Huang Task 5 – Twine
With previous experience with Twine throughout my ETEC journey, as I went through the module I found an uncanny resemblance between the Memex demonstrated in Flowers (2016) and Twine. Like the Memex, Twine can allow users to create and modify trails, pathways that Twine stories can take. In both Memex and Twine, trails do not need to be linear, allowing for diverging paths, as well as options to go back to the previous page or back to the start.
For this task, I wanted to do more than just make a story that has various trails, and I included two sections. One was due to a point in Wesch (2007) about how technology has allowed us to move beyond “shelves.” While this is true as demonstrated through the various hypertext in my Twine by not categorizing things, this could also be potentially be problematic. Without shelves, rather than browsing in topics to find a content one’s interested in, algorithms such as that used on Youtube recommend content based on browsing history and physical location, which could potentially lead users down rabbit holes. I have attached a previous Twine I have built in another course, ETEC511, that attempts to demonstrate how such content works, and that after the initial selection of categories, my algorithm can prioritize various content on the “front page.”
As for the section of my Twine I built for this task, I felt that a reading review quiz as a medium this medium allows me to demonstrate the various points made in Nelson (1999) and Bolter (2001). While not an exact of replicate of Xanadu, the amount of linking to the videos, podcast, and readings used in this module whenever the user answers a question incorrectly follows the spirit of Xanadu and the dissemination of information and knowledge through hypertext discussed in Bolter (2001).
References
Bolter, J. D. (2001). Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Flowers, T. (2016, June 19). Memex #001 demo [Video]. YouTube.
Nelson, T. (1999). Xanalogical structure, needed now more than ever: Parallel documents, deep links to content, deep versioning and deep re-use. ACM Computing Surveys, 31(4).
Wesch, M. (2007, October 12). Information r/evolution [Video]. YouTube.