Welcome to English for the 21st century

By Kevin Bushweller

It's Manhattan's frenzied morning rush hour and yellow taxis are zigzagging on the streets outside Murry Bergtraum High School. Inside the school, Jasmine Acosta is zigzagging around the unpredictable, fast-paced world of hypertext literature.

Jasmine, a junior in Ted Nellen's Cyber English class at the New York City school, is sitting at a computer showing a visitor the literary links between a series of haiku -- short, Japanese-style poems -- that she composed. When the slight 16-year-old clicks on a highlighted word, the computer dashes from one poem to another, allowing her to instantly elaborate on the relationships between the imagery and themes in her poems.

In a poem titled "White as Snow," Jasmine writes, "The snow fell lightly / Its snowflakes wandered in circles / The streets became white." Clicking on streets, she is immediately sent to a poem titled "Chaos": "The cars did not move / People became impatient / It turned to chaos." Clicking on the underlined words in "Chaos" leads her to still other poems or back to "White as Snow" -- a zigzagging of the mind that can be both fascinating and irritating.

But is it educational?

If this rapid mind movement disturbs your literary sensibilities, you are not alone. The emergence of hypertext literature in public high schools and colleges is seen by some as an artistic and intellectual sellout to our frenetic, technology-driven society -- the death-knell of good literature.

Others, scoffing at such criticism, say that using hypertext to teach literature and writing is a natural evolution in a changing world. They believe the medium is already spawning a new genre of digital storytelling that has artistic and interactive powers never before available to the readers and writers of traditional printed works.

Whatever the outlook, hypertext has the potential to alter forever the way literature and writing are taught in your schools.

What is hypertext?

In traditional literary genres -- novel, short story, or poem -- the reader follows a seemingly linear path from beginning to middle to end. But in the brave new world of hypertext, where words can be complemented by sound, video, and graphics, you don't necessarily have to read in a sequential order.

You might be reading the first line in a poem, for instance, and a reference to a place or a person in that first line interests you. Wanting to know more, you click on the word and dart to contextual information describing that person or place in text, sound bites, pictures, or video. You can return to the original poem if you like or go exploring in different directions for more information.

In the digital novel, hypertext has created a world filled with alternative possibilities. Like the "choose your own adventure" novels popular with children, the hypertext novel prompts the reader to choose which branch of the story to follow. In the simplest sense, imagine you are reading a printed novel in which the pages are cut in half horizontally. You can choose to read only the top half of each page and reach a sad ending, or the bottom half and reach a happy ending.

Hypertext fiction is like that only more so. In afternoon, a story -- arguably the most famous hypertext fiction work to date -- author Michael Joyce, a writing professor at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., creates a web of possible story lines that begins with a man who fears that his ex-wife and son may have died in a car accident. How the novel ends depends on the links readers follow. Using a hypertext writing program called Storyspace, Joyce constructed 539 computer nodes and 915 links before his piece was completed.

The need for so much computer coding and programming troubles some literature teachers, who see it as diluting the power of words in favor of emphasis on technology and glitz. In Nellen's Cyber English class, for instance, students have to learn Unix to write the coding for their projects, and they have to understand a DOS-based program to do the editing. They also must become adept users of ClarisWorks.

Diana Wyllie Rigden, a former high school English teacher who now serves as codirector of the teacher education program at the Council for Basic Education, says the danger of hypertext is that it's likely to de-emphasize the beauty of words, the nuances of authors' word choices, and the natural flow of the reading experience. She says kids also need to learn how to have intellectual experiences that occur without a computer -- like reading a book -- because those experiences encourage the kind of reflective thinking often missing in the fast-paced, feedback-driven world of computers.

"The experience of reading from a computer screen is very different than reading from a book, and that needs to be really thought about," says Rigden. "The danger with educators is that they're so quick to jump on board with stuff like this without thinking about the consequences."

Jordan Katz, a Columbia University graduate student training to be an English teacher, has reservations, too. As she roams around the rows of computers in Nellen's class, looking over students' shoulders and answering questions about The Tempest by William Shakespeare, Katz says she is impressed by how well-behaved the kids are and by their interest in using computers to study literature. But she believes the heavy emphasis on the technology goes a little too far.

