To set the scene for our activities during the rest of the semester I
wanted to devote some time initially to establishing an informal,
conversationally oriented tone for our interactions in the group as a
whole. One way of doing this which seemed to work reasonably well was
by taking as our point of departure various aspects of each of the
group member's previous academic backgrounds which they had outlined
for one another and me in our first session together, and trying to
discover some points of common reference.
In this sense I found myself initially taking upon myself a role
rather similar to that which an interviewer or program-leader in an
informal television chat show might have had, trying to keep a more
general thread of conversation going by interspersing the students'
comments with more or less leading questions based on what I knew of
their respective fields of interest, and on the small amount of more
personal background information they had already given me. My main
goal at this stage was to get the group as a whole to loosen up and
for us to begin to get to know one another better as individuals
within the framework of the class situation, rather than this kind of
activity being relegated to taking place mainly outside of the
seminar room - say, for example, in the cantine as often tends to be
the case, especially for larger groups than this particular one. I
also paid quite a lot of attention to trying to draw in all the
members of the group into the conversation, and encouraging them all
to be active participants even though some obviously seemed less
talkatively inclined than others.
I had, as mentioned in a previous report from this project (see Coppock 1996), struggled quite a bit with this problem of how to mobilize all the voices of the various members of the group in the face-to-face sessions with the six students who took the hypermedia in the humanities course in the Fall semester of 1995. I believed it was important to work quite hard at this, seen from both the students, and from my own - as teacher for the group - perspective, since the time we would have available to get acquainted by talking together face-to-face, be this within or outside of the seminar room during the whole semester, would be almost equal to the total amount of time we would be spending together in the technologically mediated environment of the DMCE seminar room during the semester. As will be seen from inspection of Appendix @@, the total number of hours we actually spent together in the face-to-face seminar room was 28, while the total number of hours spent together in the DMC environment was 22 hours.
As this present group was small, with initially four students registered for the course, and with only two who subsequently completed it, this made it in many ways easier to establish a reasonably workable group-discussion environment face-to-face, and although it is difficult to say exactly how successful this focus on making each member feel that they had a right, and indeed, even an obligation in relation to the group as a whole, to have a say in what was going on right from the outset, actually was seen from the individual members' points of view, my general impression over our first few sessions was that as time went on all the group members felt free to forward their own points of view without a great deal of prompting or elicitation from my side.
After this initial warming-up period we began working in group-oriented "close-reading" sessions. For the first session with I copied up and distributed in advance a chapter of George Landow's book on Hypertext and Literary Theory (Landow 19@@), which I thought might be of interest since it seemed a kind of "bridging" article which might provoke discussions between those with linguistic backgrounds and those with postmodern literary science backgrounds. Tone had also studied nordic literature at a previous stage of her academic career, so this meant that she was able to move quite easily between literary and more traditional linguistic terminology and understandings. Bjørn was, on the other hand, somewhat less familiar with linguistic methodology and terminology, but he was on the other hand reasonably well versed in the post-structuralist terminology and methodologies of modern literary theory. Sigrun too had some background in literary theory, but was less experienced academically and thus somewhat quieter in relation to participation in group interactions than the others. Her special strength was that she had some more background in philosophy and ethics than the others, which was a positive resource for the group as a whole. Giorgio, apart from his present background in linguistics, was also reasonably well-versed in hypertext, hypermedia and computer technology terminology thanks to his engineering training and his prior experiences with developing teaching software. He was, on the other hand, somewhat less familiar with the field of literary science than the other three members of the group.
A close-reading technique basically involves selecting some
particular sections of a larger text that look for some particular
reason or other as if they might be worth looking at more closely
(this kind of rather ad hoc evaluation may of course be made for a
variety of different reasons in different contexts), and taking these
sections as the point of departure for a broader discussion of the
text as a whole. Our close-reading process was at the same time
framed by a focus on arriving at some kind of consensus, or at least
at a sharing and discussion of different opinions about, what
actually can be said to constitute "good" scientific writing.
In the following we shall use the piece of George Landow's text
mentioned above as an example. Initially, I selected the following
passage from the beginning of Chapter 1@@, since I thought it might
be functional as some kind of a starting point for our discussions in
the group:
"When designers of computer software examine the pages of Glas or Of Grammatology, they encounter a digitalized, hypertextual Derrida; and when literary theorists examine Literary Machines , they encounter a deconstructionist or poststructuralist Nelson."
My initial intuition, given the group as it was then constituted, and based on the somewhat sparse background information I had been able to gather already relative to the possible prior knowledge of the various members of the group, as to why this particular piece of text might be of interest in this particular connection, was that Bjørn and most likely Sigrun too, would have at least some knowledge of such a well-known literary theorist and philosopher as Derrida and of associated concepts from his writings such as for example the terms "deconstructionist" and "poststructuralist" from their prior or present literary studies backgrounds, while Giorgio with his knowledge of the field of computers and hypertext would probably be familiar with the name of the so-called "father of hypertext" Ted Nelson, and if not that, at least with the concepts of "digitalised" and "hypertextual". Both Tone and Giorgio would I assumed, as linguists, know what was referred to by structuralism, and more than likely also have some knowledge of terms common in literary science such as "poststructuralist" and probably also "deconstructionist". In other words, for this particular piece of writing there would most probably be quite a bit of overlapping of knowledge and understanding of its basic conceptual framework across the group, and most, if not all, members of the group would have at least some superficial knowledge of the most central concepts mentioned above. It seemed reasonable to assume at the outset too, that some of the group would probably be better equipped than others to discuss at more length some of the possible discussion topics that might be spurred by the concrete concepts mentioned in the piece of the text in hand.
