In both the internet evaluation section and the hypertext classes,
students reaching Bs and Cs produced more thoughtful, more thorough
and more imaginative work than students gaining As for thier paper
assignments, in-class work and journals. Only two of the students
gaining As for the whole course ever reached A-grade work in the computer
units.
Hubris proved part of the problem for A students. The exercises seemed
simple, and several adopted the attitude that 'anyone' could work
with a computer, leaving themselves little time to complete exercises
thoroughly. They often looked for models they could copy, a tactic
which they exploited successfully in traditional papers, rather than
completing all the exercises.
The pitfalls glared from the final hypertext submissions. While students
working hard to hang on to their Bs and Cs used the strengths of the
medium to sharpen their analysis, the A students, and some at the
high end of the B range, undertook high-quality acts of mimicry by
copying the set-up of the dominant internet model, the commercial
site. As a result, the hypertext version of the advertising analysis
read much more like an advertisment (CLICK here to buy Levi jeans;
See our spring colors HERE, etc) than an analysis.
The computer lab also challenged their established expertise within
the classroom power structure and some students 'opted out' as the
process grew more demanding, although finding 'reasons' for doing
so. One excellent writer noted in her journal, for example:-
"I did a net search, but didn't have time to browse through
all the sites it listed, and when I narrowed my search I never got
any hits. So, I decided that I would wait until I was at home to do
the research, but every time I tried to log on the system was busy.
I'm getting rather annoyed with the whole idea of the web. There is
so much useless crap on it now that I have to take at least five minutes
per site to distinguish what is fact and what is just some person's
or corporation's ramblings."
As we were using class time for the computer work, I included it
as a critical part of class participation grade. If I taught the course
again, I should grade it as a separate section of the class, both
to recognize the intense effort the work demanded of those students
who completed it all, and to spur the more accomplished traditional
writers in the class to a thorough investigation of the medium.
My caveat, of course, given the size of the sample, is that all conclusions
are tentative. I, however, was astonished at the multiple thinking,
researching and writing tasks we activated while working with the
web. They complicated my rather linear view of a clean, comprehensive
lunge into the information age, but offered dynamic access to baseline
skills necessary to college work, and transformed students' first
stab at sustained research into a fast-moving, collaborative venture,
which I should like to exploit in building further computer units
for a 101 class. In the end, I had taken some of the 'fun' out of
computers but I hope I had also injected some 'fun' into the tasks
of thinking, researching and writing in the future. At least one student
thought so...
"Computers fascinate me...By being able to relate schoolwork
to something I enjoy, it makes learning a lot easier, as well as
fun."
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