Report on the Hypermedia Studies Workshop

Mark Baechtel, English
Submitted to Associate Dean Helen Scott Formatted for the web (with slight editing) by Samuel A. Rebelsky.

I really enjoyed spending another two days at Grinnell this past week attending the hypermedia colloquium that Sam Rebelsky put together on Monday and Tuesday. As you've probably already heard (I'm running a bit behind on getting this evaluation to you), it was a lively and well-attended gathering. I enjoyed meeting more faculty, and was also very glad to meet so many folks from the library.

I should begin by admitting that I'm of two minds about hypermedia. I am both an enthusiast and a skeptic, and for this reason I may end up sounding like I'm talking a bit out of both sides of my mouth here.

First, the skeptical side: As a writer and reader, I've been pretty underwhelmed by the works of fiction I've seen created in hypermedia. Those I've read have been mostly mannered and self-indulgent, self-referential in their very nature, and I have a hard time taking them seriously as additions to the canon. Maybe I'm just a Luddite as far as fiction goes. I will concede that hyperfiction treats with some fairly interesting ideas and asks interesting questions about how meaning is delivered, but as with much metafiction, I wonder whether the destination is really worth the trip.

That said, I can move on to my positive opinions. I've written quite a few reviews of multimedia titles on CD-ROM for The Washington Post's technology, education and literary supplements, and have seen the potential value of the medium in teaching. I've seen some especially interesting titles that have great works of literature as their focus. I think these have tremendous potential for utility in teaching fiction writing. I've found that it can be difficult to get students over the initial hurdle of thinking of *themselves* as writers. When they read a published piece of writing, they don't often appreciate the fact that each piece has a compositional history--a period replete with the author's experimentation, failure, struggle, doubt and (always, always) rewriting and revision. Because students lack this understanding, they too often lose patience when they find themselves struggling with their own work. A well-designed multimedia title can seamlessly link scholarship, correspondence, still and video images (maps, photographs, drawings, author and actor readings, interviews, etc.) and audio to the text to deepen the student's understanding of a given work, mapping its history and thereby providing a schematic of the author's creative process. I believe this can help the student to bring some patience to his or her own process of composition, and to develop the craftsmanlike ethos that is vital to every successful writer of fiction.

Our group discussion fell into two basic divisions: *utility* and

• theory*. Because of my admitted prejudice against hyperfiction, I found myself falling much more into the utility camp. Were I given the means and opportunity, for the reasons I've listed immediately above, I would look for ways to use hypermedia in the classroom as a way to illustrate the way fiction is produced. If I had a student who showed a sincere interest in working with hyperfiction, I would stretch to work with that student, but I wouldn't go out of my way to teach it as a form in a fiction writing class.

Though, as I say, I came to the table with a fairly well-formed opinion that hypermedia could be a useful tool, nothing I heard over our two days convinced me that there would be great benefit in initiating a program in hypermedia studies. I was intrigued by much of our discussion, but I think a lot more discussion and a bit more education would be necessary before it would be possible to render an informed opinion about the benefits of such a department. I think there would be a lot of benefit, however, in following through on another suggestion made during the colloquium--that being that Grinnell ought to found a hypermedia lab, both to help faculty who are interested in using hypermedia pedagogically and students who are interested in learning how to produce it. This would seem to me to be the best use of Grinnell's resources, at least in the short term. If faculty were going to put together their own hypermedia course materials rather than relying on off-the-shelf titles like those I've reviewed for the Post, I think there would be a fairly steep initial learning curve, and it would be important to be able to get some guidance on what parts of a course would lend themselves well to hypermedia treatment and which wouldn't (and thus avoiding the "When you've got an expensive hammer, everything starts to look like a nail" problem). Students learning the hypermedia ropes would benefit from the resources and guidance available in a hypermedia lab.

So there you have my opinion, Helen: again, quite a lot more than a paragraph or two. I hope you won't hold the overkill against me. I look forward to seeing you this fall.

Sincerely,
Mark Baechtel