HYPERTEXT AS A CULTURAL RESOURCE
Although the creation of electronic hypertext is a recent event, its cultural
antecedents are easy to trace since all scholarship and knowledge in the past
has also proceeded through a hypertext architecture, though at a more primitive
level of technology. The recognition that human knowledge is created through
the connection of ideas has been expounded in detail by Aristotle,
Swedenborg, Locke, Hume, John Dewey, Freud, Skinner and many other
psychologists and educators. Scholarly writing and research is traditionally
distinguished from popular and other writings in terms of the required presence
of bibliographic citations, whose function it is to interlink similar
work for the purpose of comparison, exposition, and objectivity.
The interlinking of information has received a central focus in on-line catalogs [5}
through keyword searching, a procedure that links entries in fields by means of
common tags (or anchors). Cross-referencing in subject heading lists (or 'see
also' connections) are linkage devices that bring together text from
independent sources. Subject bibliographies provide lists on related topics
that allow access to independently published sources. In the print medium,
links have been created within documents using various approaches, including
quotations, citations, reproductions, and footnotes. All of these devices
share the function of linking some text or reproduction to some other text or
reproduction. When previously unlinked ideas are linked through hypertext knew
knowledge comes into existence, new products and resources, possibly a
discovery or invention.
MINING HYPERTEXT AS A LEARNING RESOURCE
Since the recent advent of electronically linked multimedia hypertext on
the World Wide Web, the creation of knowledge through interlinking ideas or
information has taken on new significance for culture, education, and commerce.
It is now instructionally feasible as a routine activity to build learning
communities in an academic setting. Course-integrated use of the Internet
opens up new educational possibilities. Students can now produce Web documents
with hotlinks to other students and to whatever the instructor's assignments
direct them. The electronic hypertext environment, accessed through the
information superhighway, provides the medium in which students can practice
authorship, critical analysis, and social development through community
integration.
A critical factor in the success of a cyberspace learning community is the
ability of the instructor to create community-building forces within the class.
A group of people who are given a joint task to accomplish can find motivation
in group solidarity or competitiveness. Because few can accomplish complex
tasks on their own, a socially organized framework of mutual assistance needs
to be put in place so that no one is left behind in failure and embarrassment.
A visible communal product to which all contribute, and with which all can
identify, needs to be developed and perceived as the outcome of their labor and
effort. In short, the cybercommunity created within an academic
context needs to be real, believable, and authentic. To the extent that it has
these properties, to that extent the virtual learning community [6]will be
effective. The educational experiment described here will be examined to see
how these community-building forces were built up to maintain effective
cybersocialization practices, and what instructional management
mechanisms need to be maintained in order to foster the growth of a cyberspace
learning community.
CREATING THE GENERATIONAL VIRTUAL SUPERDOCUMENT
The Set-up
Students enrolled in a psychology seminar discover at their first class meeting
that all course assignments are to be submitted online through the creation of
Web documents. Only rarely can a student be found who has ever made use of the
Internet or performed related activities such as file transfer or electronic
mail. Almost all are at the level of feeling comfortable doing their homework
on a word processor and doing minimal file management on a desktop computer.
The technical tasks expected of them that are briefly described by the
instructor seem unrealistic and unreachable to most of the students:
uploading, ftp, e-mail, telnet, HTML, emacs editor, UNIX file management. They
are given a login account on the Web server of the College and the address of
several campus computer labs from which they can have access. Only about ten
percent of the students use a dial-in modem.
Students receive no formal instruction in accessing the Internet or creating
their Web documents. All Internet instruction is handled through online
instructions and in the regularly scheduled class meetings. Typically, about
half of the two-hour class is devoted to handling Internet problems and the
other half is made up of activities relating to course content. The
face-to-face class discussions serve as a forum for venting frustrations and a
source of mutual assistance. Weekly assignments published on-line on the
instructor's Home Page force a certain pace that students must maintain or else
fall behind, which carries a point penalty towards the course grade. The
pressure students feel during the first four weeks is reportedly intense. This
anxiety is expressed orally in class, on e-mail to the instructor, and in
comments students make in their written reports.
Two specific instructional techniques were used to assist students in
overcoming technophobia, resistance, and the impulse to quit. One method was
to encourage students to help one another. For example, a discouraged student
in panic would be teamed up with another student who was more skilled and
confident, and they would spend one or more sessions together in the lab.