"For me, it's not ideal," she says. "I think it's important they read actual books. But the biggest problem I see is that there's no oral dialogue -- the kids just work at computers. They need to hear each other talk [about what they are reading], and they don't get that in here."

Nellen isn't fazed by such criticism. He's heard it before, he says, and he expects to hear it again. "Using hypertext is very much like going into outer space," says Nellen, a self-described hypertext evangelist. "It's unnerving. You get lost. You don't know if you're going up or down. Hypertext takes the equilibrium away."

As a consequence, Nellen says, "the activity in this room drives some teachers absolutely crazy. It's chaos. I have teachers come and visit, and they don't even want to stay in the room for very long. They go back to their traditional classrooms where they are God."

Hypertext people

Nellen says he was not always a hypertext evangelist. "I was probably the most vocal person against computers," he says, recalling his school's initial forays into technology. "I'm an English teacher; I love literature. But one light bulb went on after another, and it became a journey of discovery."

Nellen seems well suited to hypertext. He talks quickly, switching from one topic to another with relative ease. Interruptions -- the phone ringing, students popping into his office, meetings called at the last minute -- don't seem to fluster him.

Early in his adult life, Nellen says, he learned to make order out of chaos. When he served in Vietnam as a military policeman, he says, he was constantly called on to assess difficult situations quickly before moving on to other problems -- not unlike maneuvering through hypertext.

His tiny office -- where there is barely enough room for two people to sit on folding chairs -- shows his comfort level with chaos. Computer discs are scattered everywhere, along with literature texts and cassettes of The Tempest. The coffee pot -- permanently stained from overuse -- sits on an old wood table below shelves stacked to the ceiling with books, computer hardware, and a shoe box containing a hammer, pliers, screw drivers and a can of WD40 oil.

So it is anything but surprising that Nellen is a disciple of chaos theory, the idea that everything in the world is interconnected in some strange, unlikely way. But don't misunderstand, Nellen says; he might believe in chaos theory, but he still expects students to read the complete works they are studying. The difference is that they approach the reading in a way that allows them to explore tangents and layer their understanding with personal meaning and cultural context.

"We, in life, are hypertext people," he says. "In conversation, an idea or a word pops up, and we check out the tangent, then we go back to where we were. It's reminiscent of Robert Frost's poem, 'The Road Not Taken.' With hypertext, we can hit a button and take a different road, return from where we started, and then take another path."

Cultural shift

Janet H. Murray, a senior research scientist in the Center for Educational Computing Initiatives at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and author of Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, is equally optimistic about the role of hypertext in the teaching and writing of literature. Murray, who has a doctorate in English from Harvard and teaches an interactive fiction writing class at MIT, envisions "a new kind of storyteller, one who is half hacker, half bard."

In her book, she writes that "the spirit of the hacker is one of the great creative wellsprings of our time, causing the inanimate circuits to sing with ever more individualized and quirky voices; the spirit of the bard is eternal and irreplaceable, telling us what we are doing here and what we mean to each other."

Some observers are skeptical about the overly optimistic view of cyber literati like Murray and Nellen, however. And they question the assumptions that printed books are limited by linear thinking.

"The supposed linearity of text is vastly overstated," says Richard Lehrer, a cognitive scientist in the educational psychology department at the University of Wisconsin. "Look at the work of James Joyce and T.S. Eliot -- there's a lot of moving back and forth, a lot of cross-talk going on when you read their works."

Hypertext is expanding the definition of literature, from words to a hybridization of words, images, and sound, says Lehrer, who does not see that as an altogether bad evolution, as long as it serves to help people better understand themselves and the world around them.

The trouble is, he says, that most hypertext designs being used in schools now are of poor quality. They simply reformat existing information, rather than layering it with better context to provide deeper understanding.

Plus, he says, the simple issue of portability cannot be ignored. You can take a book anywhere, and it won't crash, he points out. That's one reason he doesn't believe the traditional printed novel will be replaced by the digital story any time soon.

