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Home Page of Leon James
Go to a slightly longer version of this article by Leon James
March 1995
COURSE-INTEGRATED USE OF
THE WORLD WIDE WEB
Introduction
This is the second semester that I making full integrated use of the
university's online telecommunications facilities with two undergraduate
seminars in psychology. Students, all of whom are computer novices, learn to
use e-mail on their UNIX account, become familiar with Gopher on the Internet,
and create their own Home Page on the World Wide Web. Weekly assignments and
reports are submitted online, typed by the student, translated in hypertext
format (called HTML), and hotlinked to the reports of other students and the
Internet. Anyone browsing the Web world wide, or is searching with WebCrawler
or other client, may discover the interlinked student reports.
This course-integrated telecommunications activity has two valuable
instructional features, in my view: (1) involving students in reading each
other's work and commentaries, and (2) creating a collective, virtual
'super-document' out of the students' individual and independent efforts.
These features transform the students' work into an intellectual contribution
through their participation in a generational cyberspace learning community for
one semester. In the course of the semester, students produce an average of 30
pages of online text or about 100 screens. Each semester a new generation of
students add to the super-document and link their writing into its hypertext
fabric. This process simulates the growth and evolution of a virtual learning
community in cyberspace. At any time in the future former students may
re-visit their Home Page architecture through the Internet, and see how it has
been weaved or integrated into the evolving and living fabric of the
super-document.
The Richness of Hypertext
The links created by students are paragraph specific. Each hypertext link is a
permanent physical embodiment of a mental connection seen by a student between
one's own idea and someone else's idea. The more links and comments that are
created by students to each other, the richer, and more 'virtual' the hypertext
super-document becomes. Richness and complexity of the virtual super-document
continue to grow and expand as generations of students are interlinked with
each new semester's group.
Probably no two people ever read a hypertext super-document in the same
sequence of paragraphs or screens, so that students in the same course do not
necessarily see the same content, since content depends on the links one
explores online. The number of links and their possible permutation sequences
produced by just 20 students in one semester's work is astronomical and cannot
be exhausted even by the most ardent cybernaut browsers. This great fluidity
and amorphousness of hypertext super-documents raises important instructional
issues which educators will have to carefully research. I can see some
potential problems in terms of defining course content and disciplinary area
within a virtual instructional environment. I believe we'll be able to cope
with this problem and turn it into an intellectual advantage that fosters
diversity, freedom, and unprecedented creativity.
Empowering
Students for Creative Expression
A student may write a paper on a self-modification experiment to become
a more careful driver. By itself, the paper is limited, even if it has some
citations to the literature. In hypertext, the student may add a number of
links on every screen, greatly enriching the document. For instance, the
student may express the opinion that "it's difficult to be objective about
one's own driving style," and then goes on to create five visible links
(automatically highlighted on the screen) which, when selected by a browsing
reader, takes the person to five new locations, as follows.
Journey through Student Reports
The first hypertext link takes you to a 10-page document located in Seattle, a
pre-publication copy of a conference paper on driving behavior. The second
link wisks you to an FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) file located in
Washington and kept up to date weekly by an automobile news group and archived
in automated LISTSERVS to which you can make links or mail yourself a copy on
e-mail. Here you have the opportunity of exploring other items such as some
driving videos produced by AAA and traffic reports by various national and
local services. As you return to the student's document (assuming you don't
continue to wander endlessly until you run out of time), you are catapulted
through the third link to an electronic magazine article available online in
full text and maintained by the commercial HotWired publication. The
fourth link lands you in a student's report who took the course last semester,
and who described a similar self-modification experiment in which the goal was
to become more aware of one's thoughts and feelings while driving from home to
the UH campus. That student's report has additional links to other students
that semester, which you can explore before deciding to come back to the
student's report you started with. The fifth link takes you to a comment on
the role of self-verbalization while driving, written by the instructor in a
published article, a copy of which I made available on my Home Page. As you
browse through my article you encounter hotlinks to other students' comments of
some paragraph, as well as links to other articles by the instructor and by
other scientists.
