Lulú
Panbehchi
MATX 601
Texts and Textuality
Final
Paper
December
13th, 2007
Hyper,
hyper introduction and context
Today
university students listen to iPods, spend time online facebooking[1]
or googling, and multitasking in and outside of the classroom. Language students and instructors are
using podcasting as a way to reenforce what it taught in the classroom, or as a
culture project. It is enough to
take a good look at the iTunes store section of podcasting shows, or to browse
several university web pages, to conclude that most podcasts shows for
languages follow the same structure: a simple page and text and an audio link;
or a page with some pictures and maybe a handout, followed by an audio
file. In my opinion, a podcasting
show must be part of a well organized web site that allows students/users to
listen to the show and create their own podcasts. In other words, a podcasting that changes students from
readers to writers as Roland Barthes proposed in S/Z.
Glosas is the name of a multimedia and interdisciplinary
project I am currently working on.
It consists of a series of five internet podcasting shows about poetry
in Spanish and its intended audience are the second and third year students
taking conversation and literature survey classes of Spanish. Back in July,
when I started working on this project, I focused more on the technical details
of podcasting and engaging activities focused on proficiency --language proficiency is the teaching
of the language as a whole, not only its grammar and vocabulary. That month, Virginia Commonwealth
University’s Center for Teaching Excellence (CTE) awarded my project a small
grant. Two months later, I started reading and discussing hypertext theory in
the Text and Textuality class. I
stopped working on Glosas because I realized that I had to add this theory to
the project. I also realized that
I had to rethink and redesign the interactive part of Glosas. Now, five months later, I have not
finished my podcasting shows because every week I find a new technological,
pedagogical, or theoretical issue that may improve the outcome. The pressure of a timeline for
implementing and evaluating the podcasting shows reminded me of the main
purpose of the CTE grant: to finish my research. This type of overwhelming information and resources, plus
the never-ending cool features that my site may have, makes me understand
better Ted Nelson, who coined the term hypertext. He has never finished his Xanadu software, or any other
system he has written and fought about.
He is famous for disseminating his ideas and dreams, not for making them
a reality, a fact that has probably benefited humanity more than his software
would. This is not an excuse for not finishing a project, but rather an
inspiration to write about a work in progress.
After
reading S/Z by Roland Barthes,
Computer Lib/Dream Machines by Ted Nelsonand, and the first part
of Hypertext by George Landow, I realized that I had in my hands the
opportunity to create a multimedia hypertext. Thus, from a series of before and after activities that
accompanied the reading of a poem, Glosas evolved into a true hypertext or Web
2.0 proposition: students are provided with a text and ideas, then they create
their own version of that text, while improving their Spanish language and
culture skills, learning more about Spanish poetry, and sharpen their
multimedia skills. A simple
three-page proposal for a podcasting show of poetry in Spanish, accompanied by
a list of definitions and questions, became a ten-page document, plus a site
that includes podcasting episodes, literature and dictionary links, technical
instructions for students and instructors, blogs and wikis, surveys, and
feedback. Before, I had planned to
publish one episode of Glosas and observe and evaluate the feedback from VCU
students and instructors, and then, after a month or two, publish the next
episode with the necessary changes.
Basically, the last three episodes would have been based on the
templates for the second episode.
During
the Fall semester of 2007, the Spanish and Italian sections of the School of
World Studies at VCU implemented the new language laboratory projects, in which
students follow instructions and produce their own multimedia materials in the
target language; these materials form part of their online portfolio, or
e-portfolio in the Content System area of Blackboard. Students can use these materials in subsequent semesters to
compare and evaluate their language skills--speaking, listening, writing,
reading, and cultural awareness. For
advanced students, the materials become a section of their Global Language
Portfolio, a European style compilation of self-evaluation and multimedia texts
to prove a learner’s experience with the language and the culture.[2] I also taught the Spanish Portfolio
class; its objectives are to prepare Spanish majors to apply for a job or
graduate school. In this course, the students created an e-Portfolio in
Blackboard, and later uploaded the pages to external websites hosted by Google,
Ramsites, Yahoo!, Facebook, or Freewebs.
After this experience, I have a better vision of how a project like
Glosas may work and what to expect from students and instructors.
