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| Module 12 | | Defining Intertextual / Hypertextual Connections Between Texts |
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Another important strategy involves defining intertextual and hypertextual connections between texts. Intertextual links are used to define connections between language, images, characters, topics, or themes based on similarities in languages, genres, or discourses.
| Intertextuality may also involve connections built on social meanings in which participants make intertextual links in order to build social relationships or connections (Bloome & Egan-Robertson, 1993). For example, participants in conversation may allude to shared experiences to foster a social bond or an insider reference to exclude others. Participation in on-line chat exchanges engages early-adolescents in using intertextual links to foster social interaction (Beach & Lundell, 1997; Lewis & Fabos, 2000).
| Given the high level of online marketing to kids, there is a need for students to critically examine the links made in online marketing campaigns; click here for lessons from the Media Awareness Network.
| Making intertextual links between disparate text types or genres helps students engage in what Semali and Watts-Pailliotet (1999) defined as “intermediality” — the ability to construct connections between different sign systems, concepts, and technology tools. Students are engaged in making intertextual links through multi-genre writing about a topic, an approach currently popular in secondary writing instruction (Romano, 2000). Multi-genre writing involves using a range of different types of genres — reports, poems, letters, diaries, stories, advertisements, field notes, photos, drawings, etc. to explore different aspects of and perspectives on a topic. Connecting these disparate genre types requires the ability to determine how different types of texts yield different perspectives on the same topic or phenomenon.
| As noted in Module 2, digital media mediate the practice of making these multi-genre intertextual links. Hypermedia, Flash, or various web-page development tools are used to combine hypertext (texts linked together by multilinear nodes) and multimedia (photos, video, art, audio, text, etc.) to produce an interactive media experience for participants (Jonassen, 2000; Landow, 1997).
| One of the pioneers of hypertext is George Landow, whose Hypertext site is a useful introduction to the concept of hypertext as used in teaching, particularly teaching literature. His Victorian Web Site
represents a way of organizing a lot of different curriculum material around Victorian literature, and around postcolonial literature.
| Another important pioneer is Janet Murray, author of Hamlet on the Holodeck (MIT Press, 1998).
She argues that new digital media are changing narrative understanding and production by providing students with highly interactive ways of experiencing the same episode in a story from multiple different perspectives or the same storyline in terms of alternative storyline versions.
| In his course on hypertexts at Oakland University, John E. McEneaney has students complete projects that explore a particular topic or phenomenon through combining different media forms “including annotated videos, interactive games, works of fiction or nonfiction in hypertext with supporting media, or more visually oriented media that explore visual or performing arts.” One illustrative project combines music, choreography, and dance, to choreograph a dance by selecting and editing video clips of a dancer that represent a variety of positions and movements. This includes using iMovie to create a music video for a game on different elements of music and movement and a character animation to illustrate different types of movements and positions.
| Digital media can also help teachers accommodate to individual differences in student learning by providing additional support for students or by varying instructional design to accommodate for individual differences in learning. In their book Teaching Every Student in the Digital Age: Universal Design for Learning, (ASCD, 2002)
David Rose and Anne Meyer argue that digital media can be used to alter the same material or texts to accommodate for these learning variations.
| QuicktimePro™. Students can import video clips into the PowerPoint™ presentations using QuicktimePro™ ($29.99). To import video clips, students first put their digital video into a QuickTime format on a CD. They then use QuicktimePro to edit clips from their CD to import into the PowerPoint template. In showing their PowerPoint, they also need to have the CD in their computer to run their presentation.
| VideoPaper Builder 2™. Students can also use a free program, VideoPaper Builder 2™ to import texts, images, and video files into a multimedia web document. This tool provides students with menus, links, frames, and slide show templates to help students organize their material on a web site. One advantage of this tool is that students can combine clips of their commentary about an image or video clip on the same screen so that they can demonstrate their interpretations of the image or clip. Prior to importing their material into VideoPaper Builder 2TM, students must first put their video into a QuickTime format, their pictures in a JPG format, and their Word documents into an HTML format. This tool can also be used with both Mac OSX and Windows.
| Inspiration™. Using these various tools to create hypermedia/hypertext links between different types of texts requires an awareness of the thematic and conceptual relationships between these texts. Students could use Inspiration™ ($70.00) (see inspiration.com and tomsnyder.com) to create visual maps of their texts and materials according to different templates. For example, students can use the “thinking-skills” template to develop Venn diagram comparisons between different texts — noting ways in which they differ and ways in which they share certain features.
