The Electronic Readings Group: Generating Hypertext Dialogue Streams with Folio Views

The Electronic Readings Group: Generating Hypertext
Dialogue Streams with Folio Views

Don
Lavoie
David H. & Charles G. Koch Professor of Economics The Institute of Public Policy
George Mason University
dlavoie@gmu.edu

Theodor
Holm
Nelson
Division of Environmental Information Keio
University
ted@xanadu.net

Mark
Gilbert
Dept of Sociology and Anthropology George
Mason University
mgilbert@gmu.edu

1999

University of Virginia

Charlottesville, VA

ACH/ALLC 1999

editor

encoder

Sara
A.
Schmidt

This paper explores the pedagogical advantages of a certain sort of graduate
course, which will be called an "Electronic Readings Group." It draws from
experience at George Mason University in teaching 10 different graduate courses
(some offered several times) with a particular software tool, Folio Views. The
presentation will offer a demo of the kinds of learning experiences supported by
this teaching environment and outline some of the main difficulties and
advantages of this mode of teaching.
In the GMU courses that have been run in this way, the readings are made
available (on diskette or CD ROM) and installed in the student's home computer,
together with a run-time license version of Folio Views. Students use the
hypertext markup features of the software to work "off-line" on their own
personal copy of the readings. They annotate, categorize, and make various kinds
of links in the reading material, then periodically swap files so they can do
the next chunk of reading through the markups of fellow students. In this way a
kind of layering occurs where the files accrue a rich set of comments and links
so that the participant is no longer only reacting to the original text but now
are as much involved in "reacting to the reactions" of other readers.
The experience of hypertext-based learning can be usefully compared with the
classic readings group. The readings group is one of the most successful
traditions of humanistic education. A (small) group of serious scholars get
together with their own copies of a book and engage in a detailed discussion of
its meaning and significance. What makes this classic readings group a richer
experience than the typical modern classroom is the intimate relationship
between the verbal discussion among the students and the texts being studied.
One reason this old-fashioned model has been losing ground to other models is
that it is not very scaleable. The hypertext-based course model we have been
using at George Mason University can be seen as more similar to the classic
readings group than the modern classroom. The electronic readings group may be
able to achieve even more intimacy between the participants and the texts being
read than can occur in the classic readings group, yet without the scaling
limitations. All human dialogue necessarily takes place within specific
technological and social contexts. The "richness" that we seek in some kinds of
dialogues, especially in the humanities, often requires a context that supports
the ability to connect quickly and conveniently to specific formulations in
words of the complex ideas under discussion. What makes the classic readings
group effective is in part the proximity of the participants to the text under
discussion.
The problem so far has been that those software environments (such as the web)
that support wide-area access to a single copy of a shared text, do not yet
provide easy-to-use markup tools for the reader. On the other hand those CD ROM
based environments (such as Folio Views) that provide the reader with a rich
assortment of markup tools do not seem to support the convenient sharing of the
markups across a wide area. Our solution at GMU to this dilemma has been to use
a feature of Folio Views that is called the "shadowfile" to permit a process for
the sharing of text markups. Shadowfiles are the electronic equivalent of a
transparency overlay to a paper document. They were developed in Folio with the
intention of permitting readers of a networked hypertext to make private,
personalized markups which need not be incorporated into the shared network
copy. At GMU we have conceived of a completely different way of using
shadowfiles, where they are used to create "dialogue streams." The reading
materials for the course are distributed at the outset of the semester on CD
ROM, typically in one large (say, 15 megabytes) Folio Views file. All course
work is done in the much smaller (by the end of the semester about 1 or 2
megabytes) shadowfiles, which can be transported around via modem. Working with
shadowfiles "on" the master file (of which everyone has an identical, locked
copy) allows the underlying texts to remain inviolate, while all sorts of
markups are added to what appears to the next downstream reader of the
shadowfiles. Each shadowfile snakes its way through the class, accumulating
layers of markups along the way. The collection of current shadowfiles is always
available at the course web site, so that through the semester an increasingly
rich set of alternative "readings" of the original texts are available for
consideration.
In the typical modern classroom the reading and writing assignments are done in a
monological way, the student is on his own as he tries to grapple with the
readings and tries to compose a piece of writing. The social interactivity that
takes place happens separately from both the writing and reading, since it
occurs in the physical classroom. But in the classroom those readings are no
longer ready-to-hand, so that the texts may be vaguely alluded to, but cannot be
specifically linked to. It is difficult to directly tie the class discussion to
the readings or to the ideas the student is trying to formulate in the writing
assignments. Intimacy with other persons can take place, but not at the same
time as, and in a way that is interwoven with, intimacy with the texts. What
makes the classic readings group a richer experience than the ordinary classroom
is the fact that the texts under discussion are ready-to-hand, are at ones'
fingertips. It makes the interpersonal process also an intertextual one. A
hypertext-based course can capture and even enhance this textual intimacy. The
readings and writings are tightly connected to the interpersonal social
interaction process. The class discussion is, so to speak, taking place inside
of the books.