Associative Thinking in Monster Website

 In the "conditions" link from passage 1 of Guide to Monster, the student highlights in the second paragraph in order to amplify understanding of the background conditions that lead the author Kody Scott to decide he must "evolve or perish." If we follow that link we find the student asserting that Kody Scott deems societal conditions beyond the family, particularly media representations of violence, most influencing in his path towards gangs. Note the use of definitional imagery: "Boondocks" cartoon panel depicts suburban vs urban environs for the newly moved black family whose children's remarks ironically fly in the face of the "warm embrace" suggested for suburbia and contrast it with "jacking" a car to return to Chicago.

The close up photo chosen to depict Monster Kody (who currently uses the Afrikan Nationalist name Sanyika Shakur) also defines by picturing a thoughtful Shakur.

As well as the long essay, the student hyperlinks to many other embedded pages.

To see one example of how the connective thinking emerges, we can follow the link onthat page on "Mass Media" and see how the student interprets and relates the writer's passage to other passages in the same text and to other pieces read in the course, in particular an article by Susan Faludi on Ghetto Stars. The student writes that media attention (magazine and t.v interviews) after Scott/Shakur's book is released and he is out of prison reinforce the attraction to violence.

The text the student writes is also cunningly illustrated with a child playing with a toy gun as he watches television.

Moving to a more analytical level, The student writer notes that media attention concentrates on "gruesome details of their actions" not on causes.

Student Web Homepage on Beowulf

 Image source: http://www.lone-star.net/literature/beowulf/beowulf2.htm

Screen shot of Warrior link

 Evidence of Defining

 Screeen Shot of Education link

 Shows Evidence of Connective Thinking

 Student Website on Monster: Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member

 Student web page: http://www.georgetown.edu/users/acg7.html

 Screen shot of Conditions from Passage 1

Defining

 Screen Shot of Societal Flaws

 Connective and Associative Thinking

 Screen Shot of Mass Media and Violence

 Associative Thinking

Final Thoughts ( so far!)

 I have looked back on the web project and on the useful critique I got from VKP Triad members and made some assessments on how effective I think the project has been. I wrote a short piece for Engines of Enquiry Summer 2003 in which I concluded:

"Thus, I'm given feedback by my VKP co-researchers on what I can do to capitalize on what appears to be an effective (if exhausting) method of teaching close reading. If this student-led examination of one or two pages can help students see that every page of text (like a leaf on a tree) represents and connects to or distinguishes itself from the larger forest of ideas, then they should be better able to apply these interpretive skills to thicker and richer arguments about texts and themes and, in this case, about the role of violence in societies and over time.

This useful critique showed that after the websites have been created, some much-needed lag time needs to take place so that professor and students can read the materials to produce more probing and more deeply analytical insights. While I offered time for revision of sites, I think this resulted mostly in formatting and technology changes and some increase in connective work from passage to passage. A second revision time asking for more analysis might benefit my desire that students use the associative thinking to produce more critically analytical essays. This final stage might even be done as a non-web project. The huge demands of mastering the technology of web page creation and the closeness of the task to other late semester demands in this course and in their 4 others does not make for an ideal situation for higher-ordered analysis. The groups who created both these sites discussed on this poster had (all but one) no prior web page experience. As first-year students they were also somewhat green on using textual evidence to support arguments. They revealed in discussions that though many were in Advanced Placement English classes in high school they had not written argumentative papers built on close reading through citing of textual passages nor on using secondary sources. They typically wrote for an hour in class about a given passage in a novel or on a general thematic topic that mirrored the types of questions they might see on an AP exam.

The hypertextual amplification project has at the least given students a sample of the complexity a writer faces when composing. All the possibilities of a meaning of a word, phrase, situation that the writer has experienced meets the knowledge base not only of the current reader, but of readers' abilities to access prior and concurrent information about that issue or event. Education, hero, societal conditions, while each is a broad and rather amorphous word or phrase when first explored by these students, has become a series of (we hope) interconnected particularities. That they can go beyond definition and connection to associate these words with more thorough questioning and analysis may at least be visualized if not achieved through their web productions."

Hypertext Assignment 
 In your Literature and Writing Workshop, your group will create passages of historical, pictorial, and other contextual materials to amplify and analyze a selected passage of text from one of the four texts in the course. These projects require skills in defining, connecting, synthesizing and analyzing materials as well as technological adequacy in preparing and mounting images and text. Your group will make class presentations (20 minutes) in November demonstrating your findings and amplification of the text passage.

In class read over the passages selected from Beowulf, Frankenstein, Monster, and Dead Man Walking. Circle any words or phrases which you think have promise for depiction or further exploration. Circle, as well, things you do not know.

These can be items/ideas that, once defined, are easily visualized or which connect well with other passages in the same text, across texts, or with themes of the course.

These circlings represent what an active reader would be puzzling with or what such a reader would be associating and connecting to other passages/texts/sources of knowledge.

Your group web page will show a hypertext amplification of the textual passage relating it to the whole text, to the writer (consider how Beowulf complicates this concept!), to other class texts, and to the concepts of the monstrous that we are treating in the course.

Your home page should clearly reveal who is in your group (and how to contact them), what sort of project this is, for which class at this university.

You will need to create embedded pages, not merely links to outside sources, or illustrations, or other websites. Each of your pages or sections should clearly tell who in your group authors them. Be sure to distribute work.

You must have a clearly noted list (MLA style) of your sources and a list of useful links to other websites that you think merit attention. ALL photos, other illustrations and summarized or quoted materials need to be credited with the source location.

Two class periods in October will be devoted to building pages. We will have some alums of my former classes here to help you in your web page construction as well as an employee of UIS to help train us on FrontPage.

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Summary of Evidence

VKP Triad Help

 Members of my Visible Knowledge Project Triad Discussion group read over the VKP poster in mid stage and responded to some of my queries about whether the students' webwork indicated deeper understanding as well as increased skills would be achieved by the hypertextual use of associative thinking.

Wyn Kelly of Massachusetts Institute of Technology noted, "I see mixed outcomes . . .about whether this work is leading to deeper understanding and critical perspectives. Certainly the close reading, highlighting, illustrating, and argument is making the students focus, look for ancillary materials, make connections creatively between differnet works and media, and use the technology effectively for learning. I'm not sure, though, that the students have succeeded, with Monster, at least, in reading it critically. Their responses seem to echo [author] Shakur's argument and illustrate it but not to investigate their sources closely (all that stuff on the CIA) or include alternate points of view.

On the skills question, I like the fact that you've isolated and defined your reading skills very clearly and carefully. These students are doing a lot more than a close reading when they collect images, cartoons, and links to enrich their pages. I guess my main question goes back to what I said above: what are the students using the close reading for? Are the websites meant to explain the passages to their peers? If so, I think the pages do that richly. Do you also want them to argue with the text, analyze it in order to come up with arguments of their own? I'm not sure this is happening, but then that may not have been what you had in mind."

Student Reactions to Constructivist Learning
Students wrote about the place of constrcutivist learning in the overall course. The last prompt I gave on an 18-question course evaluation asked them to to do the following: We speak of this sort of learning [the hypertext project]as "constructivist," not just because you built a website, but because you constructed much of the set of knowledge you acquired about the text you amplified. How did you find this type of learning as compared to lecture or discussion class formats in which the same topics would be discussed? What (if any) relationship did you find among the assigned papers, the readings, the final web project and presentation, and the course portfolio? Please spend some time thining and writing about this one. Should we teach in this manner? If so, how might we improve the class? **** See More info for the variety of responses from the MOnster and Beowulf website constructors.

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