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DEVELOPMENT OF A HYPERTEXT PROGRAM AS A TEXT AND REFERENCE SOURCE.

Report

Pedagogical goals and strategies:

This web will supplement the fiction and history in my course. It is designed to accomplish two goals:

1) to help students read narrative ( since this is an introductory course in literature) and narratives of people denied their own voices by the dominant culture (since this is an introduction to minority literature)

2) to help students understand theories of culture and the varieties of multiculturalism; multiculturalism is a form of hypridity, a concept now at the forefront of cultural theory that governs the course.

The web is also designed not just to make information easily available through our network, but to take full advantage of a hypertext structure--which encourages associative as well as logical thinking. It is designed to be read in a logical order: students will have regular assignments following the reading schedule of our books. And it is designed to take full advantage of its associative hypertextual structure, or to be read by following links as individual students wish.

Description of project:

The best description of my project, which focuses on multiculturalism, is provided on the homepage: http://acunix.wheatonma.edu/rpearce/MultiC/Index.html

Evaluation procedures:

The project is being, and will continue to be, evaluated in the following order:

1. I have already sent it to a web designer ( the language departments' Mellon Fellow Jenni Lund), an alumnae graduate student at Tufts (Danielle Mule), and a recent colleague who taught the course last year (Michael Manson). I have followed Jenni's and Danielle's suggestions. Michael Manson only had time for a brief look but will continue reviewing it. See Jenni Lund's and Danielle Mule's responses below.
   
   
2. I am about to send it to colleagues I meet regularly at professional meeetings, who are established scholars and teachers of U. S. Fiction, cultural studies, and narrative, and also to a professional web designer.
   
   
3. The next step will be to send it to scholars I know less well.
   
   
4. I will ask students in English 256b for their comments and evaluation during and at the end of the semester.
   
   
5. This April I will chair a panel and read a paper on cultural hybridity at the Narrative Conference at Northwestern Univeristy, where I will be testing some of my ideas and, if possible my new hypertext.

Comments so far.

JENNI LUND:

I love your page! I can't wait to curl up with my mouse some evening and really enjoy it. Maybe many evenings....

I like the grid and the suggestion to return to the local home page while navigating. I didn't get lost, although the branching is - -I think -- 3 or 4 levels deep. The only small suggestions I would make, for your consideration, is to have the "terminal nodes" and the major pages be just slightly different.... maybe slightly less bright background for the end-nodes of the tree, or maybe slightly smaller title box... something to cue the reader that they should go back to the mainstream when they are done.

Of course, on the other hand, I can appreciate the consistency between all your pages, because that makes the pages all candidates to point to, without further explanation or ado. So filter my ideas through your major vision.

Also, had you considered adding pictures? To narrow the column for easy reading, as much as to add "eye candy.

Thanks for letting me know it was out there. I'm going to enjoy it!

[I narrowed the column and made the pages less bright.]

DANIELLE MULE:

This looks great. The only thing that comes to mind is that some additional explication of double consciousness might prove useful. The site is easy to browse through and certainly seems to hit on the important basic areas and problems of cultural, historical, and narrative "definitions"--you provide just enough information to inform and fuel students' understanding, and it's up to them to figure out how they fit into the class and the bigger picture as subjects as well as readers--wow! Seems like you're setting up a pretty sophisticated class here. [I've added to the file on double consciousness.]


Last updated on 1/26/99; 3:51:59 PM
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