Hypermedia Authoring
Jamie Myers and Richard Beach, in their article Hypermedia Authoring as Critical Literacy (see link to article below), contend there is a need to provide students with myriad strategies for analyzing their “social worlds”. Similarly, I believe students must be provided with the tools to critically evaluate and interrogate the socially situated worlds we live and grow in.
Hypermedia, as the two authors present it, serves as an excellent resource for this critical thinking. Isolating and analyzing song lyrics, photographs, graphics, and digitizing videos are a few of the examples the authors present in their article. They describe the theoretical framework of hypermedia (i.e. immersion, identification, contextualization, representation, critique, transformation). I cannot help but question the omission of reflection from this framework. While it is obvious reflection is embedded in each of these pieces, I believe reflection places a critical role in students’ examining how they are positioned, or represented, in the media culture. Why is reflection absent?
By marrying hypertext and multimedia, hypermedia emerges as a form of critical literacy. I agree with the authors that hypermedia authoring can help students understand their place in the world, as well as questioning norms and biases. Empowering students by allowing them the opportunity to analyze, edit, and modify representations they embark on a journey where literacy is retired and critical literacy emerges as the MVP.
http://www.readingonline.org/electronic/ele_index.asp?HREF=/electronic/jaal/3-01_Column/index.html
April 9th, 2007 at 6:14 pm
I agree that reflection is an important component of student projects. Students lives are often like ours: miles to go before we sleep, so sometimes we need to “force” them to stop and think about what they are learning. Also, when helping students with hypermedia projects, teachers can get so caught up in the requests for technological help, it might be easy to lose track of their progress. It’s a good idea to allot time for reflection throughout a project and to include reflection in a final self-assessment.
April 9th, 2007 at 6:56 pm
Dear Lydia,
I was interested to read about your concern regarding reflection as a category. I guess I assumed that reflection was integrated into the ‘critiquing’ category. As you mentioned, reflection is also embedded in the entire scope of this framework. However, as I was reading your post, I thought back to how complex this all can seem. I was first familiarized with proponents of critical approaches (through my graduate courses) about two years ago and I realized that critical literacy was a label for an approach I had been using. I began to learn more about it as I also began to learn more about using technology in the classroom. Though I have not always taught with technology (not even with electricity), I have been exposed to many ideas on how to use both critical literacy and technology. However, this seems like a lot for teachers who do not work in an ideal setting (one with a good deal of access to technology and with a relatively autonomous class in terms of curricula, syllabi, etc.). We keep coming back to this issue, but I think that’s because it’s an important one –How can teachers with a less than ideal setting best incorporate these complex approaches to technology and…well, simply gain access to technology. It seems like a question worth asking because, as Meyers and Beach imply, the possibilities for student reflection and creativity through hypermedia may be limitless.
Lori
April 10th, 2007 at 7:32 am
Lori, you point out that we continue broaching the issue of access to technology and I agree it’s perhaps the most salient question to be asking. Without access everything we read and write about technology is empty. I have worked in schools where access was not the only problem facing my students. Working in a school with high-needs, the children had a computer lab; however, there were allotted times the lab could be used and they were constantly taken away because of other “academic” things that the administration believed we needed to address. The technology gained dust, while our children missed out. The complex issue of access and resources to technology seems more prevalent in urban schools. Perhaps because of the added pressure of meeting AYP? Perhaps the standards-based movement and recent policy (namely No Child Left Behind) have done more to hinder the use of technology and critical literacy in the classroom then help it. This could be a place to start in our answering our question about access and affordances. If policy remains on the same tracks its currently running, we will be teaching without critical literacy and our children, who are the digital natives, will be left behind.