Reading Spaces and Orientations

by TMD

21 comments

1 Eva Ziltener { 10.09.09 at 3:53 pm }

Hi folks,

if anyone is looking to read the McGann article “The Rationale of HyperText” (on our related reading list) you can find it via this link:
http://web.archive.org/web/20041011135225/jefferson.village.virginia.edu/public/jjm2f/rationale.html

Cheers and Happy Thanksgiving!

Eva

2 Genevieve Brisson { 10.12.09 at 6:12 pm }

Hello all!

I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving day and got the chance to feast with family and friends!

Here’s my contribution on this week’s readings.

“As we May Think” by Vannevar Bush was captivating. I tried to picture myself reading this it in July 1945, and I wondered how people reacted to Bush’s ideas at the time. I believe I would have read them as someone in 1865 would have read “De la terre à la lune” by Jules Verne: as a piece of science fiction. It must have sounded so weird to his contemporaries. I decided to look for more information about Vannevar Bush. I quickly ended up on Wikipedia where I discovered a great article on him (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vannevar_Bush). From this hypertext, I followed a link to another hypertext on the Memex, then to another link to The Atlantic Monthly. Links are so useful. I was surprised to discover that The Atlantic was a literary magazine, publishing mostly poetry and short stories, but also “speculative articles that inspired the development of new technologies”. I would have thought that Vannevar Bush, being an engineer, would have chosen a scientific magazine to publish his text. Then again, it was not about research, but really speculative work.

From a pedagogical standpoint, I was interested by the experiments presented by Salmerón, Cañas, Kintsch and Fajardo, specifically when they discussed low knowledge and high knowledge readers interacting with texts and/or hypertexts. As a teacher, I was fascinated to learn that high knowledge readers learn more from a text or hypertext with a low coherence order than from a highly coherent one. It seems that high prior knowledge of the content allowed these readers to fill in the gaps, and they did not need a coherent structure to make sense of the information they were reading. In a class, we often over structure every lesson, trying to help our students. I have often seen well-informed students loose interest and zone out in class. Could it be that these students do not need that much structure and coherence?

Cheers
Geneviève

3 Eva Ziltener { 10.12.09 at 7:41 pm }

Hi Geneviève,

I, too, got caught up in Bush’s article.
He really was a visionary thinker able to conceive of ideas and tools such as the internet and google long before the age of computers. “Mere compression, of course, is not enough; one needs not only to make and store a record but also be able to consult it, and this aspect of the matter comes later. Even the modern great library is not generally consulted; it is nibbled at by a few.” (Bush, 1945)
As Bush predicted, the internet has made the great cheese of information available to so many more mice, and still we continue to nibble only on its corners. How amazing that we are still looking for solutions to problems Bush saw coming over fifty years ago.
I did have to chuckle a little when Bush kept telling us about the “roomful of girls” that would be putting data into computers in the future. In a way he was not that far off with that prediction either, as women do use computers at home and at school – and although they are not all secretaries, they do work techie jobs as programmers and computer scientists.

I’m glad you talked about the Salmerón, Cañas, Kintsch and Fajardo article. As I was reading, I sometimes got lost with some of the terminology, and had to go back to re-read definitions. (I’m still not quite clear on what they mean by “text-base”). However, overall, I felt that their findings made sense on an intuitive level. It would make sense that a learner with high prior knowledge would benefit from being able to test the limits of what she knows by having to fill in some gaps and “self-test”. Having your hand held may be reassuring at the beginning of a learning journey, but it does get embarrassing after a certain time.
I liked the idea that there were 3 types of learners in hypertext environments: Knowledge seekers, feature explorers and apathetic hypertext users. Did anyone else identify with a particular group? I found that I fell into all three categories. Hmmm…
One last thought/question: Is it ethical for researchers/educators to ask students to participate in their studies in exchange for credit? (This was the case with Salmerón, Cañas, Kintsch and Fajardo, who had students at the University of Colorado participate in their studies). I was curious as to whether the students were taking classes from one of the researchers, and if they had other options for obtaining credit?).

Okay, that’s a long enough post for now!
I hope you all enjoyed the long weekend!

Eva

4 Melanie Wong { 10.13.09 at 4:31 pm }

Hello everyone!

I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving! There is already so much discussion on here!

Like Eva and Genevieve, when I read the Bush article I was like wow! Very forward thinking for someone writing in 1945.

