XplanaZine

Hyperlinks are what the web is all about: making connections. This is the piece of web publishing that is truly new technology in the history of writing. The monks of the Middle Ages had beautiful images to decorate their manuscripts but they were stumped when it came to creating hyperlinks; even just making an index for a text in the Middle Ages was a struggle because the page numbers would change based on the size of somebody’s handwriting! But now with the Internet, we can crosslink, index and refer to other documents with a simple single click. Everything on the web has an address, and you can connect to it… you should connect to it. This is what makes the web strong.

Next question: What is the best way to get our students to value and use the web for their schoolwork?

Here’s what I do: give the students annotated links and ask them to write annotations about the websites to share with the other students in class. The world is filled with links - Google will gladly give you a billion of them - but annotated links are harder to come by, and they are invaluable. There’s a reason why we invented blurbs for book jackets: everybody wants to know what’s inside. The same with a website. Websites need blurbs, and there is no reason why teachers and students cannot collaborate on writing those blurbs together!

So every week I give my students a page of Internet resources, links with annotations that I recommend to them for further study. It is surprising how many students will explore these links, and one of their weekly discussion assignments is to come back to the rest of the class with observations about the websites that they visited. Here is a typical student comment about one of the websites that was a suggested link for our Brothers Grimm week:

There were a lot of good sites for this week, but I went to Dan Ashliman’s page, a professor from the University of Pittsburgh who has a huge and extensive page devoted to Electronic versions of folklore and mythology. I actually found this wonderful site at the beginning of the year when I was looking for stuff for my storybook project, and it’s great! The page pertaining to this week is http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm.html#studieslinks where Ashliman has compiled tons of information about the Grimm brothers and their fairy and folk tales. First there is an interesting section on the lives of the Brothers Grimm and then a listing of the works they wrote, plus links to other sites about them if you want to know more. The best part are the “Studies of specific tales”. He picks out certain stories from the Grimm brothers tales and gives comparative versions of that tale from all over the WoRLD! So if you are like me and can’t get enough of your favorite tales (like say Godfather Death, which I was reintroduced to this week :o) then you can go to this section and see all sorts of different versions of the story from different regions.

Here is a website report from the week devoted to Islamic folktales in the poetry of Rumi:

The website that I visited was http://www.khamush.com. I really liked this site. It offered more of Rumi’s poems and some background information as well. I especially liked the fact that they classified the poems that Rumi wrote into different categories by subject (such as love poems, passion poems, and mystical poems to name a few). The site also offers daily quotes and daily poems so to give the visitor a sense of the different philosophies of Rumi. But my favorite part of the site is the glossary. I know this may sound somewhat weird, but I think that an important part of appreciating the art (whether it be poetry, graphics, or actions) is understanding the language used by the author of the work. This definitely clears up some of the words that I did not understand all the way in our readings. This website also helps to educate the visitor on the history of Rumi and his followers. This site would be very useful if someone wished to learn more about the life of Rumi, his philosophies, and his legacy.

I am consistently impressed with how carefully the students describe their website experiences - the trick is to get them in the habit of reflecting about the sites that they visit! Here is the question I ask them each week about the website they choose to report on - it’s simple, but seems definitely to get them to pay attention to what they find:

8. Website report. Did you visit some of the websites listed in the Additional Resources for this class? Provide a link to the site, and a brief description of its contents. What are the strengths and weaknesses of this website? Who would find this website useful? What did you use this website for? What did you find there? Do you think you will visit this website again?

Yes, that sounds a lot like the book reports we all used to write in sixth grade… and there was a reason why we all had to write book reports in sixth grade - providing a summary report is an important study skill and a crucial tool for sharing information with your fellow students and colleagues. The same is true of websites: students need to get used to writing website reports.

I hear a lot of complaints from faculty members that college students don’t know how to use the web, can’t distinguish quality sites from dreck, and so on. Well, let’s do something about that! The first step is for faculty members to prepare an annotated list of high-quality recommended web resources for any class that they are teaching, and then get the students to interact with those sites in a constructive way. If we can be a bit more “hyper” about the way we work with hyperlinks in our teaching, our students will dazzle us with their web savvy. They are already the connoisseurs of every mp3 file repository in existence - now let’s get them to link up with other valuable resources online!