Preparation of this report was supported under the Educational Research Development
Center Program (Grant number R117G10015)
as administered by the Office of Educational Research and Improvement, U.S. Department
of Education. The findings and opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect
the position or policies of the sponsoring agency.
The Multimedia and Literature Teaching and Learning project was initiated to explore the potential of multimedia and hypermedia for supporting the response-based teaching and learning of literature. Response-based approaches to literature teaching and learning regard readers as active meaning makers whose personal experiences affect their interpretations of literary works. Response-based practice likewise emphasizes the reader and the constructive reading process. There are many reasons to believe hypermedia might provide a promising enhancement to text for supporting response-based pedagogies; and indeed, many contemporary scholars believe that it is ideally suited for such purpose.
The project's initial phase involved the development of criteria for considering hypermedia from a response-based perspective and their application to a critical review of commercial software. A group of ten graduate students developed eight evaluative categories which fell roughly into three groupings -- technical were concerns, response-based considerations, and classroom issues. Applications for review were identified through a detailed search of listings dedicated to hypermedia materials. Fifty-four multimedia/hypermedia literature programs and/or program series were identified, and forty-five were acquired from their publishers and reviewed. The applications thusly acquired were evaluated by twenty-five graduate students. Findings from the review revealed that commercial hypermedia literature applications were moderately priced, designed for commonly available platforms, technically quite good, and related to works commonly taught in elementary and high school classrooms. They did not, however, embody response-based pedagogies. In particular, average ratings on response-based criteria for the applications we reviewed were 4.69 (on a scale of 1 to 10), while the same software packages averaged 7.26 on technical criteria relating to multimedia design.
The project's second phase accordingly involved the development of prototype applications for supporting literature teaching and learning at both the elementary and secondary/post-secondary school levels designed to address what seemed to be conspicuously lacking in commercial software, namely, support for student responses. The elementary level application, Kidspace was designed around the metaphor of a universe populated by individual students' worlds. Students can "visit" each other's worlds as readers, but they can only create (author) in their own. Each world supports a variety of personal spaces in which students are encouraged to recursively construct, explore, write, reflect, and otherwise express their feelings about their own and others' work. The secondary/post-secondary application, the Beats is an open-ended program which is centered on the texts of the major Beat authors, which contains hypermedia tools designed to support student (and teacher) discourse and reflection about literary works. These include the Personal Notes tool, the Notes tool, the Links tool, and Media tools.
The project's third phase involved pilot testing the prototypes in actual classroom settings. Kidspace was tested in six elementary classrooms chosen to reflect varying grade levels, student populations, and learning environments. Major findings from the pilot involved the highly motivating nature of the program, its ability to uniquely support student responses, and the importance of epistemological and technologically complementary classroom environments for these capabilities to be realized. A class of twenty-six undergraduates enrolled in a creative writing course at a community college in upstate New York participated in the initial piloting of the Beats. Both the instructor and the students' responses to the Beats were extremely positive. Both believed that the program and its response-based tools offered a unique and interesting environment in which to explore literature. Indeed, data collected from the pilot study suggests that students on-line responses were both quantitatively and qualitatively different from their regular classroom responses.
As schools see more and more students coming to the learning process equipped with predispositions and skills for electronic communications, it becomes more and more clear that issues surrounding the use of such new media need to be addressed. 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.
 Background
 Critical Review of Commercial Applications
 Development and Piloting ofKidspace
 Development and Pilot-Testing ofthe Beats
 Discussion
 References
|
 |