One advantage of being such a small group as we were on this occasion is that it allows for a large degree of negotiation of possible shared (or not) meanings in the form of a conversation. In larger groups there is always the chance that members will, by remaining on the sidelines in a discussion[13], not reveal that they are not cognizant with what is being presented or dicussed in the group.
I began first by asking each member of the group to make a general appraisal of the text, seen more specifically as a piece of scientific writing, and to qualify briefly why they had formed this particular opinion. From there we began a discussion of some of the specific concepts and terms mentioned in the small piece of text reproduced above. Bjørn was asked to give a short presentation of some of Derrida's ideas, since he was familiar with both `Glas' and `Of Grammatology', which none of the others were, and since he had previously written a term paper in Literary Science entitled "The decapitation of the referent", where he discussed the postructuralist movement. At this stage none of the group had read this paper, but we decided to use it later on in the semester as the basis for one of our DMCE discussion groups. No one in the group was familiar with "Literary Machines", so in this connection I made a brief summary of the position and contributions of Ted Nelson in relation to the more recent history of the development of hypertext. This also gave me a pretext to illustrate briefly how DMC environments actually are constructed on the basis of hypertextual principles, since each "room" or space in the environments is actually a small piece of text, and where the exits and entrances represent links between different pieces of text. The difference between DMC environments and other forms of hypertext being, of course, that in a DMCE one can actually `enter' the environment constituted by the text itself and communicate with other people there either about the environment itself, or about other issues. This enables a possibility for interactions between different actors carried on in the virtual environment leading to various kinds of changes and modifications being made in the environment, for instance the construction of new rooms, editing and changing existing room descriptions, creation of new `objects' and programming these in order to enrich the functionality of the spaces they belong to for various purposes, and so on.
Already at this stage, the various members of the group had begun to emerge as four very different individuals, with Tone being clearly the most verbally active of the four, and the one with the most strongly and clearly articulated points of view about most kinds of issues we discussed, also those concerning what may be said to constitute good scientific writing. Bjørn was rather more retiring, and less active in discussions without direct prompting from my side, but he also showed a keen sense of ironic and perhaps, self-depreceating, humor, something which also is reflected in his writing. Sigrun was also reserved, but when she
Using some of the text materials that students submitted as the basis for our discussions.
Sigrun: contributions discussed
1995: "Tillitt til håp om mer fornuft, vitenskap, fremskritt?" [Confidence in a hope om more rationality, science and progress?]. Examination paper in Philosophy and Livssyn, December 1995.
Tone: contributions discussed
1993: Sammenlignende analyse av et Pär Lagerkvists dikt "Det är vakrest når det skymmer" og Knut Hamsuns dikt "Skjærgaardsøy". [A Comparative analysis of Pär Lagerkvist's poem "Twilight's most beautiful hour" and Knut Hamsun's poem "Skerrie island"]. Examination paper in literary analysis submitted in part fulfillment of NORD 102, Nordic literature, under the Nordic studies undergraduate program.
1994: "TV-Mediets rolle i det nordiske kultursamarbeidet" [The role of the TV medium in Nordic cultural co-operation]. Section 5 in "De nordiske språken och den moderna massemediasituationen" [The Nordic languages and the modern mass media situation]: Group paper submitted in part fulfillment of the seminar: "Nordisk sprogforståelse og kultursamarbejde i massemediesamfunnet" [Nordic understandings of language and cultural co-operation in massmedia society], Copenhagen University, Spring 1994.
1996: "Lexical Processing of Prefixed Words". Review and discussion paper in psycholinguistics, University in Amsterdam, May 1996.
Other materials and activities:
WWW page on use of MUD's and MOO's in education.
Elizabeth Reid's dissertation on MOO culture
Bjørn: contributions discussed
1996: "Referentens dekapitasjon" [The decapitation of the referent]. Examination paper in General Literary Science, May 1996.
Other materials and activities
"Julia" article
Textbook materials - close readings and discussions
Newspaper articles - close readings and discussions
Articles from some other authors with whom I had personal contact (Sandor)
Web articles, Reid, Tone's MOO Education pages, Julia article
Tone
Chatty, personal home page, with a lot of informative information
directed to the outside world
Bjørn
Expressive, personal home page with a lot of "gimmicks"
Sigrun
Minimalistic home page made together with me
Giorgio/ Jørgen
Own home page at the department of linguistics, with amongst other
things a CV from where some of the information given here is
taken.