Another student from a prior semester volunteered to be at the lab during
certain announced hours so as to provide one-on-one help. The second method
was to have students give oral presentations on the content of student
self-witnessing reports from prior semesters. This feature was called
"studying the generational curriculum." Reading, presenting and discussing the
self-witnessing reports of former students facilitated their understanding of
what is expected of them and allowed them to vent their emotions since these
reports are full of desperate descriptions of being in panic. Best of all, the
generational student reports are almost invariably up beat; they end in success
and enthusiasm, thus, a complete turnabout. The generational self-witnessing
reports are the proof that (a) they are not alone in feeling the desperation of
infoshock and (b) they have overcome and reached success, so therefore
they can too.
Focus on Learning Skills
The skills students acquire through this course-integrated cybercommunity fall
into three categories: (a) educational networking skills; (b) information
literacy skills; and (c) scientific or scholarly skills. In terms of
networking skills, students achieve the following significant steps
by midterm: (1) they stop feeling panicky or depressed and start
feeling enthusiastic and self-confident; (2) they learn to use e-mail and a
UNIX editor (either emacs or Pico); (3) they learn to upload their assignments
from their word processing diskette and to translate their text into HTML
format; (4) they learn to use Netscape and Lynx and to search the Internet
through gopher indexes, Veronica searches, Web directories, and WebCrawler
searches; (5) they create a Home Page on the World Wide Web giving access to
their weekly assignments which by now averages about 40 screens with 50
hotlinks and a hundred anchors.
In terms of information literacy skills, students practice the following
throughout the semester: (a) translating their problems into written form so
that they can receive a solution in e-mail form; (b) following complex online
instructions and executing the sequential steps required; (c) finding
information in a hypertext environment; (d) strengthening one's courage and
resolve in becoming a perpetual but successful novice in the ever-changing
kaleidoscope of information systems. In terms of scientific and scholarly
skills, students are engaged in the following: (a) learning to write in
public and for an interactive purpose; (b) learning to perform critical
analyses of other people's writings; (c) maintaining an intellectual presence
or voice within a generational learning community through citizenship
activities in cybercommunity, e.g., maintaining a Home Page on the World Wide
Web and acting as host to cybernaut browsers both inside and outside the
learning community; (d) making individual contributions to the building of a
virtual superdocument and thus meeting the responsibility of being a published
author; (e) learning to express one's intellectual position on pre-assigned
topics.
The Weekly Assignments
The detailed weekly pacing of student work is essential to maintain
instructional control and organization of materials. Homework for the first
few weeks directed students to engage in acquiring basic skills such as logging
on, using communications software, sending e-mail, and navigating the
information superhighway through Lynx, Netscape, and Gopher. The second phase
directed students to upload their reports and to use the online editor to
insert HREF links to other students' reports. A major effort is required to
help students gain an understanding of relative and absolute URL paths, and
this topic comes up at every class meeting until midterm and beyond. The
interlinking of student reports is made part of the assignment every week.
Students access each other's Web documents through the instructor's Home Page
and make a link from one paragraph in their report to a paragraph in someone
else's report. Students are free to choose who they link to and what about.
Mutual two-way links are strongly encouraged so that students get into the
habit of searching other people's documents, and when they find that someone
has made a link to their report, they then go to that anchored paragraph in
their own report and create a link to the other student's anchored paragraph.
As depicted in Fig.1, the instructor's weekly homework assignment document
occupies a central role in the cybersocialization effort by which students
become functioning members of the cybercommunity. This document serves as the
medium for announcements, instructions, and advice. It introduces new content,
re-interprets old content, and responds to ongoing concerns and themes in the
cybercommunity. The instructor's document contains encouragement to the class
as a whole, but individuals are also singled out for meritorious contributions
and awards (or bonus point give aways) are announced.
The Expanding Superdocument
By the end of the semester, there may be as many as 100 links in any student's
Web document, connecting themselves to others through some idea expressed in a
specific paragraph. In one semester of 16 weeks, two interlinked classes of 20
students each, typically produce a total of 12 megabytes of text containing
about 8,000 links. Each semester a new crop of students peruse the previous
generation documents and write their own documents interlinked with each other
and with the prior semesters. The interlinked reports within and across
generations constitutes an ever expanding virtual superdocument. Figure 1
presents a conceptual representation of this hypertext document.
