joyce's definitions, which I've read many times. (each rereading being a new reading). Joyce defines a "constructive hypertext" as "a tool for inventing, discovering, viewing and testing multiple, alternative organizational structures as well as a tool for comparing these structures of thought with more traditional ones and transforming one into the other." He also claims that Storyspace was meant to be a tool for creating constructive hypertexts as opposed to exploratory ones. By implication, then Afternoon is a constructive hypertext.
But my understanding of Joyce's definitions is that Storyspace is a tool for creating Afternoon, and that the act of creating Afternoon was a constructive hypertextual experience for the writer; and I suppose in the capacity of the text to surprise, change, morph, reshape itself through the topography of its hypertextual, it is constructive of a "new way of seeing" for the reader as well.
However, it is hard to see how that definition could hold a long time, and ultimately it comes down to two things: the difference between writers and readers, and the context of reading. I personally don't see how the reading experience of Afternoon is any more constructive than the reading experience of another work of literature. In my mind the operative distinction between exploratory and constructive is the ability to reshape the narrative and write that reshaping into the hypertext product itself. My understanding of exploratory/constructive has always been closely tied to relative passivity/activity, or reading/writing. To tie, as Joyce implies, the distinction to whether one's knowledge is transformative and whether that transforming knowledge can be written back into the structure of the reading experience, simply by navigation, seems to rely on a very thin proof of reader response. That would mean that, for the reader, Afternoon is constructive if the reading experience creates sufficient knowledge in the reader that new ways of seeing the text are constructed and learned, and that the reader is using that knowledge to manipulate the text in increasingly informed ways.
That would be true for some and not others. And so I don't think it is reasonable to call Afternoon a constructive hypertext *for the reader* even if it is for Joyce and for *some* readers.
Does that make any sense?
Date: Fri, 7 Feb 1997 08:27
Subject: Exploratory v. Constructive, continued
In reading Frank's posting about things (as well as Krissi's question) I thought I would say a couple things.
I think Frank is concerned about hypertext being perhaps merely "more" and "speed" compared to the living hypertext that is reading a book, sparking an idea, pursuing that idea, reading another book. That is, isn't there something more powerful about making the connections yourself over time than using electronic hypertext to explore someone elses connections in a limited, sped up, extensified, space.
I gave a talk to the faculty here at U of Alabama yesterday called
"Resisting the Myths of the Electronic Frontier." The three myths I
attacked (beyond discussing how the frontier was just a bad metaphor)
were:
(1) that new technologies were about speed;
(2) that they are
about individual encounters and liberation; and
(3) that they are best
at finding answers and resources.
My basic point was that new
technologies will only be truly transformative when we learn to use
them to help students "slow down" their reading and writing, when we
use them as tools for collaboration and community, and when we learn
to use them for helping students to find questions, not answers. Yes,
the Microsoft commercials tell you that there are answers at the end
of the rainbow--but I say, if there aren't environments for teaching
students to be interrogrative and critical, rather than just sites for
resources and answers, then this is not an important transofrmation.
It is a coincidence that Frank picked Beloved as his example. My students just did a web exercise on Beloved. Check it out: it is at http://www.georgetown.edu/bassr/beloved.html. It is linked off of traditions.html, follow the Beloved link. I think you'll see what I mean, with this assignment, about the difference in using the "more is different" capabilities of the web to lead students to questions not answers.
Krissi, as for you concern about not having StorySpace: I think that the constructive nature of the assignment will bein your head when you conceived what you want to do and in the process of collaboration--knowing that you don't need to reduce your argument to a single linear line, but that you have a tool with which expres the mulitiplicity of your lines of thought in hypertextual format. That is, you can construct the hypetext f your ideas in an hypertextual environment, and similarly, the hypertext tool is constructive of your thinking. It helps to go back and forth, I agree, not to just plug it all in at the end. And if you think that is esential to have it in your possession, I'll distribute it. But it shouldn't be only possible to think and construct hypetextually when sitting in front of the screen.