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DRAFT VERSION ONLYAssociation for Computing Humanities, 1999 Proposed Paper
Type of Proposal: Paper LINKS for paper.
Cinema studies as a field of teaching has, of necessity, always availed itself of new technologies. It was among the first humanities disciplines to actively use the VCR, and regularly employs what are now known as 'multimedia' technologies to assist in teaching. The need for this is obvious, as the object of study is, precisely, the cinema. However, the use of new digital technologies by cinema studies, in particular online learning resources and hypermedia, appears to have been unusually conservative in this regard, with the result that students' experience of writing on the cinema remains firmly entrenched in a conservative paradigm of textual description and theoretical application. This paper describes a current hypermedia cinema project where students combine peer owned online resources with hypermedia writing to significantly alter their perception and practice of cinema studies, in the process developing significant and novel learning outcomes. A teaching methodology is employed that encourages students to develop link 'competency' producing 'knowledge objects', which in rare instances demonstrate 'deep' linking. Bonza is a colloquial Australian term that means, more or less, "great" or "excellent", and is the name of an undergraduate cinema studies project at RMIT University (http://cs.art.rmit.edu.au/bonza/). This project is an applied research subject where students develop and exercise significant research skills in their discipline area, and then apply this research in the writing (or production) of complex, interlinked, hypermedia essays. In all aspects of the project great care has been taken to ensure that the technologies used are affordable, available, and scalable. Bonza consists of what can be characterised as two related practices, the first involves students undertaking primary research in a self nominated field of interest Ñ relating to cinema studies of course (at the moment this is also constrained to Australian cinema, though this constraint probably will not remain in future). They are encouraged to use as many resources as possible, including conducting interviews, taking photographs (for example of locations), recording material (video, audio, scanned images). This material is digitised, and all bibliographic material is entered into the bonza bibliography database. In addition production details on any relevant films, and biographical details of individuals, are also collected and entered into their respective databases. These databases are relational, so that as students enter data direct relations between material become apparent. This allows students to not only pursue particular research themes with ease, but it encourages collaboration as they find related material contributed by their peers. However, the databases also become a primary research tool in their own right, rather than just a 'holder' of student work. In this regard a student researcher simply interrogates the database and bibliographical, biographical or production records are returned. As the database is relational students are able to begin to recognise the manner in which their object of study is strongly interrelated (thematically, institutionally, theoretically) and not actually a discrete or individual entity. This I characterise as 'shallow' link building, as the connections being found are generally literal and the result of simple string matches based on names. On the other hand these simple connections appear to strongly encourage students to recognise the way in which research participates in a particular notion of community, as their work is automatically linked and related to other's research. The first gasp of "oohh" when a student searches the database for their work and finds it already linked to other material, is often evidence enough of this effect! However, their contribution to these online (and public) databases (where it should be noted undergraduate students have already made significant contributions to primary research in a number of areas of Australian cinema historiography) forms the first part of the research experience for these students. The second part of the project involves students writing up their material. The issue of writing with digital media, rather than using digital media as a delivery vehicle (whether multimedia CDROM, DVD, hybrid or Internet based), is regarded as an important component of the pedagogical experience for these students. It is the ability to write with, and amongst, media types, and to link them freely, that distinguishes hypermedia writing from other digital pedagogies. (This is why much of this student work is not particularly exciting to read, but students have learnt a great deal about their subject material through building their 'objects'.) Bonza has adopted the teaching and learning methodologies of the RMIT Hypermedia Project, which has demonstrated the advantages to learning by regarding digital literacy as a writing, or even assembling, practice rather than a reading practice. As a result we have taken the unusual step of allowing students to write up their research adopting whatever authorial voice or style they wish, the emphasis being on the presentation of their research material, rather than the demonstration of a particular thesis. This decision was made because the subject's aims are very specifically about the development of research skills and the production of link rich 'knowledge objects', and by granting students the opportunity to build whatever 'objects' they wish allows them to take advantage of what digitisation affords them in their writing practice. It is apparent that the 'traditional' academic essay tends to stymie students in their free use of hypermedia as a writing tool, particularly their desire (and anxiety) to demonstrate, argue for, and legitimate a specific theoretical thesis. The linearity that results, and an anxiety about the 'outside' of their writing - that is all that is marginal, contrary, or simply unable to be incorporated due to media type or size - is an aspect of formal and traditional writing practices (as virtually all introductory hypertext theory texts in the humanities have identified, see for instance Landow, and Bolter) but it is also the case with most authoring technologies for digital media, including