There
are more work and theories involved in the redesigned Glosas than I had
anticipated. Nonetheless, I
believe that it will be easier to finish, test, evaluate, and justify Glosas
with students, instructors, and administrators now that I have a better
understanding of hypertext theory and practice. In the following pages I describe my current design of
Glosas; the pages are divided in four sections. In section one, I will attempt
to explain what makes Glosas a hypertext, and its connection to Barthes’
concept of writerly text, Nelson’s ideas about education and performance. In section two I will talk about the
poems as the main message of Glosas, the theories involved in the selection of
the poems, such as gender, ethnicity, post-colonialism, and genre. In the third section, I will describe
the parts that each one of the five episodes will include, and the purpose of
using new media to reinforce language learning skills. The last section will be related to the
use of Glosas in language curricula, the evaluation of this project as well as
its limitations.
I. The Idea is Podcasting, Hyperpodcasting.
In
his book S/Z Barthes explains that after doing an evaluation of texts,
he has to classified them as writerly and redearly; writerly are the type of texts that can be written or
re-written now, while redearly are the ones that can only be read; in the last group, he includes the
classic texts, the ones that cannot be changed anymore; he gives more value to
the writerly texts. Then he adds,
“Because the goal of literary work (of literature as work) is to make the
reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text.” (Barthes 4) My goal is to produce writerly
podcasts, in other words, to let the user/listener/reader rewrite/remake the
podcast. Later, Barthes says that
interpreting a text is to find out “what plural constitutes it;” next, he defines the image of the
triumphant plural or ideal text as follows:
[T]he
networks are many and interact, without any of them being
able
to surpass the rest; this is a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure
of
signifieds; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to
it
by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared
to
be the main one; the code it mobilizes extends as far as the eye can reach...
(5)
For
George Landow, this is what “has come to be called computer hypertext--text
composed of blocks of words (or images)” that are linked to each other. (Landow
3) Ted Nelson’s notions of
the use of computers are similar to the network described by Barthes. In Dream Machines, Nelson
envisions the computers as a tool to help humanity with creativity, learning,
and production. According to Nelson, software writers need to make it easy for
an individual to learn the software in 10 minutes or less. In Glosas, my idea is to make it as
easy as possible for anybody who is learning or teaching Spanish to understand
how do participate in the making of more podcasts.
Nelson
also says that we can now create presentational wonderlands with the computer
that contain text, “pictures and apparitions in magical space,” and data that students
can explore and manipulate. Nelson
calls them ‘responsive resources,’ which include facilities --the use of or
response to the computer, and hyper-media, in other words, performing
presentations. Among the
responsive resources, he lists hypertext, one of the dozen terms he coined in
this book. He defines hypertext as “’forms of writing which branch or perform
on request; they are best presented on computer display screens.” (Nelson 314)
For
Nelson, we live surrounded by media and media is a show, a performance. Education is a show. What we produce
with computers is also a show.
From this point of view, my project is a show of my skills as, in no
particular order, a literature instructor, Spanish instructor, an instructor
training other instructors, a computer user and programmer, a webmaster, a
radio lover, an English speaker, and a hypertext enthusiast. My work is my performance as a
podcaster and a radio style show host.
What
makes my project a real hypertext is that a user has the opportunity to rewrite
the podcast and post it on a page linked to the Glosas episode, as well as to
link it to other podcasts. The use
of blogs and wikis may facilitate and accelerate the process of rewriting,
because students may be inspired by looking at other students’ work.
Fortunately,
or unfortunately, the majority of the users will interact with this site
because it will be a requirement for most conversation classes in the second
year of Spanish at least on from the third year. This means that since they will
not be facebooking, about two in three students will say at the beginning, “I
don’t understand,” “I learn more by reading, although I don’t want to read
right now.” “Do I really need to do it?” or “Can I post my work on Facebook
instead? I don’t want strangers to listen to me.” This attitude, that may be genuine or fake, is an obstacle
to understand the episodes, the instructions to create other multimedia files,
or to learn more about the poet, for example. I have seen first hand this semester, that students are very
familiar with social virtual networks, but the moment they need to form
communities outside their bunkers in MySpace and Facebook, they act as if they
were never had uploaded or attached a file. I also noticed that by the time the students worked on their
second multimedia assignment, they were more comfortable using in the classroom
and sharing the texts they created.
Some students gave me ideas on how to improve some instructions, use
alternative software, or short cuts in design to produce better quality
materials.
