DISCUSSION
The results of our survey of commercially available hypermedia literature applications
revealed that while such programs are generally of high technical quality and linked
to works commonly taught in schools, the pedagogical approaches taken are not response-based. Programs designed for elementary students commonly equated literature education
with reading instruction; programs designed for high school populations generally
adopted a traditional, text-centered approach.
What was conspicuously absent from commercial applications at both levels was support
for student responses. We therefore created two prototype application, Kidspace
, for students in grades one through six, and the Beats
, for high school and college students, whose primary focus was to provide explicit
on-line support for student responses to text. Our preliminary pilot testing of
these applications suggests that they can uniquely enhance response-based teaching
and learning given complementary instructional and technological environments.
Judith Langer (1990) breaks literary understanding into four stances people take when
engaged in the reading process -- being out and stepping in, being in and moving
through, stepping out and rethinking what one knows, stepping back and objectifying
the experience. Ideally, hypermedia literature applications should support each of these
stances. One way to summarize our findings concerning multimedia and literature
teaching and learning is to examine the features of hypermedia, both currently commercially employed and potentially available (as demonstrated in the pilots), with respect
to each stance. This is done in the sections which follow.
Being Out and Stepping In
In this stance, readers make initial contacts with the genre, content, structure,
and language of the text by using prior knowledge and surface features of the text
to get sufficient information to begin to build an envisionment. With literature,
readers try to make initial acquaintance with the characters, plot, and setting, and how
they interrelate. They use information from the text in concert with their background
knowledge to get enough information to "step in."
This first stance, then, involves readers being drawn into the text world, and it
is where the hypermedia literature applications currently commercially available
are strongest. They invite access. Interactive graphics, sound, and video not only
engage students in ways text alone cannot, but offer alternative, concrete representations
of characters, plot, and setting that bring these in focus for students who might
otherwise struggle to envision them. In addition, nonlinear links to background
information concerning these and such literary elements as genre, structure, and language increase
understanding and accessibility.
Indeed, evaluators who observed students using commercial hypermedia programs were
very impressed by its power to draw students into a literary work. They report that
the use of such features as interactive pages and links to video enactments of text
passages encouraged an exploratory approach to literature. Many also found that the
use of such programs generated interest in and enthusiasm for the print versions
of the works they explored; that students were not only interested in comparing print
with hypermedia versions of a work as they used the latter, but that they searched out these
other works by the same authors on their own time.
In our pilot studies of both Kidspace
and the Beats
, we were consistently impressed by the capacity of even our homemade hypermedia to
draw students into the exploration of literature. Indeed, the response-based features
of the prototypes we designed seemed particularly effective in this regard. Students (and teachers) who had previously expressed little or no interest in multimedia,
were very enthusiastic about the use of Kidspace
and the Beats
. The result suggests that support for on-line student responses can be highly motivating
as well as pedagogically sound.
Being In and Moving Through
In this stance, readers are immersed in the text world, using both text knowledge
and background knowledge to develop meaning. They take new information and immediately
use it to go beyond what they already understand, asking questions about motivation,
causality, and implications. This stance, then, involves immersion in the text world,
hence, it is an arena where a printed text is probably superior to hypermedia.
Indeed, in general, the hypermedia literature programs currently commercially available
are weak on this stance. They make little or no provision for students to develop
meanings around texts. Many high school applications have a "notes" feature which
provides a space where students or teachers can write comments or questions, but these
are not linked to the text and often not even linked to a particular "page" in a
document. Elementary school applications do not even provide space for "notes."
Another feature that might be considered useful is the open-ended questions integrated into
some programs. These prompt off-line student comments and reflections on the text,
but both the fact that student answers are completed off-line and the fact that neither
students nor teachers can enter their own questions tends to devalue such responses.