HTML. In utilising Storyspace and then publishing into HTML, traditional humanities students can still 'write' in the traditional sense, but it also allows them to easily incorporate other media, as well as to build work that is able to accommodate varying levels or degrees of complexity Ñ what I like to describe as 'deep' linking and what Entwistle and Marton have described, in another context, as "knowledge objects" (Entwistle and Marton, 1993). Indeed, within this hypermedia practice, teaching is able to concentrate on identifying cognitive and thematic structures within research material, rather than developing specific technical or digital 'competencies'. To assist in this technical support is provided so that students do not need to be hindered by specific digital practices, and can concentrate on linking and annotating their material. As a result most students, though certainly not all, develop quite sophisticated link structures in their work that represent idiosyncratic though complex relations amongst their material. This 'link competency' is the recognition that links are not merely navigational aids within a work but represent rhetorical or cognitive associations that are able to generate logical metastructures alongside their existing writing practice. At its best such linking is able to produce 'knowledge objects' that incorporate diverse media types and objects, with links between, for instance, video extracts, newspaper clippings, and original writing. At its worst the work is simply unstructured, radial in outline, and tends towards reportage. However, for students to be able to have the opportunity of using different sources in a material way in their writing, and to identify and contextualise the relations between them, does represent a significant departure from usual academic humanities practice. Research, in this model, becomes contextually rich and writing becomes a game or strategy of bricolage Ð more or less successful. However, even where sophisticated structures are developed, the dominant model of linking adopted by students currently takes two contrary forms. The first is derived from the example of Web navigation, and is where text or graphic menus are utilised to provide simple navigation options for the reader. This work, while often academically strong, tends to display the conservatism of the traditional essay, and struggles with hypermedia as a writing medium. The most common structures produced here are radial or tree like, and generally suffer from the usual problems that diluted forms of linearity have in multilinear environments. The second common form is the use of saturated linking, where a work consisting of, say, thirty nodes, may contain between one hundred and two hundred links. Here the student attempts to link everything to everything, and while complex linking gives the appearance of complex structure this saturation obscures thematic or contextual associations that may be apparent to the writer, but not to the reader (or the assessor!). What remains to be developed, and it isn't yet clear how this will be achieved in the short term, is an adequate pedagogy of 'deep linking' where students are able to build these knowledge objects through not only combining media types or maximising link use but through the development of coherent thematic and contextual associations across writing and media types. What is apparent to date is that students require considerable time writing their material for this to happen, where rewriting needs to become a continual rebuilding of the relations between already established parts. This difficulty is hardly surprising given students unfamiliarity with the medium, and the paucity of examples available. Indeed, particularly in academic writing, there appears to be virtually no work available that actually performs what most humanities hypertext theory has said hypertext would enable us all to do (for examples see Miles, 1998, Kolb, and the projects undertaken by the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities). That this is the case in cinema studies only exacerbates what could be characterised as the tyranny of the word (and node) in academic hypertext practice, particularly when considered from the point of view of students as knowledge makers. This project is a beginning along such a path, providing a mechanism for students to collate research, and then combine this research into novel forms. It is hoped that from this new pedagogies may develop that are able to facilitate the students' construction and identification of relations between parts, for it is clear that if we regard digitisation as only a mechanism for the delivery of pedagogy then we are not only constraining the learning that our students might achieve, but we remain fixed within conservative genres of what constitutes a possible academic writing practice. References
Bolter, Jay David. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Hillsdale (N.J.): Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1991.Entwistle, Noel, and Ference Marton. "Knowledge Objects: Understandings Constituted Through Intensive Academic Study." EQARD Occasional Paper 93.4 (1993). Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities. Joyce, Michael. "New Stories for New Readers: Contour, Coherence and Constructive Hypertext." Page to Screen: Taking Literacy into the Electronic Era. Ed. Ilana Snyder. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1997. 163-82. Kolb, David. Socrates in the Labyrinth: Hypertext, Argument, Philosophy. Watertown: Eastgate Systems. n.d. Computer Software. Landow, George P. Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1992. Laurillard, Diana. Rethinking University Teaching: A Framework for the Effective Use of Educational Technology. London: Routledge, 1993. Ling, Peter. "Evaluating Teaching Initiatives which Employ Resource Based Learning: Draft For Review and Discussion." UltiBase: A World Wide Web Service for Tertiary Educators.< http:// ultibase.rmit.edu.au/Articles/lingp1.html> Accessed July 24, 1998. Miles, Adrian and Verhoeven, Deb. bonza. Miles, Adrian. "Singin' in the Rain: A Hypertextual Reading." Postmodern Culture, 1998. Accessed May 8, 1998. Vol. Miles, Adrian. RMIT Communication Studies Hypermedia Project. Snyder, Ilana, ed. Page to Screen: Taking Literacy into the Electronic Era. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1997.
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