As a university professor, how do you use the new media and hypertext with your students?
David Kolb - I’ve used several kinds of media in my classroom. I am teaching a philosophy course after all so I am trying to encourage discussion and interaction and I do not have huge amounts of information to present. I do not have to talk about the whole civilisation of Greece; I want them to concentrate on certain texts of Plato. I will send them to the WWW to get information. I have used e-mail, many of the teachers in my college do, we set up e-mail discussion groups and demand that the students send e-mail to everyone else in the class once or twice a week, commenting on each other’s work. You can also use newsgroups, Usenet newsgroups, which provide ways for students to comment on other students in a rather structured, hierarchical manner. I have experimented further with actual hypertext.
I’ve done it in two ways. One is to use the program Storyspace because it allows you to make comments in many directions and to have a map of what is going on, what is linked to what. It works very well, if the students can use the program. But the program is not terribly easy to learn, especially for students who are not familiar with hypertext structures. I’ve used that in Greek philosophy mostly to have students comment on some texts and on other students’ comments on the texts. I think I’ve thought of a way to do that on the Web using forms but I am still working on that. I’ve also simply offered students the chance to write hypertexts instead of writing normal terms papers in the classes.
And finally I’ve taught courses specifically about hypertext where that is what the students do, write hypertexts of various kinds. My experience at the moment is that if the student is offered a chance to write a hypertext term paper in a course which is about something else, Greek philosophy or philosophy of art, mostly they will not take the opportunity. They already know how to write term papers; they are very busy; they do not want to take on the extra burden of learning how to do the hypertext. They will do e-mail because they are quite used to that and they’ll do things with the Web, but Web authorship is a little more difficult.
But in the class which is specifically about hypertext the students get very excited and they are quite willing to devote themselves to it, usually in a fairly literary fashion. There we get a lot of participation and considerable invention, and since we’re all learning together and there are no fixed rules, I am not quite the teacher in the same way, and that is very refreshing.
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