In this stance, hypermedia programs might best serve functions similar to reading
journals; that is, students might read from a printed text but link comments and
questions to text in hypermedia environments as they occur to them. Such usage will
have to wait, of course, until student access to computers improves. Until that time, students
might write comments and questions in reading journals and transfer them to hypermedia
applications when they are available. The use of hypermedia applications would then have an advantage over written reading journals to the extent that they encouraged
the linking of comments and questions to the text, and to the extent that they promoted
reflective public discourse around such links.
The pilot testing of our prototype applications, the Beats
in particular, suggests that response-based hypermedia can indeed do both. All students
in the class linked comments to texts in the Beats
and many began online conversations about them. Even more intriguing, in this pilot,
was the way the instructor used print-outs of these on-line responses to spark regular
class discussion. Such usage suggests a way we had not imagined in which hypermedia can be used to help students develop meaning about texts. It certainly deserves
further investigation.
Being In and Stepping Out
In this stance, readers use their text knowledge to reflect on personal knowledge.
They use what they read in text to reflect on their own lives, on the lives of others,
or on the human condition. Whereas the previous stance was primarily concerned with shared text knowledge and discourse around it, this stance is primarily concerned
with private knowledge and personal reflections. Ideally, hypermedia literature
applications should provide both public "discourse" spaces where students can question
and comment on the text as well as reflect on others' observations; and private "journal"
spaces where they can reflect on their own understandings without worrying about
others' opinions of these. None of the programs we reviewed did so. The creation
of such spaces thus became a major focus of the design of the prototypes.
Our pilot testing of the prototypes indicates that this stance can be very much enhanced
by appropriate use of hypermedia. Both the elementary and community college students
with whom we worked used them to develop personal meanings from texts, and did with little encouragement, beyond our expectations. The instructor who used the Beats
with his class was above all amazed and delighted at the range and personalized nature
of his students' responses, which typically began with initial comments concerning
the forms of the poems and moved to very personal responses relating the perceived
meanings of the verses to their own lives. Elementary students also found hypermedia
a safe environment for exploring personal meanings. This was well expressed by a
second grader who, when asked what she would like to do with the computer if she
could do whatever she wanted, wrote;
I would go inside the computer and live inside one of my stories.
Stepping Back and Objectifying the Experience
In this stance, readers distance themselves from the text world, reflecting on and
reacting to both the content and the experience. They objectify the text, judge it,
and relate it to other texts or experiences. This evaluation and generalization
is based on their notions of the specific genres as well as the content covered or the literary
experiences they have.
This stance is one in which readers relate the text to other texts and other experiences.
Here, then, the ideal functions for hypermedia to provide would be linking mechanisms
similar to those imagined by Vannevar Bush (1945) and described by Ted Nelson (1974, 1987) when he coined the term hypermedia
-- links that readers could create between what they were reading and other literary
texts and other media, links that could be annotated with text and graphics, perhaps
even sound and video. Other useful tools might be ones for plotting such literary
elements as story lines, themes, characters, setting, and imagery. None of the applications
we reviewed had such tools, and, course, we do not quite have such capabilities yet.
But experimental environments such as Intermedia
(Landow, 1992) and Story Space
(Bolter, 1991), and most especially the exponential growth of the World Wide Web,
indicate such capabilities are at our doorstep. Preliminary results from the pilots
showing tentative linking of texts suggest they would be well used.
As schools see more and more students coming to the learning process equipped with
skills and predispositions for electronic communications, it becomes more and more
clear that issues surrounding such new media need to be addressed. For example,
the assumption that ways of knowing, using, and understanding text are a consequence of print-based
literacy may need to be reconsidered. The findings of the "Multimedia and Literature
Teaching and Learning" project suggest that electronic media support unique and important forms of meaning making that need to be included into a necessarily broadening
view of literature study. Thus, while there is without question a need to design
and test hypermedia applications that are based on pedagogical theory (Jacobson,
1994), we believe there is also a need to re-examine pedagogical theory in light of
new media. Our studies also made it clear to us that there is an overwhelming need
to carefully examine the social and philosophical contexts in which new media are
used. Our future work will explore such directions.