Strangely enough, hypertext author Michael Joyce agrees.

"As time goes on, I'm less and less likely to use this talk of succession [about the traditional novel being replaced by hypertext]," says Joyce, one of a growing cadre of college professors teaching hypertext fiction. "But I do think we're in the midst of a huge cultural shift."

That cultural shift, he says, has resulted in an increasing emphasis on offering multiple points of view on the same scene or topic, examining the fragmented existence of postmodern life, and realizing the vast possibility of consequences in the choices we make. Hypertext, says Joyce, is a natural medium for examining those issues from a literary perspective.

And he does not believe, as some do, that the emphasis on alternate possibilities in hypertext writing allows readers to retreat from confronting difficult circumstances -- the tendency, in other words, to always choose the happy ending. If written and designed well, he says, hypertext stories confront those difficulties more truthfully and in greater complexity by forcing the reader to weigh the reality of each possible scenario.

Illumination and insight

In Bette James' Illuminations of Literature class at Hoxie High School in Hoxie, Kan., hypertext has had the unlikely effect of sparking a renewed interest in writers such as Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, and Walt Whitman. The class also studies more contemporary authors such as Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison.

The class uses an IBM Ultimedia Knowledge Platform, an IBM Ultimedia computer, a laserdisc player, and a color monitor. The software package is Illuminated Books and Manuscripts, a database of literature that also has creative tools that allow input of text, audio, and graphics to enhance the meaning of a piece of literature or a student's own writing. Students create "illuminations" of a piece of literature -- that is, they design multimedia projects with the purpose of adding context and meaning to the original text of a novel, short story, or poem. James uses the students' illuminations to introduce authors to other classes she teaches.

The class was working on illuminating Shakespeare's Henry V this year. The complete text of Henry V was available on the computer screen, but the students also had paperback copies of the play to use in homework assignments.

"The whole concept of making kids sit down and read a Shakespeare play from beginning to end isn't going to work," she says. "And it never did."

What does work, she says, is enticing them with hypertext. If kids see scenes acted out or hear them read by actors on the screen, or if they read something that helps them understand the cultural connections between now and then, James says, they want to know more, and that encourages them to return to the text.

"You get more insight into everything," says Holly Ochs, a senior in James' class.

Holly created a hypertext illumination of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. She had already read the book the summer before. "For me, it's easier to read a book and then go through the illuminations," she says. "But for other students, the illumination captures an interest that wouldn't be there otherwise."

At first, Ochs says, she was intimidated by the coding and programming required to do the illumination. "When I looked at it, I said, 'Oh my gosh, how am I going to do this?'"

But the class had developed a step-by-step manual for using the technology, and Ochs' fears that she would spend more time mastering the software than analyzing the literature soon dissipated. She says the class developed her literary skills as well as giving her more confidence in using technology.

The power of this combination of writer and techie -- Murray's vision of the new storyteller as part hacker and part bard -- lies at the heart of Nellen's Cyber English class. You can see the combination at work in the classroom, where frayed copies of The Great Gatsby, a 20th-century novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, are stacked near a poster on a wall that says, "Make your own video and you might see it on Showtime." The chalkboard is covered with computer coding instructions; and, on the orange pipes that run just below the ceiling, the school's web site address is written in black magic marker.

"I like this more than regular English classes because I like computers," says Kariym Burke, a lanky, soft-spoken boy who hopes to study computer graphics in college.

Like Jasmine, Kariym has developed a series of haiku linked by hypertext. In one, he writes "The sun reflected / Its big bright light blinded me / The wind woke me up." After he clicks on "wind," the computer dashes to a different poem, which reads: She blew in my face / Making me dream of beauty / Is it really true?"

All the underlined words are linked to a different poem, and if you go through all of them, you find yourself winding back and forth between five poems Kariym has written. It's dizzying to the novice, but Kariym says it flows perfectly in his mind. "I look at it as if everything comes together as one," says Kariym, in a whisper to avoid the curious ears of his friends nearby. "Everything relates to everything else, somehow."

Kevin Bushweller is a senior editor of Electronic School and The American School Board Journal.