| Noodletools™. One component of combining certain texts involves searching reference databases for different texts and then providing citations for those texts. One kid-friendly tool is Noodletools that provides them with an easy-to-navigate set of category options to search for resources, as well as ways to provide citations.
| Learning objects. Another development tool is the use of digital “learning objects” that are employed to support learning in all subject-matter areas. These highly visual “learning objects,” often created by tools such as Flash™, combine visual and verbal modes of learning to engage students in interactive simulations. The Merlot site contains numerous examples of learning objects in all subject matter areas.
| One example of a highly engaging learning object is “Who Killed William Robinson,” developed by Ruth Sandwell and John Lutz, University of British Columbia. This learning object is a simulation based on an actual historical person, William Robinson, a Black American who was murdered in British Columbia in 1868. An Aboriginal man named Tshuanhusset, also called Tom, was charged with the murder, convicted and hanged, but a closer look at the evidence challenges the guilty verdict. Students need to sift through various clues to determine who may have been the murderer.
| Click here for a learning object related to brainstorming ideas for writing.
| All of this has profound implications for helping students learn to construct knowledge through the use of digital tools. Nancy Patterson has done extensive work with her middle-school students using Storyspace™, a tool developed by Eastgate Software that is used by academics as well as writers to construct hypertexts. Patterson (2000) describes how she uses hypertext to help students define relationships in a poetry unit as well as a biography unit:
| I want my middle school students to experience this texture of possible readings and see that text is not a fixed entity. Students work toward this goal by participating in hypertext projects throughout the school year. This article will discuss two of those projects — a poetry web where students annotate a poem of their choosing, and a biography web where students select a figure from American history, research that figure, and create a hypertext web designed to inform others about that person.
We start this project at the very beginning of the school year, before the computer lab is operational. And so we begin by simply reading a collection of poems written by Native Americans and discussing them. We use the traditional reference materials to start the annotation process. I also give students large pieces of paper and after showing them a hand drawn map of a poetry annotation, I ask them to draw their own concept maps of several poems. Ultimately, they will choose one to focus on in more depth. And, using an lcd display panel (our district has yet to purchase an lcd projector) and an overhead projector, I show them hypertext maps of several poetry webs from previous years. These maps are made using Storyspace.
Other examples of Nancy Patterson’s use of Storyspace:
| The America Web
Nancy Patterson’s classroom
At the high school level, Roberta Hammett (1999) describes the examples of a Romeo and Juliet hypermedia that involves a range of different types of texts simultaneously open on the same screen that allow students to perceive intertextual connections between these different texts in terms of thematic links having to do with suicide, first love, parent-child conflicts, or despair. These texts include:
| print text (the Wordsworth sonnet, the student’s personal reflection (M.A.M), an introduction to the Styx song “Babe,” and the quicktime movie that shows scenes of ninth grade students reading Romeo and Juliet. The soundtrack is the Styx song: “Babe I’m leaving / I must be on my way … / I’ll be missing you” (Styx, 1987). These textual explorations of various moments of despair can lead the students to a deeper understanding of the Shakespeare text. Although, in composing hypermedia, they start with the Shakespeare text and bring in the media culture texts to illustrate it, in reading Romeo and Juliet they, rather, bring understandings formed in multiple experiences with media culture to the classic text.
In the Suicide strand of the hypermedia, clips from several videos and quotations from poems, novels and songs illustrate this: My Darling, My Hamburger (Zindel, 1969), “Wanting to Die (Edmund Vance Cook), “Grind” (Alice in Chains, 1995), Dead Poets Society (Weir, 1989), and several others have provided the students with understandings of suicide. Similarly in the Balcony, First Love, and Parental Conflict strands, popular culture texts demonstrate the variety and number of perspectives on the themes shared in songs and films that students bring to their reading of Shakespeare.
For Hammett, all of this involves the use of media texts to construct new knowledge:
| In composing the Romeo and Juliet hypermedia, students learned how movie soundtracks affect and change the mood, reactions, and meanings of the visual images and scenes. They experienced the effects they can create in viewers when they replaced, with several different songs, the original soundtrack of the Juliet’s funeral scene in Zefferelli’s (1968) movie version of the play. Alice in Chains’ “Grind” (1995) and “Girlfriend in a Coma” (The Smiths, 1987), when used as soundtracks for the scene, seemed to completely change our reaction to and interpretation of the scene. Our attention was focused on different visual images, and the visual images appeared to be different (movement seemed faster, and so on.) By constructing these effects themselves, students will have a more practical understanding of how professionals achieve the effects that move them as audiences.