New Golden Age of Education
In effect, the student who authored this report has made two parallel
intellectual contributions. One is the content of the paragraphs in the
document; the other is the information journey we are made to travel as we
traverse the five links put there by the student. Extend this example in many
different ways for various topics, activities, and media, and you'll soon
realize how educationally powerful, how culturally enriching the new
telecommunications technology can be. It is evident that hypertext online is
initiating a new Golden Age of education. In this new instructional
super-medium, the professor is no longer the sole influence that determines
what is important or what is related to what. The curriculum is now more open,
less fully predictable. In part, the medium has become the message, and the
student its messenger. I can live with that. It's good.
Students as a
Cyberspace Learning Communitybr>
I foster an informal discussion atmosphere in class and I openly rely on the
group's solidarity with each other to get an individual unstuck when in
trouble. The faster learners help the slower, and within four to five weeks
90% of the class is on board, surfing the Internet and creating World Wide Web
documents. Yes, you can hear them complaining a lot, very excitedly but also
very happily. In my 25 years of teaching on the Manoa campus, I have never
seen more student enthusiasm and pride for learning than in my
course-integrated telecommunications classes. The written student comments
reveal that many experience a changed self-image that no longer is tainted with
depressive technophobia. I feel terrific when I read their expression of
heartfelt and genuine appreciation for the course. In this new medium,
students are challenged to find their own voices, to express their own thoughts
and feelings in a public and scholarly context. Students see their own writing
on the World Wide Web, impressed by the fact that their writings are, in a real
sense, "published" and available to millions of browsers. Students are in
effect modeling the role of author, scholar, and scientist. They are thus
awakened and introduced to intellectual citizenship.
Jump Right In!
For me, the great moment arrived a few months ago when the College of Social
Sciences, installed a World Wide Web server in Porteus Hall (the CSS server:
www.soc.hawaii.edu), under the management of Harry Partika who is responsible
to Dean Richard Dubanoski. With the expert and friendly technical advice of
Webmaster Eric Hagen and Kevin Bogan, volunteer Internet coach, I was able for the first
time, to create an instructional set-up that truly met my vision for a
generational cyberspace learning community. With this approach now in place, I
feel that the University of Hawaii is soaring ahead into the 'futures of
education', and I encourage my colleagues to start experimenting with this new
amazing educational technology.
The age of the global virtual university is now upon us. This may all seem
intimidating to uninitiated instructors, and hopelessly complicated or foreign.
It appears to be all these things, true, but this is only during the
accommodation phase. I started from scratch as a typical middle-aged
technophobic professor, but I had the strong belief that I must join the
information age or become second rate. The library played a big role in helping
me overcome my initial technophobic aversions (and fears), with the
introduction of the online catalog and CD-ROM databases. Subsequently I
worked up enough courage to use the PLATO system on campus for
course-integrated student online socializing. (You may see a report of that
experience in the UHCC Newsletter, 1991, 28(2), 12-14, or browse
a copy with hotlinks to student reports which you can view by pointing your
browser to http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/club/leonj/leonpsy/instructor/leonplato1.html.
(To the uninitiated: at the UNIX prompt, type lynx, space, then the address
above starting with http -- that's all!).
The campus technocrats and administrators are doing their job by installing and
placing at our disposal the marvelous capabilities of the Internet and the
World Wide Web. Thank you! Now it is up to us faculty to make use of it in
effective and creative ways. I invite you to browse through the cyberspace
created by my students. Just point your Netscape or Lynx browser to the
following URL address and enjoy!
URL: http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/club/leonj/leonpsy/leon.html
___________________________________________________________
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Professor Leon James (formerly "Jakobovits") has been Professor of Psychology
at the UH since 1971. His e-mail address is leon@uhunix.uhcc.hawaii.edu.
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