II. Glosas, what to annotate and why
The title of the podcasts is glosas, a word related to marginalia, and a metaphor for
hypertext and hyperpodcasting. The
Spanish Royal Academy’s dictionary explains that the signifier glosas,[3]
is the plural of the Latin glossa,
which means “obscure word that needs explanation;”
glossa comes from the Greek γλῶσσα that means tongue and, by extension, language. In modern Spanish, the signified of glosa is the
explanation or comment of an obscure or difficult text; it is more common in
the plural form, and it is used mostly by language historians and
linguists. The most important
glosas in the Spanish speaking world are the ones written on the Aemilianensis
Codex 60, shown on Figure 1. Essentially,
what the users of this project will do is to annotate my annotations of five
poems, or other users’ annotations of my annotations, and so on. Glosa is a short word that is easier to
pronounce than “hyperpodcasting,”
therefore is more marketable. It is also rarely found on the vocabulary
lists used by Spanish textbooks.
Figure 1. A page from the Latin Aemilianensis 60 Codex. Museum of the Royal Academy of
History, in Madrid, Spain. The Codex is known in
Spanish as “glosas emilianenses,” it was written in Latin, but the
scribe wrote on the margins in Romance and Basque languages.
Romance is the source for Castilian and
other Spanish dialects.
But,
what texts may used to start this dream of an ad infinitum spoken
annotation? The answer has to
comply with the intermediate Spanish curriculum that calls for the most
representative and essential texts to be included. The most famous poets in Spanish are men, among them Luis de
Góngora, Rubén Darío, José Martí, Federico García Lorca, Octavio Paz, and Pablo
Neruda; only a few women are included, for example Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz,
Alfonsina Storni, Gabriela Mistral, and Rosario Castellanos. These are the names that most
literature surveys textbooks include as well. In order to be fair and politically correct, my criteria to
choose the poems was initially as follows:
• The authors have to be well known in Spanish, but
none of the six men mentioned above.
This way, the use of this site complements the curricula of literature
classes, but it does not become a substitute for the book or the materials
selected by the instructor.
• The authors have to be from different periods and
represent a different styles. Students who are or will be taking literature
classes may benefit more from this project if they do more research about each
one of the poets.
• The list has to involve men and women, and in order
to be fair to women, it includes more women than men.
• The level of vocabulary and the grammatical
structures must be adequate for intermediate learners, this means that even if
grammar and vocabulary are not explained, the introduction to the episode and
the context of the poem should allow the users to understand and answer basic
questions about it: what is the main theme?, who is the poetic voice?, and what
is the problem expressed or suggested by the poem?
• The themes have to inspire students to talk about
their own experience and provide their opinion without doing extensive
research. For this reason, the list doesn’t have historical or nationalistic
texts.
• The texts have to be short, they cannot have more
than thirty verses or need more than three minutes to be read at a regular
speed. Brevity is crucial to keep users interested on reading and recording the
poems. It is important to point
out that most commercial songs last in average 3 minutes.
• A bit of humor is always welcomed in the language
classroom. To motivate students
and to keep their attention for more than two minutes, all the poems have to
present or end with a comical image, situation or commentary.
It
was difficult to make a list of five texts instead of ten or more, but at the
end I decided to include these poets: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651-1605)
from Mexico, Félix María de Samaniego (1745-1801) from Spain, Gertrudis Gómez de
Avellaneda (1814-1873 ) from Cuba, Alfonsina Storni (1892 -1938) from Argentina, and Mario Benedetti
(1920) from Uruguay.[4]
I
believed that the list was fair and inclusive until I read Dana Haraway’s essay
“The Cyborg Manifesto” and the “Introduction” to Nation and Narration by
Homi Bhabha. Samaniego, who
rewrote Aesop’s fables, is the only poet that does not come from a colonial or
postcolonial nation, therefore he does not have the Janus-faced discourse that
the other poets have. None
of the other four is what Haraway calls a cyborg; in other words, none of them
breaks completely away from the European way of thinking and the Western and
colonial mentalities; (Haraway 531)
it may be in part because their families come from Spain or Italy. Sor Juana belonged to the clergy,
association that makes her of the Spanish establishment. Storni was born in
Switzerland to Italian-Argentinean parents; Gómez de Avellaneda’s parents were
second generation Spanish, and her father was part of the royalty line; while
Benedetti’s parents came to Uruguay from Italy.