New students form a fresh cohort each semester. The first generation leaves
behind its interlinked reports. The second generation works itself through the
existing linked documents and creates their own. The third generation goes
through the first and second, and leaves its own. The hypertext superdocument
keeps expanding as each generation processes the previous one and adds its
layer to the top. Throughout this community-building process the instructor's
weekly homework assignments play a central directive function. Reading,
discussing, annotating, and linking are the student activities that the
instructor needs to guide. Feedback , evaluation and correction are essential
for learning to continue. Keeping up with this task has required a major
investment of time on the part of the instructor. However, this kind of
repeated close inspection of student work and contact with their ideas has been
for the instructor a source of surprise, delight and deep satisfaction.
The Virtual Size of a Hypertext Superdocument
Is a hypertext superdocument real? Can it be identified through the physical,
URL locations of a collection of files on some Web server's computer disk? Of
course, the physical files are a pre-requisite condition for the superdocument
to exist, but the physical files do not define the hypertext superdocument.
Rather, one can say that its existence is virtual, in the sense that its
hypertext links create a cyberspace highway whose existence is beyond the
physical files and cannot be defined by them. The World Wide Web as a whole,
defined as thousands of interlinked Home Pages across the Internet, is itself a
very large virtual superdocument that can be traversed in a different way by
millions of cybernaut browsers in an endlessly variable patterns. The number
of possible ways of traveling the Internet is endless and its size may be
called virtual infinity. Each browsing session has the potential of
uncovering new information, new connection of ideas, new ways of linking
concepts.
The more a link is traveled the greater its value as an information resource.
The more links exist in a hypertext document, the richer is the document's
cultural value. How can one calculate the virtual (rather than actual) size of
a hypertext superdocument? One approach might be to treat links as a
multiplicative factor functioning to magnify the potential traffic on the
information superhighway. For instance, the first generation of 40 students in
this cyberspace learning community produced 12 megabytes of disk space and
created a total of 4,000 links. Multiplying these two figures we obtain the
value of 48,000 megabyte-links or megalinks as the size of the
cyberspace created by Generation 1. This is an incomplete formulation since it
assumes that all links are equivalent, which in fact they are not, as will be
now shown.
STRUCTURAL PROPERTIES OF HYPERTEXT LINKS
IN A CYBERSPACE LEARNING COMMUNITY
Three categories of links are observable in the superdocument: within
each generation, across generations, and links to the outside world. Further,
the links within each category there may be either two-way or one-way.
Two-way links are mutual or reciprocal. That is, a browser may see a paragraph
in a file belonging to student A, with a link to student B. Traversing that
link brings the browser to student B's paragraph where a link is found to the
paragraph in student A. The mutuality of two-way links enhances the
information value of links. Two-way links are possible across generations if
there is a mechanism in place for inserting links backwards in time, that is,
from generation 1 to generation 2, and so on. These links may be called
anachronistic since they allow a cybernaut who is browsing in generation
1 or 2 to take jumps to generations 3 or 4, and so on.
Anachronistic links are created by the instructor as part of the maintenance
requirements of the generational superdocument. This is a labor intensive
effort that requires regular scanning of the current student files to identify
one-way links that may have been created to prior generations, and then
creating reciprocal anachronistic links in the older documents to the new.
Without the provision for creating anachronistic links, the older parts of the
superdocument would gradually die and become an archive or database. These
have their proper function, and several types of archived student files have
been included in the overall Web documents available to the students. It is
necessary to create anachronistic links in order to maintain the virtual
superdocument as a live cultural resource for knowledge creation in a
generational cybercommunity.
In our educational experiment so far, we note the occurrence of seven types of
links in this cyberspace learning community:
Within generations:
1) Two-way links between two students or a student and the instructor
2)One-way links from one student to another student or the instructor
Across generations:
3)One-way links (created by students) from student X in one generation to
student Y in some prior generation
4)Two-way anachronistic links between student X in one generation to student Y
in some prior generation
5)One-way anachronistic links (created by the instructor) from student M in one
generation to student N in some subsequent generation
To outside world:
6)One-way link from a member of the cyberspace learning community to the
outside World Wide Web
7)Two-way links between a member of the learning community and the outside
world (this requires outside world cooperation).
An additional possibility exists, namely one-way links from the outside world
to a student in the cyberspace learning community. However this would be
difficult to locate, given the enormous size of the World Wide Web
cyberspace.
