technologies for knowledge production, diffusion, and reception

Reading Spaces and Orientations

In the Digital Literacy chapter (Dobson and Willinsky, 2009), we provide a brief history of the introduction of hypermedia and its implications for literacy and learning (the section is subtitled “Hypermedia”). It may be useful to review this short section in addition to taking up the assigned readings for this week because the section raises a number of key issues that have been debated through the past twenty years, such as the following: 1) What are the implications of networked multimedia environments for learning? 2) How do readers, or “users,” experience such spaces? 3) How might different text structures modify reader experience (cf Bernstein, 1998)? 4) What are the merits or demerits of the “associationist” argument? The assigned readings offer perspectives on these issues and others. “As We May Think” is an historical article that is often cited as the first articulation of the hypertext concept; Gerjets & Kirschner (2009) and Salmerón et al (2005) take up the complex question of how reading processes are modified in hypermedia environments.

October 7, 2009   21 Comments