 |
 |
Monica (and Bill F.), You raise some really interesting questions about online documents and students' reading. When we at CCT watched students work with American Memory docs in print form, we noticed that sometimes students did indeed confuse primary and secondary material. But the difficulty was minimized by the way we tended to format the printed materials: without thinking much about it, we created clear demarcations (using bold text, boxes, italics) to separate primary from secondary materials. Also, we kept the primary texts short, so that their authorship was clearly visible. Finally, the documents we had students work with tended to be somewhat dramatic, and so differed in tone from the surrounding material. All these are techniques that are fairly standard, I think, in 'prepared' classroom materials. They also tend to be missing on the net. I agree with you -- people who claim that hypertext raises altogether new problems for readers tend to overstate the case. Voice, genre and discourse style are the same in electronic and non-electronic texts, and they are hard for students to discern in both. What hypertext does, I think, is intensify the difficulty by removing many of the aids that we usually use to help readers make these distinctions. It is true, I think, that in the strange click-happy flow of cyberspace, authorship tends to become muted. Also, students have access to so many different docs that many 'primary' documents can look and sound much like 'secondary' ones (eg government reports, documentary photos, etc). And non- linearity means that we cannot necessarily 'frame' a primary text with a secondary text -- readers may skip the frame, and not know it. Further, text tends to have a uniform look on the web no matter what the genre. The visual conventions of the web are in flux and do not yet help us steer readers easily in the right directions. I think there are two main ways we can respond. The most important will be to create more skilled and active readers, regardless of medium. The number and diversity of texts that students need to negotiate well will only increase across all media. The second thing is to keep experimenting with design conventions and formats on the web that help readers identify different kinds of docs, keep authorship in mind, and generally follow more active reading techniques. I'm curious to know what you and others may think about this. Is anyone else noticing that students have trouble with primary and secondary docs in different formats? Best to all, Bill Tally