Pedagogy goes to the movies: hypermedia in the cinema class room.

Pedagogy goes to the movies: hypermedia in the cinema
class room.

Adrian
Miles
Department of Communication Studies RMIT
University
adrian.miles@rmit.edu.au

1999

University of Virginia

Charlottesville, VA

ACH/ALLC 1999

editor

encoder

Sara
A.
Schmidt

Bonza is a colloquial Australian term that means, more or less, "great" or
"excellent," and is the name of an undergraduate cinema studies project at RMIT
University (). This project is an
applied research subject where students develop and exercise significant
research skills in a discipline area, and then apply this research in the
writing (or production) of complex, interlinked, hypermedia essays. In all
aspects of the project great care has been taken to ensure that the technologies
used are affordable, available, and scalable.
Cinema studies as a field of teaching has always availed itself of new
technologies. It was among the first humanities disciplines to actively use the
VCR, and regularly employs what are now known as 'multimedia' technologies to
assist in teaching. The use of new digital technologies by cinema studies, in
particular online learning resources and hypermedia, has followed what is now
the established paradigm for such work with content being distributed in various
electronic formats (CDROM and WWW for instance) but with the result that
students' experience of writing on the cinema remains firmly entrenched in a
conservative paradigm of textual description and theoretical application.
Through a peer owned online relational database, combined with hypermedia
writing, students in the bonza project are able to significantly alter their
perception and practice of cinema studies, but more generally a teaching
methodology is being explored that encourages students to develop link
'competency' producing 'knowledge objects,' which in rare instances demonstrate
'deep' linking and cognitive understanding.
Bonza consists of two related practices, the first involves students undertaking
primary research in a self nominated field relating to Australian cinema studies
where they are encouraged to use as many resources and media types as available.
This material is digitised, and all bibliographic, biographical, and production
information entered into the appropriate database. As these databases are
relational, direct connections between their own, and each others, research
becomes apparent. This allows students to not only pursue particular research
themes with ease, but it encourages collaboration as they find related material
contributed by their peers. In addition the connections that the database
establishes automatically amongst material encourages students to recognise the
manner in which their object of study is strongly interrelated (thematically,
institutionally, theoretically) and not actually a discrete or individual
entity.
This can be described as 'shallow' link building, as the connections being found
are generally literal and the result of simple string matches based on names,
and while much of the primary research students undertake has already made
significant contributions to Australian cinema historiography, it is the
possibility of writing 'deep' link structures in hypermedia that best expresses
a student's understanding of their research material.
This is a key feature of the pedagogy employed in this project, as it is the
ability to write with, and amongst, media types, and to link them freely, that
distinguishes hypermedia writing from other digital pedagogic practices. This is
the method developed by the RMIT HyperText Project where digital literacy is
defined as a writing practice rather than a reading or delivery methodology.
As the subject seeks to encourage the development of research skills and the
production of link rich 'knowledge objects' students can write up their research
adopting whatever authorial voice or style they wish. This is a pragmatic
response to the manner in which the 'traditional' academic essay tends to stymie
students in their novel use of hypermedia as a writing tool, particularly their
desire (and anxiety) to demonstrate, argue for, and legitimate a specific
theoretical thesis. The linearity that usually results, and their anxiety about
the 'outside' of their writing -- that is all that is marginal, contrary, or
simply unable to be incorporated due to media type or size -- is an aspect of
formal and traditional writing practices, that a free authorial voice partially
bypasses.
However, it is in the performance of what could be described as 'link
competency,' that is the recognition that links are not merely navigational aids
within a work but represent rhetorical or cognitive associations that are able
to generate and express logical metastructures, that students develop 'deep'
linking and write what Entwistle and Marton have described, in another context,
as "knowledge objects" (Entwistle and Marton, 1993). Research, in this model,
becomes contextually rich and writing becomes a game or strategy of bricolage --
more or less successful, which at its best is exemplary (Gee, 1998), and its
worse produces radial texts that tend towards reportage (Lim, 1998).
While most student work tends towards the two extremes of the radial and the
saturated (Lim, 1998 and 36, 1998) what remains to be developed, and it isn't
yet clear how this will be achieved in the short term, is an adequate pedagogy
of 'deep linking' where students are able to build these knowledge objects
through not only combining media types or maximising link use but through the
development of coherent thematic and contextual associations across writing and
media types. What is apparent to date is that students require considerable time
writing their material for this to happen, where rewriting needs to become a
continual rebuilding of the relations between already established parts.
This difficulty is hardly surprising given students unfamiliarity with the
medium, and the paucity of academic examples available. That this is the case in
cinema studies only exacerbates what could be characterised as the tyranny of
the word (and node) in academic hypertext practice, and while bonza is a
beginning along this path, it is hoped that new pedagogies may develop that are
able to facilitate the students' construction and identification of relations
between parts. It is clear that if we regard the digital as only a mechanism for
the delivery of pedagogy then we are not only constraining the learning that our
students might achieve, but we remain fixed within conservative genres of what
constitutes a possible academic writing practice.

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