Hypermedia authoring as critical authoring (Myers & Beach, 2001) makes think to a book I’m reading for review:
Opportunity House: Ethnographic stories of mental retardations (Angrosino, 1998). One of the striking similarities is the principle of immersing mentioned by Myers and Beach. Angrosino has to conduct a research on mentally retarded people. The first thing he did was to immerse in the world of his subjects, not as a researcher but as a volunteer first. This made it possible for him to engage in their activities and understand them. He said that contrarily to received wisdom, he came to realize that mentally retarded people have very meaningful things to say.
As far as I’m concerned, this principle of immersing is appealing to me. I think that in the context of classroom, this principle will have a very important impact on the classroom understanding. Understanding our students’ culture and getting them to understand the interaction between what is going outside the classroom and what is going on inside are enabled by this strategy of immersing. Of course, this has an impact on how classroom activities and tasks, especially literacy ones are performed.
This led me to discuss another strategy mentioned by Myers and Beach, that is, representing. According to the author, “Students use hypermedia to represent their own beliefs or to explain how texts are used to represent worlds to achieve certain purposes”. This reminds me of the Super Heroes by Dyson (1997). In this book, Dyson explains how children use symbols like superheroes in popular culture to achieve a sense of social belonging and personhood and to construct their social identity. Knowledge is definitely constructed by using the cultural and social tools available.
However, I think that we need to pay attention to the critical aspect of the cultural and social tools used to construct knowledge. As the editor to Myers and Beach’s article, these tools “provide affordances and constraints”. Even if hypermedia enlarges the possibilities to construct knowledge and reduces the limitations of our cultural and social tools, we still need to be aware of the fact that these tools will always pose some constraints as culture has an evolving aspect we usually tend to forget.
