Kolb and autobiography

- There is a sort of literary genre of hypertext which seems very widespread, which is that of autobiography or writing personal Web pages. Do you think this kind of autobiographical hypertext writing has some particular features which deserve attention? Do you think it changes somehow the way we can write about ourselves?

David Kolb - I think it has. It is not so much the hypertext as the fact that anyone can publish on the Web, that everyone has a printing press, as it were, and therefore can make their life available. What the hypertext then adds is the ability to add pictures, to quickly write, and change quickly if need be, and to produce fairly good visual effects without too much effort. Although not all Web pages with personal autobiography have such good effects. There is another thing involved: if you look at literary hypertext, even if published on CD-ROM or disk and therefore rather incomplete in themselves, you see that autobiography often shows up. Not necessarily that the story or the characters are autobiographical, but rather that the author inserts autobiographical segments which you may find your way to. In one hypertext story called Woe by Michael Joyce you suddenly find yourself reading something that says: "Well, I am writing this at 2 o’clock in the afternoon on a Macintosh computer. It is a very cold day and I’ve been writing since 9 in the morning... ". Suddenly you have the author, truly or not, bringing in an autobiographical element. It is very tempting. I have found myself when writing hypertext putting in a few self-reflections questioning the form of what I was writing. It is a move which seems very natural because you can always link off in different directions. I think the other attraction of the Web, and I’ve seen this when my students write autobiographical things, is the feeling that what you do is suddenly available to a very large audience. Perhaps not too many people will see it but it is available. It is not like a personal diary which you keep or even something which you make to show your parents or your fellow classmates; it is open and that takes on either solemnity or a sense of fun, depending how you do it, which can be quite stimulating.

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts

-PHONEREADER Library - - Jean-Philippe Pastor

Personal homepages for hypertextual thought

In our program we have Web surfing . Do you have some Websites that you could suggest as interesting to visit during Web surfing and can you also tell us something about the Website on which you work with your students and where material of your students is located.

David Kolb - If we’re thinking about hypertext, the two Websites that come to my mind are actually personal homepages. One is the personal homepage of Stuart Moulthrop who teaches at the University of Baltimore and the other is the homepage of Michael Joyce at Vassar College. Both of those are interesting because they connect to essays or texts written by those people, who are both fine theorists and writers, but also because they have many links from those pages to other hypertext-related Websites.

I think those would be good starting points. As to what I’ve done with my students, I’ve created on the Web a little thing called the Bates Hypertext Archive, which is simply a place to put some student works and a bit of my own which seemed to me to be worth putting on the Web. Most of the material there has been transferred from the program Storyspace, which allows you to construct more complex linkage than is easy to do on the Web. As a result, there is some awkwardness in the Web production of the pages, but by and large it is OK. What you’d find there are three or four "fictions" or short stories written by students and also a link to a site of students in a philosophy of art class - quite a large class. I asked the students to go out onto the Web and find sites related to art - paintings, sculpture, architecture - and write reviews of those sites.

So I have several hundred reviews, typically a paragraph or so, written by these students, purely their own opinion, about these various sites, and there is a link to the site with each review. Some of the reviews are very fine, some of them are not. Some of them are quite insightful. But it was an attempt to allow the students to have a voice and to have a fairly simple way of constructing something, because we were able to post the reviews without too much difficulty and it did not require the students themselves to compose a Web page. That is an example of another thing you could do. Given that you’ll probably have some students who know something about Web construction, one of the best ways to involve students is to have a common project - it allows them to learn from one another. Have them create a Website or a portion of a Website that relates to the material of the class or to some project that the students are working on. You could even let them define it to some extent. One of the things that is on the Website, for instance, is something some students did last spring. They had to break into groups of three or four and decide on a Web project and create it. One group did a project on the worst things they could find on the Web. Another one did a guide to college, things the administration doesn’t want you to know, and so forth.

So you are getting people to create. It doesn’t have to be enormous but they learn a tremendous amount and they learn from one another.

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts -

PHONEREADER Library - - Jean-Philippe Pastor

Autobiographical hypertext

- There is a sort of literary genre of hypertext which seems very widespread, which is that of autobiography or writing personal Web pages. Do you think this kind of autobiographical hypertext writing has some particular features which deserve attention? Do you think it changes somehow the way we can write about ourselves?

David Kolb - I think it has. It is not so much the hypertext as the fact that anyone can publish on the Web, that everyone has a printing press, as it were, and therefore can make their life available. What the hypertext then adds is the ability to add pictures, to quickly write, and change quickly if need be, and to produce fairly good visual effects without too much effort. Although not all Web pages with personal autobiography have such good effects. There is another thing involved: if you look at literary hypertext, even if published on CD-ROM or disk and therefore rather incomplete in themselves, you see that autobiography often shows up. Not necessarily that the story or the characters are autobiographical, but rather that the author inserts autobiographical segments which you may find your way to. In one hypertext story called Woe by Michael Joyce you suddenly find yourself reading something that says: "Well, I am writing this at 2 o’clock in the afternoon on a Macintosh computer. It is a very cold day and I’ve been writing since 9 in the morning... ". Suddenly you have the author, truly or not, bringing in an autobiographical element. It is very tempting. I have found myself when writing hypertext putting in a few self-reflections questioning the form of what I was writing. It is a move which seems very natural because you can always link off in different directions. I think the other attraction of the Web, and I’ve seen this when my students write autobiographical things, is the feeling that what you do is suddenly available to a very large audience. Perhaps not too many people will see it but it is available. It is not like a personal diary which you keep or even something which you make to show your parents or your fellow classmates; it is open and that takes on either solemnity or a sense of fun, depending how you do it, which can be quite stimulating.

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts

-PHONEREADER Library - - Jean-Philippe Pastor