RESEARCH ISSUES
Maintenance requirements of the hypertext superdocument
As the number of generations grows the virtual superdocument grows at a certain
rate which is either fixed or variable. Figure 1 currently depicts a model
that assumes a constant amount of increment with each generation. This means
that as the superdocument grows in megalinks size the cyberspace thins out, in
the sense of less links per unit of text. This is because the number of links
created by each generation is limited by the semester hours available. For a
three-credit college course, we can assume an average limit of around 100
links per student per semester with approximately 30 typed pages of contributed
text. As the size of the text grows generationally more and more links would
have to be created by each new generation in order to maintain the same
density. But this is not a realistic expectation. Hence the density of the
cyberspace will tend to thin out. Continuing observation of the growing
superdocument will reveal how it grows in terms of size, density, and shape.
Methods need to be discovered for ways of maintaining the superdocument up to
date and of creating anachronistic two-way links where appropriate.
Psychological properties of hypertext links in a cyberspace learning
community
Analysis of links must include the question of what motivates a member of a
cyberspace learning community to create a particular link. This may require
content analysis of the text containing a link as well as the text to which the
link refers. Additionally, members may be interviewed or prompted by a
questionnaire requesting information on the motive for creating a particular
link. So far five types of motives have been observed for creating links:
1) Wanting to facilitate browsing or navigation
2) Providing a topical index for identifying live issues and for easier access
to them
3) Wanting to entertain browsers by providing access to curiosities or fun
things to see or do
4) Seeking confirmation or validation for one's opinions or feelings by linking
to another person's comments or acts
5) Illustrating or proving one's point by linking to other data or
information.
Natural vs. Artificial Superdocuments
The growth of a virtual superdocument within a generational cybercommunity can
be viewed and studied as an anthropological and ethnolinguistic phenomenon.
Its study and analysis over time leads to new knowledge about
community-building forces that can be useful to cyberspace managers who are
participants and leaders in cybercommunities such as system administrators,
discussion group managers, Home Page architects, electronic mall owners,
Internet trainers, and instructors of cyberspace learning communities.
However, the validity of data obtained from the analysis of a superdocument may
depend on the authenticity of the cybercommunity that produced it.
A natural superdocument is the virtual outcome of the social and
psychological exchanges transacted by members of a cybercommunity as part of
their normal and regular membership activity over time. The virtual
superdocument discussed in Fig. 1 is being produced by generations of college
students, with semester-cohorts of 40 students, and 16 weeks of activity per
semester, and a real environment made up of course credits, homework
assignments, and class discussions. The assignments involve both the
production of scholarly text ("weekly lab reports on your Web document") and
the critical annotation of the work of other students ("comment on their work
and make links to their paragraph"). The text they write and the links they
create are thus valid data for anthropologists and students of human
behavior.
An artificial superdocument, on the other hand, is produced by one or
more indexers or publishers who create interconnected text collections on the
basis of their subject content using keywords and cross-references to
facilitate searching, navigating, teaching, vending, entertaining, and so on.
The virtual universe of gopher directories on the Internet is an instance of an
artificial superdocument. Another artificial superdocument is the interlinked
network of WWW indexes and directories ("Other places to visit" or "My favorite
bookmarks" etc.). No doubt future research will study the differences between
artificial and natural superdocuments.
REFERENCES
[1] J. Conklin, "Hypertext: An Introduction and Survey," Computer, vol 20, pp. 17-41, Sept. 1987.
[2] N. Yankelovitch, B. Haan, N. Meyerowitz, and S. Drucker, "Intermedia: The Concept and the Construction of a Seamless Information Environment," IEEE Computer, vol. 21, pp. 81-96, Jan. 1988.
[3] M. Mohageg, "The Influence of Hypertext Linking Structures on the Efficiency of Information Retrieval," Human Factors, vol. 34, pp. 351-367, June, 1992.
[4] F. Halasz, "Reflections on NoteCards: Seven Issues for the Next Generation," Communications of the ACM, vol. 31, pp. 836-852, July, 1988.
[5] W. Horton, Designing and Writing Online Documentation, New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1990.
[6] H. Rheingold, The Virtual Community, New York: HarperPerennial, 1994.
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here for Picture
Figure 1. The expanding generational virtual hypertext superdocument in a
cybersapce learning community.