Student Writers as Hypertext Users
To help combine new media with more traditional models of academic discourse, I ask my students to perform rhetorical and thematic readings of the class hypertext. I also have students test the usability of the site. The next student comment responds to this type of analysis:
"I find that hypertext makes the content easily accessible. However, the number of links and how each article is linked to another disrupts the flow of the articles. I would be reading one article and find myself clicking on a link to another page that discusses a different topic. Even if I switch back to the article I am reading, my focus on the subject is somewhat dispersed. Also, because of the nature of the formatting, I found myself skimming through the text as a habit from reading internet articles during my free time."
This type of student comment is an important issue to discuss in class because the reading of a class hypertext helps to reveal the different ways new media may affect the ways we read, write, and think. Furthermore, this student’s comment concerning the dispersal of the subject does bring into play the postmodern notion that new forms of communication are transforming our notions of subjectivity and culture. As I argue in my book, Integrating Hypertextual Subjects, new computer technologies feed into the multi-tasking, multi-media, and multicultural (Cooper, 1999) foundations of contemporary society and subjectivity that are so prevelant in my students' comments. However, many critics have argued that new communication technologies also help to give the reader a stronger sense of control over language and discourse (Sosnoski, 1991).
Many student comments also reveal that while they enjoy writing zines and using new media, they are also afraid of losing the more traditional methods of education and composing. The next student expresses this digital divide between new media and traditional educational conceptions of writing:
"This idea of the class hypertext is good in the sense that it allows students to view different topics individually and send their analysis to the professor easily and quickly. In addition, the professor does not have to carry a load of work to his office. But it just scares me how now we are taking quizzes online for chemistry and doing English assignments on the Internet. The idea that technology is taking over traditional ways of doing things just scares me!"
From a pedagogical standpoint, we can define this cultural and historical opposition between old modern media and postmodern new media by distinguishing between the modern stress on individualism, universal rationalism, mass culture, and disciplinarity, and the postmodern emphasis on interactivity, cultural relativism, collaboration, and interdisciplinarity (Lanham, 1994). Thus, the postmodern new media approach to higher education pushes us to see knowledge as being socially constructed through shared acts of collaboration (Cooper, 1991) that cut across disciplinary borders, and these shared acts of learning place all education in a situation that is sensitive to historical and cultural contexts. In other words, instead of seeing knowledge as being universal, fixed, and controlled by a single authority (the teacher) in the classroom, postmodern compositionists tend to see knowledge as an ever-changing effect of culture and discourse. Moreover, this postmodern notion of the social construction of knowledge production (Rifkin, 2000; Gergen, 1991) also challenges the modern idea that writing represents a neutral transmission of meaning; rather, from a postmodern perspective, writing is itself a learning process that helps to transform the knower and the object of knowledge.
Technology, Writing, and Higher Education
Student Writers as Hypertext Users
Changing Conceptions of Academic Writing
Home and School Models of Literacy