Salmerón, Cañas, Kintsch and Fajardo’s article was really interesting to me. Being an ESL elementary teacher, I am fascinated by articles that discuss reading research. In particular, I remember my students who struggled with reading. In fact, my last classroom of grade 5/6 students had reading levels from Kindergarten to grade 8. It was like teaching in a school house, most of the time. It was interesting to learn about the effects of prior knowledge on learning.

Eva, like you I was getting lost in the terminology too. I think you brought up some really valid points; especially your last point about whether or not it is ethical to offer credit in exchange for participation. I wonder the same thing.

In terms of Gerjets and Kirschner’s article, it got me thinking. The discussion on multimedia and hypermedia brought up some interesting points. In particular the article describes about how hypermedia provides non-linear information and how it provides learners with more choices. This is extremely powerful for the learner. I could see many of my past students benefitting from experiences such as this. The article also discusses the benefits and disadvantages of the shift in locus of control form the teacher to the student. However, from personal experience, I know that many educators resist technology just for this reason. In a traditional, teacher-directed classroom, I am not sure teachers would be happy with allowing their students to have such freedom. Even when I had informal conversations with other teachers in the past, many of them expressed their concerns surrounding this concept of “learner choice” to me. I think it is difficult for individuals to move from being the teacher to a facilitator. Hypermedia brings up a lot of implications for the classroom.

Melanie

5 Erin Garcia { 10.15.09 at 1:59 pm }

Peter, as you are my partner for the November 9th presentation, maybe you can help me out. Or anyone who already has this cased:

Has anyone else had difficulty accessing articles that are on the University of Florida’s site? I know it’s ahead of this week’s topic, but we had another article previously on this site and I remember it wasn’t too easy to find either. Here’s the article that escapes me: On the Nov 9 reading list: Douglas “How do I stop this thing?…” the link provided says it’s a pdf, but I keep getting redirected to the home page of the university (depsite VPN connection). grrrr. techno stress rising.

Peter, here’s my email so you can contact me about planning the presentation: egarcia AT nvsd44.bc.ca

6 Chelsey Hauge { 10.15.09 at 7:25 pm }

The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. It has other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is transitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature” (Bush, 1945).

This quote, from the article by Bush, seems to me as being very related to what Salmeron, Canas, Kitsch and Fajardo are discussing in their attempt to understand how information organized in nodes that the user navigates as opposed to linear text affect comprehension as well as related to the other article on hypermedia. Bush has just been talking about indexed library systems that (for many years, at least) organized information rather efficiently, though not in the same way that the brain organizes information. It strikes me that perhaps hyperlinks, and nodal storing of information allows access to information that is more web like and “in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain” (Bush, 1945).

This afternoon, Teresa spoke about her own work, and as I reviewed the readings I see so many links between her discussion about nodes of interlinked texts as the defining feature of e-literature. The environment allows for composite representations of narrative and story also, and Teresa spoke about the ways in which storytellers are layering mediums and story pieces on top of and around each other. What I found most interesting from her talk in the context of these readings and the quest to understand how cognition shifts in digital narrative environments was that in her study of a single group of people engaging with digital narrative, they found it difficult to read and engage with digital narrative but were drawn to the same modes of expression when writing digital narrative as they were critical of during the reading phase.

Its quite interesting that the Salmeron, Canas, Kitsch and Fajardo article is so preoccupied with how reading perception changes but does not address what happens to the users/learners when they engage in the creation of story themselves. In the other article, the authors Gerjets and Kirschner call one of the major advantages of hypermedia the learner-centered control over the medium and learning. They found most learners benefit from a structured environment, which coincides with what Alex Juhasz found when she ran an undergrad class in YouTube at Pitzer College. I still wonder, though, how cognition in these kinds of learning environments change- or do they?- when users are involved in both the learning/receiving/navigating of knowledge/story and the creation of knowledge and story in a digital space using digital tools. There is a point in the Gerjets and Kirschner article where they discuss if multimedia learning or learning in a multimedia/digital space changes the process involved in “acquiring a novel cognitive structure” or if learning in a multimedia space “also influences the type of cognitive structure.” While I have no answer to this question, I do think its worthwhile to think through literate culture as the building block here, and I can’t imagine imagining an answer without considering both the use of learning spaces and how those spaces and knowledge is created by learners/users.

I think we could also learn something significant here thinking about public spaces that are defined by digital writing or representing as learning spaces. While there is certainly learning happening in a classroom, the ways in which users acquire knowledge in unstructured, informal public spaces that are increasingly defined by hypertext and links and nodal structures/ways of organizing. I’ll continue to think about this and post more later, but I think it would be interesting to look at these ideas in relationship to the way youth post on FB or on YouTube, and how or if the learning occurring in that social space changes or shifts the way social learning is cognitively acquired, or if the cognitive structure acquired through multimedia play in these social spaces is distinct from that acquired through other kinds of play and sociality youth engage in in other spaces.

