Thinking
and
Linking:
Teaching with
Hypertext
Melody Anderson
Brendan Holloway
Alex McAdams
Alex Mueller
UMass Boston English
Department
Hypertext
Revolutionary . . .
. . . or Restrictive?
Revolutionary Hypertext
The capability of banking education to minimize or annul
the students' creative power and to stimulate their
credulity serves the interests of the oppressors, who care
neither to have the world revealed nor to see it
transformed. The oppressors use their
“humanitarianism” to preserve a profitable situation.
Thus they react almost instinctively against any
experiment in education which stimulates the critical
faculties and is not content with a partial view of reality
but always seeks out the ties which link one point to
another and one problem to another.
---Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 54-5.
Revolutionary Hypertext
The purpose of computers is
human freedom, and so the
purpose of hypertext is overview
and understanding.
---Theodor Nelson, Computer Lib/Dream
Machines.
Revolutionary Hypertext
There is nothing in an electronic book that quite
corresponds to the printed table of contents . . . In this
sense, the electronic book reflects a different natural
world, in which relationships are multiple and evolving:
there is no great chain of being in an electronic worldbook. For that very reason, an electronic book is a better
analogy for contemporary views of nature, since nature
today is often not regarded as a hierarchy, but rather as a
network of interdependent species and systems.
---Jay David Bolter, Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the
History of Writing, 105.
Restrictive Hypertext
Hypertext isn't really interactive, they
argue; it only gives the illusion of reader
involvement – and certainly only the
illusion that the hierarchy of the author
and reader had been leveled: clicking, they
insist, is not the same as writing.
---Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Planned Obsolescence:
Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the
Academy, 98.
Restrictive Hypertext
It follows logically from the
banking notion of consciousness
that the educator’s role is to
regulate the way the world “enters
into” the students.
---Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed,
57.
Restrictive Hypertext
Contrary to Nelson’s idealistic claim
[that “the purpose of computers is
freedom”], the purpose of computers
is power, and hypertext is as much
involved in that struggle for power as
anything else.
---Espen Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic
Literature, 82.
From Hypertext Critique to
Hypertext Composition
Whereas banking education anesthetizes
and inhibits creative power, problemposing education involves a constant
unveiling of reality. The former attempts
to maintain the submersion of
consciousness; the latter strives for the
emergence of consciousness and critical
intervention in reality.
---Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 62.
From Hypertext Critique to
Hypertext Composition
. . . what performs
critique . . .
. . . cannot also
compose.
---Bruno Latour, “An Attempt at a ‘Compositionist Manifesto,’” 475.
From Hypertext Critique to
Hypertext Composition
With a hammer (or a sledge hammer) in hand you can do a lot of
things: break down walls, destroy idols, ridicule prejudices, but
you cannot repair, take care, assemble, reassemble, stitch
together. It is no more possible to compose with the
paraphernalia of critique than it is to cook with a seesaw. Its
limitations are greater still, for the hammer of critique can only
prevail if, behind the slowly dismantled wall of appearances, is
finally revealed the netherworld of reality. But when there is
nothing real to be seen behind this destroyed wall, critique
suddenly looks like another call to nihilism. What is the use of
poking holes in delusions, if nothing more true is revealed
underneath?
---Bruno Latour, “An Attempt at a ‘Compositionist Manifesto,’” 475.