In his essay, Jamie Myers describes further uses of hypermedia as a tool for responding to literature.
| Students can organize collections of digital texts found through search engines based on
certain themes, topics, or concepts. For example, Jeff Rice (2003) asked students to create a “handbook of cool” based on images of dress, behavior, artifacts, consumer goods, as well as texts from the 1950s to the present as a way of encouraging them to examine different cultural attitudes towards what was considered “cool” in different decades.
| Students can also use digital texts to apply various critical approaches. In a unit on feminist technologies, Cari Carpenter (2003) created a learning simulation in which groups of students representing a “feminist foundation” had to made oral presentations convincing a board to donate a million dollars to the development of technologies that would enhance women’s lives.
| And, Adrien Miles argues that Blogger sites allow for combining different forms of textual links based on Google™ searchers and links to previous messages on a site as another way of constructing knowledge, as illustrated by the “OzBlog” site.
| Accommodating for learning diversities. CAST, The Center for Applied Special Technology, an organization focusing on the use of technology to address learning diversity provides teachers with various on-line tools for accommodating to these differences. For example, they noted that for students who need additional directions or support in reading texts, digital text can be used to separate the content from the display. As a result, the same content can be varied to, for example, for on auditory aspects for the visually impaired, or tactile aspects for the auditory impaired. And, digital texts can by “tagged” with various prompts to direct students to summarize, pose questions, or visualize. Features such as headers or sidebars as well as summaries and questions can be added to help students as they process texts (see cast.org: Digital Text in the Classroom).
| One of the CAST tools, eTrekker, provides varied formats or structures of the same material for different learning needs. The on-line example displays two different examples of formats for an inquiry project for two different students.
| Developed for the students, and facilitators, of four Study Support Centres in Christchurch and Invercargill, New Zealand, wickED is a quality assured, lively learning environment, hosted by virtual characters Ed and Wiki, and full of student-friendly activities and interactives.
| wickED: Literacy stuff
| wickED: Themes Archives
| Another organization, MENO, Multimedia, Education, and Narrative Organization, provides similar assistance in terms of narrative support for differences in learners.
| Other digital media sites:
| Hypertext on the Big Screen
| Course on hypertext and literature
| Inquiry Unit: How does hypertext change literacy practices?
| Course on Reading and Writing in a Digital Age [ focus on Hypertext ]
| University of Iowa Communication Studies [ lots of links on hypertext theory ]
| Digital Narrative [ University of Maryland ]
| Center for Digital Storytelling
| Hyperizons: Hypertext Fiction [ Duke University ]
| Hyperizons: From Page to Screen [ Duke University ]
| Introduction to the Visual Arts [ Laura Ruby, University of Hawaii ]
| Computer-Mediated Learning
| English Through the Internet
| Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning
| A technology-infused English curriculum [ Coogan, P. (2000). International Electronic Journal For Leadership in Learning, 4(13) ]
| Project-based Learning [ GLEF: The George Lucas Educational Foundation ]
| Ted Nellen’s Cyber English
| Technology integration [ GLEF: The George Lucas Educational Foundation ]
| Meaningful Digital Video for Every Classroom [ Hall Davidson ]
| Hypertext fiction
| Hegirascope [ Stuart Moulthrop ]
The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot [Stephanie Strickland ]
Stained Word Window [Deena Larson ]
Webquest: Hypertext fiction
For further reading on digital literacies, hypertexts, and hypermedia:
| DeWitt, S., & Strasma, K. (1999). (Eds.), Contexts, intertexts, and hypertexts (pp. 65-116). Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.
| Kress, G., & van Leeuwen, T. (2001). Multimodel discourse: The modes and media of contemporary communication. London: Arnold.
| Landow, G. P. (1997). Hypertext 2.0: The convergence of contemporary critical theory and technology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press.
| Myers, J., & Beach, R., (2001). Hypermedia authoring as critical literacy. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 44(6), pp. 538-546.
| Myers, J., Hammett, R., & McKillop, A. M. (1998). Opportunities for critical literacy and pedagogy in student-authored hypermedia. In D. Reinking, M. McKenna, L. Labbo, & R. Kieffer (Eds.), Handbook of literacy and technology: Transformations in a post-typographic world (pp. 63-78). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
| Myers, J., Hammett, R., & McKillop, A.M. (2000). Connecting, exploring, and exposing the self in hypermedia projects. In M. Gallego & S. Hollingsworth (Eds.), What counts as literacy: Challenging the school standard (pp. 85-105). New York: Teachers College Press.
| Patterson, N. (2000). Weaving a narrative: From teens to string to hypertext. Voices from the Middle, 7 (3), 41-47.
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