Sor
Juana and Gómez de Avellaneda were born in Spanish colonies; the former poet
lived at a time when Mexico was known as The Viceroyalty of the New Spain, and
the latter was born in Cuba when Spain was trying to retain the island as a
colony. For Samaniego and Sor
Juana, the classic Greek writers and philosophers are even more important than
those from Spain. Gómez de Avellaneda wrote an anti-slavery novel and patriotic
poems. Storni’s poetry is more vocal against men and how they belittle her just
because she is a woman. During Uruguay’s dictatorship, Benedetti went into
exile in Spain, Argentina, Cuba, and Peru; he is concerned with how little
Uruguay is next to other countries, and it is one the reasons he has written
against the power of the United States.
The women are often studied from a feminist point of view. Sor Juana[5]
is probably the one who distances herself more from a gendered voice; since she
was paid to write poetry, a good number of her poems are written in a masculine
voice.
In
a way, I can say that the Latin American poets of Glosas appear to brake some
ties with the Western tradition, but not that many with the motherland,
Spain. It is possible, tough, to
engage the users of Glosas in discussions not only about literary periods and
metaphors, but also about gender, ethnicity, colonial and postcolonial
thinking.
My avatar,
Octaviana Etzel in Second Life.
IV. Like Nelson, “I’m not a
tekkie,” but here is a technical description
Unfortunately,
the intermediate Spanish courses include more short stories than poetry
readings. At Virginia Commonwealth
University, and other institutions, Spanish majors take one or two courses that
cover poetry; but students minoring in this language may graduate without
taking a poetry class. This is the
main reason I decided to focus on poetry and poetry reading. My first impulse was to include poems
that can propitiate a light or a deep discussion, depending on the level of the
course, and that would not scare the students who usually do not read poetry in
the target language, or even in English.
Most
pages of the Glosas site are now under construction. I wrote the script of episodes 1 and 2, along with the web
page where it is encoded. The first
episode is ready, but the audio needs to be re-recorded. Figure 2 shows an attempt to map out
the pages for the Glosas site. Each section may be composed of one or more
pages.
Figure 2. Hypertext. This is a Tinderbox map view of
the website.
Here
is the description of each section.
1.
A podcasting show, with five episodes that last between 5:30 and 6:30
minutes each. An episode
introduces a poet, then presents the poem and its reading, next it gives
definitions and provides questions for writing or conversation activities. The podcast has still pictures and
drawings, voice, music and special sound effects, titles and on-screen
phrases. Users, or any listener of
the show, may download a text file with the poem; this way, the absence of text
may challenge advanced speakers.
In the future, the script of the show will be available for hearing
impaired users. The audio file is distributed in the following formats: iTunes
and QuickTime (Mac), iPhone, and Windows Media. Users may download the episode into their iPod, iPhone,
their Windows or Mac computer.
The
software programs used to produce
each episode are: Garageband (podcasting editor, voice recorder), Adobe
Photoshop (photo editor), iMovie (video and pictures/audio editor), iTunes (test run the show, saves files
as iTunes files), QuickTime (saves files as QuickTime and iPhone files), a word
processor (Pages or NeoOffice, for typing), Adobe Acrobat Professional (to
prepare PDF documents and take screen shots of software and websites),
Dreamweaver (website builder), Firefox and Safari (Internet browsers). The equipment: an iBook G4 Mac computer and Blue microphone. Websites: Google, Corbis, and Flickr (pictures); The
Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy (definitions), ACTFL--the American
Counsel on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (Language curricula), Global
Language Portfolio (European type portfolio), the Cervantes Virtual Library,
Instituto Cervantes and Spanish and Latin American national universities
(literature). Glosas is a one
woman show, therefore is my job to research, plan, and write the scripts, as
well as to read, record, and edit them.
The job includes to upload the site and test-run it in my own websites,
lulup.com, and later transfer it to the School of World Studies Media Center
server.
2.
One page with definitions and links to dictionaries and literary sites. After the definitions, there are
phrases that may be used in an everyday conversation; this information is also
available for download as a PDF file. The list of links incorporates language
and literature related links. The
language area is comprised of dictionaries: Spanish to Spanish, Spanish to
English, and English to English.
The literature links consists of the same websites I used to produce the
script for the episode. Later,
users will be allowed to add related links that they may have found.
3.
Two pages for after listening activities that contain listening and reading comprehension
questions, as well as suggested topics for writing and speaking about the
poem. After Glosas is published, I
may add interactive quizzes and a blog or wiki style page for VCU students to
share their written work and recorded conversations based on the after
listening activities.
