Untitled - witz cultural

3't 1RECONFICURINGLITERARYEDUCATIONIntermedia had a simple graphics editor that permitted student-wreaders tocreate diagrams, concept maps, and overviews within the system, Storyspaceand World Wide Web viewers do not, thus requiring them to use Photoshopor similar graphics software. The immediate effect of the switch from Intermediato Storyspace, therefore, was that students in my survey and Victoriancourses stopped producing interesting concept maps that I discussed above.At the same time, because students experienced in using Photoshop, Illustrator,and image scanning programs found adding visual materials to theirwebs very easy to do in Storyspace-one simply copies images from a graphicsprogram and pastes them directly into a Storyspace lexia-they began touse images (and video and sound) much more often.Another anticipated difference appeared in the way students manipulatethe Storyspace view to convey information. Although both Intermedia andStoryspace share what at first appear near-identical folder structures, authorscan arrange the individual items in the Storyspace view to create patterns andhence display a web's organization. Experimenting with this feature, studentsquickly began to use it as a visual element in their writing (for examples, seeFigures 14 and26\.Using the World Wide Web again confronts the teacher with another setofadvantages and disadvantages. Most obviously, available resources and potentialcollaborations are truly worldwide rather than being limited to a singleclass or campus, and students find creating basic HTML documents veryeasy to do, particularly if instructors provide simple templates. Although imagesconsume time and resources, they are easy to employ, and sheer visualliteracy has risen greatly with the Web. Assuming that students have accessto a server on which they can place their own documents (and a considerablenumber of students in my hypermedia classes do), the World Wide Web onceagain grants student-collaborators the power to create their own documentsand sets oflinks.On the other hand, as we have already seen, HTML viewers come with aheavy cost as well. HTML produces a relatively flat version of hypertext, andstudents used to working with two features shared by Intermedia and Storyspace-one-to-manylinking and various aspects of the multiwindow feature-oftencomplain bitterly how confining and disorienting they find theWeb to be. As I have already explained in chapter 5, course templates, identifyingheaders, and sets of linked footer icons solve many of the potential problemsof navigation and orientation in HTML-based systems. One-to-manylinking, which I take to be one of the defining qualities of a true hlpertext systemand one of its educationally most valuable, proves harder to replace or