7 Jeff Miller { 10.15.09 at 8:08 pm }

Hi Erin,

Well, the Douglas article seems to have been taken down, but fortunately, the Internet Archive saw fit to save a copy for us! Try this link:

http://web.archive.org/web/20050405034123/http://web.nwe.ufl.edu/~jdouglas/stop.pdf

Best,
jeff

8 Chelsey Hauge { 10.15.09 at 8:40 pm }

Also, look at this!
http://www.yourworldoftext.com/

9 Janet Pletz { 10.16.09 at 11:14 am }

I have had a number of ‘aha’ moments this week. Reading the posts to date have again, ‘acted’ as conduits in strengthening my new learning and yes, even fledgling associations.

Chelsea, in your question referring to Gerjets and Kirschner article and their discussion on whether multimedia learning or learning in a multimedia/digital space changes the process involved in “acquiring a novel cognitive structure” or if learning in a multimedia space “also influences the type of cognitive structure?”… really holds my attention too. It would be interesting to know if research in neuropsychology, with the benefit of fMRI technology, has attempted to answer this question. It seems to me that this could be vital in our field of education. If multimedia/digital design is to be meaningful in classrooms and practice, it seems relevant to know how, or by what neural means, learners process and ‘build’ effective associations, comprehension, and storage capacities through digital mediums. Developing educative programs built on this knowledge may be the course of diligent attention. Is anyone aware of this kind of research?

The Salmeron and Canas article on reading strategies and comprehension of post secondary learners, reading a grade 12 equivalent expository text, invites further questions for me. I wonder if developmental, and skill dependent differences in learners (across ages and stages) would reflect similar results? The study provided me with another perspective in understanding the multiple conditions and variables we must account for in understanding comprehension through interactions with hypertext. Many of us have commented on the ethical question of credit for participation. Does anyone wonder about how, or if, this was factored into the analysis?

Teresa’s presentation yesterday really really!, helped me make meaning and connections with our readings this week. I have never perused or experienced e-literature before, and until yesterday, wasn’t aware that there is such an incredible body of work available (thinking of Bush…and Eva…my nibble is small)! On an emotional level, I was so engaged, particularly with thinking about the notions of ‘layering narrative’ and ‘thinking about continuity between digital and print media’. I grasped on to these two notions yesterday because they invite my imaginative and creative interest with autobiographical inquiry and poetry. Texts with/as composited, appropriation, mash-up, and bricolage, embodied metaphors… I’m in!

Jeff, Chelsea, Genevieve, and Eva…thanks for the links in your posts..

With care
Janet

10 Heidi { 10.16.09 at 11:16 am }

Oh no!!! I knew there was something that was taking place yesterday that I should have been attending…I would have liked to be at Teresa’s talk…:(

11 Emma Kivisild { 10.16.09 at 11:46 am }

i loved the Bush article.

quite aside from all the things it raises about information — well i guess because of all those things — it made me think about prediction or forward thinking. how did he manage to be so prescient? there were others with access to the same information, why did he manage to put it all together? AND have the courage to say it?

i think this has to do with neural pathways, with his own internal hyperlinks. where do these pathways come from? why do some people have the ability to put their ‘finger on the pulse,’ and others of us are not sure where the pulse is?

in this case, i am inclined to think that his ‘visionary’ abilities were probably the result of what articles call prior knowledge. and prior thinking. if you know some of the places the thinking can go, those links are open, you can start down the path and then are simi.llarl y open to other links along the way. learners are more confident choosing hyperlinks if they have seen similar links taking them somewhere (prior knowledge). with no prior knowledge, the pathways/links all seem a little uncertain. best to stick with the linear.

and i don’t want to discount how remarkable Bush’s sequence of paths is. i mean, you could not have taken just anybody and given them the same education and have them write that article in 1945. i think that he was able to see connections across many fields. this article is the result of a very happy (for me, anyway) intersection between his education and his thinking process.

why do some things stand the test of time? how do some people (Bush) know what will and won’t?

12 Erin Garcia { 10.16.09 at 12:05 pm }

Thanks Jeff! you’re super!

13 Emma Kivisild { 10.16.09 at 12:28 pm }

i don’t know about participating in studies for credit. it would colour their answers, but in what way? that would be an interesting study in itself. people do try to give the answers they think the researcher wants anyway.

