Untitled - witz cultural

288HYPERTEXT 3.0 concern theme, a second should concern technique, and a third some aspect ofthereligious, philosophical, historical,scientific context... Not all the relations youdiscover or create will turn out to be obvious ones, such as matters of influence oranalogous ideas and techn iq ues. Some may take the form of contrasts or oppositionsthat tell us something interesting abouthe authors, literary forms, or times in whichthese works appeared.To emphasize that demonstrating skill at formulating possible explanationsand hypothesizing significant relations counts as much as factual knowledgealone, the directions explain that some subjects, "particularly matters of context,may require you to use materials" in whatever website or book they use"to formulate an hypothesis," and the assignment goes on to warn that inmany cases, the hypermedia materials, like the llbrary, "provide the materialsto create an answer but not answers themselvesl'Using this exercise in six iterations of the survey course as well as in variousother upper-level courses convinces me that it provides a useful andaccurate means ofevaluation that has several additional beneficial effects.Although the exercise does not directly ask for specific factual informationother than titles, authors, and dates, students soon recognize that withoutsuch information they cannot effectively demonstrate connections betweenor among texts. In comparing a passage from Pope's "Essay on Man" with"Tintern Abbey," for example, they soon realize that only specific examplesand specific comments on those examples produce effective discussion. GaryMarchioni points out that "hypermedia is an enabling technology rather thana directive one, offering high levels of user conffol. Learners can constructtheir own knowledge by browsing hyperdocuments according to the associationsintheir owncognitivestruclures. Aswith access, however, controlrequiresresponsibility and decision making" ("Evaluating Hypermedia-Based Learning,"356). By making students choose which literary techniques, themes, oraspects of context they wish to relate, the exercise emphasizes the major roleof student choice.This assignment itself also proves an effective educational tool becausewhile attempting to carry it out many students realize that they have difficultyhandling matters of context, which at the beginning they often confuse withthe theme or main idea of a passage. Discussions of context require one toposit a connection between one phenomenon, say, the imagery in a poem, andsome other, often more general, phenomenon, such as conceptions of thehuman mind, gender roles, or religious belief contemporaneous with that