ABLE: And that leads to a major problem. We could fish in an endless electronic sea of work on the postmodern, or on any subject. Drop a line in the waters and a big bright new specimen will bite quickly every time. Isaac Walton went a-fishing to find himself as much as to find fish. You don't get the time to reflect on your inner being when you are fishing the sea of cyberspace. When you hawl in a site and link to it, you have the feeling something cognitive has happened.
CHARLIE: It has!
ABLE: Not necessarily. The danger is that you think you have accomplished something by making the connection with a site. Doing so reminds us of the kid in the library who copies a whole article without digesting the one point in it that will matter to her. She has SOMETHING in hand; it feels really substantial. Cognitively speaking, however, she has nothing. What good will it do us to have an unannotated list of WWW references as long as an arm?
BAKER: It will of course be good to have the list for ease of access in future studies....We are seeing here what might be the very core of the revolution in information. Libraries acquired their traditional aura of sanctuary because they were places for the preservation of a scarce and valued resource. When a book made it onto the shelf of the library, everyone could reasonably assume that it had passed some tests of discrimination. A book had to be accepted by a publisher, an article by a jury of peers. A teacher could send a student to the library with the reasonable conviction that, no matter what the student came out with, it would have some merit in the educational enterprise. Moreover, there never was enough material. We always drove ourselves to find more money to add more books. Evaluators judged us on the sheer number of volumes and periodicals; the judges simply assumed that any book or periodical there would have value. Now we can send a student to the Internet, where she can virtually drown in an endless array of material from all over the world.
ABLE: Yes--and what good will it be for her? Discussion lists alone go on and on, and they often are trivial or disjointed or meaningful only to the participants on the inside. How, what will she learn?
BAKER: Clearly we are at the beginning stage of a major change in the pedagogical function. She will learn from what she finds with the help of her teacher, of course. The teacher has to help her to sort out the junk, which is as easily netted as good work. The junk and the good work all come together, quickly, easily, and too abundantly. The teacher used to be the source of scarce information on a subject and on a method of getting at that subject. The teacher's precious intellectual artifacts now constitute the students' playthings of cyberspace. Volume of material and ease of access change the value of the information accessed.
ABLE: What can a teacher do about this?
CHARLIE: George Landow said something to literary critics that may help here. He posed the dilemma of hypertext for critics in his essay, What's a Critic to Do? Critical Theory in the Age of Hypertext.. Landow thinks that in a hypertext world, critics lose their claim to mastery and authority over texts. He advises them to coopt the revolution: "Write in hypertext itself." Similarly, he (we) could say to teachers, "Teach in hyperspace itself." If a student is not equipped to deal critically with the plethora of stuff that she can play with so easily on-line, a teacher's duty becomes evident.
ABLE: This is a far cry from the lectern in the hall with its tablet arm chairs and implicit reverence for authority at the front of the room. The electronic changes, consistent with the broad postmodern shift of sensibility, affect space in many ways. The medieval classroom at last may fall, done in by the Web. This is worrisome for the tradition.
CHARLIE: On the contrary. It enhances the tradition! We prize the close personal attention of the liberal arts setting. The information environment compels an even greater pedagogical commitment to interaction with the individual student. The difference is that the object of attention shifts to what is on the Web. Teacher talks about what to do about it. That talk itself can be electronic as well as face to face.
ABLE: Worrisome still. Does this mean the teacher has to become expert on everything that comes on-line? Remember, anything can come on-line. There are no juries. Why should the teacher spend time sorting out all the crap out there in advance of his student's fishing expedition?
BAKER: He shouldn't.
CHARLIE: He couldn't, anyway. There is too much ever to see totally.
BAKER: Landow saw the literary critic losing mastery and authority over texts when texts become hypertexts. His point applies more generally to all of scholarship in the postmodern world. No one is master of much, given the explosion of information, even before the Web. The electronic change simply completes the process of changing the strategies of pedagogy. Teachers become helpers in developing the student's navigational skills.
ABLE: This demeans a noble calling.
CHARLIE: Puh-lease! This redeems a noble calling! Think of the novelty, the fresh experiences with students, the horizons.
BAKER: We know THE PROGRAMME itself must behave like the new teacher. We must not merely accumulate Web references without discrimination. Our rule should be to allow nothing on the WWW reference list without a critical annotation by us. How does this contribute to our inquiry? We need to evaluate before we incorporate a new reference.
ABLE: More than we have done so far. The electronic sea is so vast that we could engineer the virtual inundation of THE PROGRAMME itself--our own special way of seeing the postmodern--simply by proliferating the links to the Web. That potential makes our project quite unstable. The work is endless.
CHARLIE: The work is enjoyable!
Talk Eleven also deals with the ideas of George Landow on hypertext.
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