14 Jeff Miller { 10.16.09 at 3:59 pm }

Hi everyone,

Like many others this week, I found the Bush article quite interesting to read, both for the prescience that he showed concerning future engagements with knowledge, as well as for the genuine excitement that comes through with his tone, as he considers advancements in technology that will, as Eva so wonderfully puts it, make the great cheese of information available to all of us mice!

I was intrigued, too, by the way in which Bush envisioned a machine capable of replicating his theory of associative thinking. Following his excitement over advances in photography (just imagine what he would think of today’s dry, digital cameras), he comes up with a mechanical, visual, cross-referencing fax machine, one that was mimetically capacious and able to efficiently store both photographic reproductions of all manner of documents, but also the links we constructed when linking them together. The memex sounds a little bit like the technology Terry Gilliam imagined for the movie Brazil, those funny little typewriters with old blotchy cathode ray tubes projecting images. Bush cannot help but envision the future of knowledge access using the recording processes and surfaces that he was familiar with. Teresa showed us an image in, I think, the second class with a great wheel set up in front of a reader to speed up the access a person would have to multiple texts. That wonder of technology was imagined at a time when mechanical models set the limits of imagination.

Bush’s vision does not extend at all to the realm of the digital (of course), though I did find it surprising that he did not consider the impact of radio waves and technologies that had dramatically impacted command and control relationships and the transmission of information. He would have been aware of the work of Norman Wiener and of the great leaps forward in radio-telegraphy as well as wireless communications. I wonder why the Memex did not have a radio transmitter in it to allow for communication with other Memexes. Had Bush pushed on that model a bit more, he would perhaps be credited with imagining a prototype for the Internet!

Jeff

15 Cory Theodor { 10.17.09 at 12:40 pm }

Here’s something you might be interested in:

http://freshmedia.me/

It’s a new media forum/exhibit/workshop on Saturday October 24th.

16 Heidi { 10.17.09 at 1:19 pm }

Another event people might be interested in:
http://www.interactivefutures.ca/if09.htm
It’s taking place at Emily Carr University of Art & Design, Nov. 19-21. I know that ECU students can get access for $50 but not sure about UBC students.

Interactive Futures (IF) is a forum for showing current tendencies in new media art as well as a conference for exploring ideas and research related to technology and art. IF supports a conference, keynote addresses, presentations, exhibitions, and performances. For IF’09, national and international presenters, performers and artists acknowledged for their research and production are invited to contribute to an expansion of knowledge within the thematic of “stereo”…

17 Heidi { 10.17.09 at 8:31 pm }

I’ll respond to some things posted above…

Similar to Janet, I am also really interested to know more about research in neuropsychology related to the learning process and multimedia/hypermedia instructional design. Educational researchers exploring technology and learning should be referring to studies in cognitive psychology; more attention to research across disciplines is necessary:

“…in order to achieve a more comprehensive body of knowledge on learning from multimedia and hypermedia, it seems necessary that the two research communities reviewed in this paper will continue to take notice of each other and to inspire each others theoretical and methodological approaches” (Gerjets & kirschner, p. 265).

In addition to acknowledging and referring to studies across disciplines, I think that this week’s readings attest to the need for collaboration across disciplines – for researchers to consider methodologies that fall outside the traditions of a narrow disciplinary model, embracing interdisciplinary methods that might be more relevant to contemporary life.

I totally agree with another point Janet made regarding reading level of students. It reminds us that the Salmeron et al (2005) article examined the comprehension of post secondary learners, a point that is only discussed at the beginning of the methodology section of each experiment, and not defined in the discussion of the results. I often question potential differences across ages/stages when studying relationships with digital technology in education, particularly because my own work deals with post-secondary students/teachers and fellow colleagues are mostly dealing with secondary and elementary students.

In response to Chelsea’s post, I have the same questions concerning research of students’ use of hypermedia, in that it seems necessary to examine not only how students “comprehend” text but how they “create” text/work in response to the hypertext they are asked to comprehend. What about the happenings in the “process” of learning through the act of making and collaborating? Recall based questionnaires, answering text-based questions and completing cued association tasks, (Salmeron et al, 2005) is one way to research “knowledge comprehension” but what kind of “understanding” are the authors examining? On page 3 of the Salmeron et al. article, the authors define text coherence as “the extent to which a reader is able to understand the relations between ideas in a text.” Does this study use methods that adequately analyze “understanding”? Gerjets and Kirschner (2009) discuss differences between meaningful learning and rote learning, citing Rothkopf (1970) as someone who advocatd the idea that learning depends less on what teachers or instructional designers plan or want to happen in learning situations than on what the learners themselves actually do (p. 254). I am still left wondering if the Salmeron et al study was looking at text comprehension from the viewpoint of meaningful learning or rote learning.