4.
Instructions for
users to create their own
podcasting materials, that may be made with audio only, audio and still
pictures, audio and text, or video.
5.
A blog or a wiki to post recorded readings of the poem presented on the episode, or to create a
similar show to Glosas using this poem or other poems by the same author. Here, the users may even mock the
episode, change the pictures or the music, as long as they use Spanish only and
respect copyrighted information.
6.
An advanced section (in blog or wiki form) dedicated to advanced
students and instructors, where they can create and post their own Glosas
episodes, as long as the language is Spanish.
7.
An blog to keep users informed of the best and faster ways to create and post
their own activities. After a few weeks, this page will have links to the best
podcasts according to VCU instructors.
8.
A survey to rate the content and overall effectiveness of the activities in
learning and practicing Spanish.
There will be one survey per episode and the results will be shared with
other instructors and administrators.
9.
A short guide to netiquette
and copyright information. Some users may have to be reminded that
this is a university sponsored project, meaning that all users have to follow
VCU non-discriminatory and equally opportunity guidelines, and they have to
practice the fair use rule of copyrighted information according to the US
Copyright Office. This section is
part of surveillance model proposed by Philip E. Agre, but otherwise it may
become chaotic.
A+ A a- / B+ B B- / ...
10.
Rubrics for instructors. A guide to grade the materials made by students and how to
incorporate them in their syllabi.
This section is reserved to train instructors on how the podcasting show
works. It may even include
excerpts from this paper.
The
purpose of using the Internet, podcasting, blogs and wikis, online dictionaries
and surveys is in part to speak the same language that the millennial students understand nowadays, and that the second
language teacher has to appeal to, as describe by Kassen et al in Preparing
and Developing Technology-proficient L2 Teachers. This semester, when students had to build their own
multimedia materials, most of them expressed that they preferred the activities
in which they worked they worked with other classmates; this asseveration is
contrary to what the common believe says, that so much technology isolates
students. In Glosas, students may
work in group to make a more dynamic podcast. Sharing their a media file and commenting on it is another
form or collective work. Working
in pairs or groups stimulate students to form communities of learners as the
ACTFL guidelines suggest. Students
have to record their voice to create a podcast; but first, they have to write
or prepare an outline, and after recording they have to listen to themselves,
something that usually makes
students more aware of their performance in the target language. Usually, students practice their script
before recording it again, a practice that most likely will improve their
speaking skills. Even if the
script is not the best, at least they practice and self-reflect on their own
language skills.
IV. Evaluation
By
the end next May, I have to finish my project and evaluate my project and
deliver a report to the Center for Teaching Excellence. I cannot evaluate the outcome of Glosas
yet, but I can make some assumptions based on the performance of the language
laboratory projects and the Portfolio class. Before that, I need to declare that I may be dreaming too
much, and that a great deal of the project web site is still under
construction; even after the site is running, monitoring the performance of the
project may become a more than one woman show. Aside from that, the most serious
problems that I anticipate are related to making the project available and
promoting it to instructors.
In
order for this project to be available and to work, I will have to use my
position as the lower-level Spanish coordinator at the School of World Studies
to require instructors to work with Glosas as a part of their syllabi, and not
as novelty activity reserved for a day when the instructor has to cancel a
class. Another way to promote the
site is by linking it to the Global Language Portfolio, a system that seems to
be the rule for all the languages at the School. Students can add their podcasts to their Global Language
Portfolios.
Now
that I have more experience training other instructors, I believe that I will
definitely need more than 10 minutes to train the instructors who are willing
to use my project in their classes.
I will have to obtain permission from VCU to use Wikipedia, Blogger, and
SurveyMonkey, and other third party sites, and probably another special permit
to use (an maybe abuse) the VCU internet servers.
Ted
Nelson would say that in this project, I will have too much power in my hands;
he would also scream at me because students/users/readers will not be able to
have a side to side text, but rather a hierarchical structure. My response to Nelson is be that too
much freedom in undergraduate students’ hands may result in chaos. When talking to instructors, I would
like to quote Nelson from one of his latest dreams: “The design I am about to
present is not arguable. There is no right or wrong about such a design, except
that it is good and usable. But it must be seen and touched to be understood.”
When
Roland Barthes talks about the evaluation of a text, he says that the value is
in the readerly texts. My hope is
to create one of those texts, even if they do not fit completely the ideal
text.
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