Navigating the Hypermedia Sea

Final Project Site: Navigating the Hypermedia Sea

Interactive (Non)Fiction
For my project, I used interactive fiction to explore the use of hypermedia and how it has affected my development of digital literacy. I consider my technical abilities to be advanced but I still have the same experiences as that of a technical novice. This self-exploration has enabled me to compare my experiences with studies and articles and also provides some insight into the implications of media literacy and education. The experiences are reflections into how I have come to see, engage and interact with print through its published and online formats. As well, it has given me the opportunity to list some of the many distractions online.

The story begins with a short narrative and then, in interactive fiction form, asks the user to choose a path. Not all the links are found at the bottom of the page and have been embedded within links inside secondary pages. A site map has been included for full exploration of the web site.

Platform
The WordPress platform provided the best environment for which to create my interactive fiction work. Furthermore, it is a platform which I am comfortable with. This work permitted me to write creatively while maintaining a scholarly position at the same time. The web site’s appearance is simple, clean and basic.

Critical Issues
Hypermediacy contains a wide range of issues that I wanted to cover as much as possible in this interactive (non)fiction work. Through use of common distractions such as search engines, news sites, and social media, I was able to cover the issues in a general fashion. The main issues discussed in this interactive fiction piece include multiliteracy, gaming literacy, and media literacy in general. Consequently, there is discussion of how print literacy has evolved into the online world along with the implications of this change.

The New London Group (2006) posits that teachers and students need a language for talking about language, visuals, texts, and meaning-making interactions. Otherwise called a metalanguage. Each reflection conveys the implications of the various aspects and issues in education – how one learns through exploration or with assistance and how the metalanguage affects the user in a variety of different media formats, with respect to the major Web 2.0 tools as well as traditional print materials.

The theme of distraction is congruent with the notion of the multimodal design of the web and the challenges associated with meaning-making (New London Group, 1996). In my reflection on distractions and multimodality, I have come to appreciate the technologies of the past and the present and, with this project, I hope the audience can also reflect on and relate to the implications of digital and hypermedia literacy.

Reference

New London Group. (1996). A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures. Harvard Educational Review. Retrieved from http://wwwstatic.kern.org/filer/blogWrite44ManilaWebsite/paul/articles/A_Pedagogy_of_Multiliteracies_Designing_Social_Futures.htm