18 Chelsey Hauge { 10.18.09 at 11:51 am }

There’s been lots of great discussion about cognitive structure and how/if multimedia interaction shifts the “acquiring a novel cognitive structure” or if learning in a multimedia space “also influences the type of cognitive structure-” Janet and Heidi, I’ve really appreciated your posts.

I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit in the last few days, and I wonder if instead of “shifting” it, engagement with multimedia environment more releases ways of knowing and being that have always been present within our cognitive structure but that were preciously not expressed in differently mediated environments. I’m not sure I’m convinced engagement with multimedia actually makes us “acquire a novel cognitive structure,” and I’m not even sure I think the type of cognitive structure acquired through multimediated play is different than the kind developed without digital media. Regardless, cognitive structures are mediated through expression, whether than be language or writing or imagery.

Heidi, you write that it “seems necessary to examine not only how students “comprehend” text but how they “create” text/work in response to the hypertext they are asked to comprehend. What about the happenings in the “process” of learning through the act of making and collaborating?” I could not agree more. In thinking about this, I turn to the many networks in which youth are creating text and creating images and pieces about their lives, that I see as a response to their environments (which, I think, includes the hypertext they are asked to comprehend- and by hypertext, I would include information accessed through networks and hypertext outside of the classroom). So they are creating on YouTube, they are updating on FB, they are microblogging on Twitter. It seems all of these expressions and ways of being in the world are very oriented to the process of learning, and the act of making and collaborating—especially if we think about it in terms of youth writing themselves into existence in the world through engaging in digital socialities.

Like Janet, I’m interested, though in how learners “process and build effective associations, comprehension, and storage capacities through digital mediums.” My motivation in wanting to understand this is more related to an interest in how girls are mobile within digital spaces, and how they set those ideas into motion by “moving” imagery and by collaborative artistic practices that aim towards social justice. Learners who are engaging in this way in digital spaces, and who are building associations, comprehension, and storage capacity are doing so by way of participation in a networked public (boyd, 2008). In his article on publics and counterpublics, Warner writes that “The discourse of a public is a linguistic form from which the social conditions of its own possibility are in large part derived” (Warner, 2002, 75). It seems that maybe the “shift” in cognitive structure we were talking about is more like a shift in linguistic form and social conditions, which in turn release new possibilities and ways building effective associations, comprehension, and storage capacities. Anyways, I don’t know if any of that makes sense- just ideas and responses from the posts I read from you guys.

19 Heidi { 10.19.09 at 12:36 pm }

Not sure where to post this…
It’s a call for paper/projects for a Technology Learning & Thinking conference being held at UBC next year.
http://learningcommons.net/

20 Cory Theodor { 10.19.09 at 1:12 pm }

I was surprised to hear everyone’s positive enthusiasm in regards to Vannevar Bush’s article. Although I recognize the article’s foresight (it does seem incredible to predict as much as he does), the themes of mechanization and the militarization of the human body are disconcerting (to me). Even though he’s advocating here for modern science in a post-war setting (not specifically war itself), he places a high degree of value on advancement in all its forms without any criticality on the ethics of his scientific premonitions. In his discussion of the walnut camera, he blends the camera with the body by placing the lens as a third eye and the trigger that trips the shutter runs down the sleeve, onto the hand, embedding the technology with the body. I do not want to suggest that technology as an extension of the body is in itself a dangerous proposition—by no means—but rather, given Bush’s political alignment, technology as an extension of the body has a direct correlation to the militarization of the body. (When I use the phrase militarization of the body, I am referring to the Frankfurt school’s resistance to use technology for the ends of extreme politics like Fascism, and in the back of my mind I’m also referring to Donna Harraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, oh, and the Futurists). Bush seems like a late Futurist to me, especially in the way that he aestheticizes his fictional technologies.

21 Jeff Miller { 10.19.09 at 3:16 pm }

Hi Cory,

As is the way with this global memex unit we are all strapped to, a new report this week from New Scientist (of all publications) describes a soon-to-be released camera that can be worn as a pendant and that has the capability of automatically recording everything that happens in ones life.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17992-new-camera-promises-to-capture-your-whole-life.html

It seems some uses of an optically armed eye are benign, such as the recording of images to help patients with Alzheimers recall the events of their day, but I am sure that we will see other uses, too.

Jeff

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