Thinking in hypertext: Interrupting the

mindset of schooling

Rebecca Luce-Kapler

Abstract

In this article I develop two narratives from a study of adolescents using digital technology: one group were students in an English class, the other group were participants in a digital literacy camp. Focusing on how the students responded to one of the literary hypertexts (Patchwork Girl), I highlight the differences between the two groups using Lankshear and Knobel’s (2007) conception of Mindset 1 and Mindset 2 as a framework. I suggest some of the challenges associated with teaching digital literacy, and end with a description of wiki writing in a classroom, which offers a possibility for developing digital practices.

Introduction

Writing … becomes a site of possibility, a place of ‘as if’ that works in multiple ways with, through, and beyond the text. For the writer and for the reader, they write and read as if the text can describe the reality of an event, an imagining, or a feeling; as if language did not remove us a step from it. Such contingencies broaden the possibilities for experiencing, acting, understanding, and creating. (Luce-Kapler, 2004, p. 88)

This observation came from working with groups of women—adolescents to elders—as they created print narratives and memoirs. Through writing, the women discovered the subjunctive (the as if) spaces available through those genres. The familiar telling structures of narrative intertwined cultural history with personal stories. Our only interruption of these processes was to borrow a practice from Frigga Haug (1987) that entailed “breaking apart” the narratives into word lists of wishes, dreams, actions, and feelings (Luce-Kapler, 2004, p. 99). Fragmenting our work revealed a new level of meaning and highlighted how we could be lulled by the seemingly complete and transparent rhythms of narrative.

In the years since, as I have introduced digital texts and writing to adolescents, the experience of working with literary hypertext has extended the possibilities for interrupting familiar genres. Hypertext challenges how we believe literature makes sense and the processes we use to create it. For instance, literary hypertext (e-literature) is usually constructed from discrete pieces of text and other media that invite readers to choose hyperlinks to continue their reading. The genre requires bringing together fragments in a meaning-making process that Marie-Laure Ryan (2004) equates with piecing together a jigsaw puzzle. (Sample literary hypertexts are available for reading at Eastgate.com. For example, see Michael Joyce’s Twelve Blue, 1996.)

This progression into e-literature has not been comfortable for me as I flounder at times in a process that feels strange and unproductive. In contrast, when I introduced the hypertext genre to adolescents through digital literacy camps at our faculty, they quickly engaged in reading and writing, experimenting, and teaching me details about the texts and software that I had not noticed. However, when I brought the same hypertexts to their classrooms it was a different story. Often it was as if the students were trying to bend the processes to make them fit familiar practices of schooling. And while they seemed to enjoy the opportunities, in some I sensed that this was only a pleasant interruption before they got back to the “real” work of schooling.

What is it about structures of schooling that discourage thinking differently using new technologies, especially with adolescents who seem to embrace them outside the classroom? Can we challenge our curriculum structures and find spaces where possibilities can be expanded?

To understand how educators can identify and create such opportunities, I want to examine two narratives of reading that occurred during my recent study of digital literacy: one took place in a high school English class, the other during one of our camps. To understand what might be happening in both instances, I want to frame the stories using Lankshear and Knobel’s (2007, p. 11) description of mindsets—what they call Mindset 1 and 2. Mindset 1 “operates on physical/material and industrial principles and logics”, where the “world is ‘centered’ and hierarchical”. Mindset 2, on the other hand, “operates on non-material (e.g., cyberspatial) and post-industrial principles and logics. The world is ‘decentered’ and ‘flat’.”

The latter is characteristic of what Lankshear and Knobel identify as “new literacies”. They do not mean new in the temporal sense. Rather, they are thinking of it in historical terms as described by their notions of mindsets. New literacies do share features with conventional forms of literacy, but they also differ in some important ways. Central to these differences are what Lankshear and Knobel call new “technical stuff” and new “ethos stuff”. The new technical stuff is fairly straightforward— the term refers to the applications that enable us to build and participate in literacy practices. The “new ethos stuff” refers to the participatory, collaborative, and distributed nature of these literacies. That is, “they are less ‘published,’ ‘individuated,’ and ‘author-centric’ than conventional literacies” (2007, p. 9). These literacies involve less expert domination, with rules and norms that are more fluid.

Although Lankshear and Knobel have identified two mindsets, they note the impossibility of thinking only in one mindset. We cannot easily sever the bonds of cultural and societal structures that are still rooted in industrial principles, nor can we escape the influence of the Internet and the reach of digital technologies. I sense that my experience of working with hypertext is clearly that of a Mindset 1 writer struggling with the lure of Mindset 2. For the students, however, it seems that they see their lives in schools as inhabiting Mindset 1, while any Mindset 2 sensibilities occur in the world outside schooling. To bring the latter all at once into the former causes some confusion and discomfort, and some surprising resistance from the students. While a number of studies have concluded that teachers are responsible for the failure of digital technology in schools (see Walz, 2008, for examples of the effects of such blame), my work suggests that it is the structures of schooling and curriculum that militate against its use.

In the narratives that follow I focus on two instances of reading Patchwork Girl: A Modern Monster (Jackson, 1995), one of the literary hypertexts we asked the students to read. Patchwork Girl is a satirical piece about the experiences of Frankenstein’s female monster. The image of the stitched-together character greets one at the entrance of the e-literature, inviting the reader to click on a choice of links. This monster ultimately becomes a symbol of a patched story, where readers will find themselves at times immersed in that character’s consciousness, pieced together from multiple characters; at other times they will hear the monster’s creator, Mary Shelley; and at still others the text itself is discussing its creation. The hypertext, like the monster, is stitched together, its ruptures plainly visible as it explores how identity is multifaceted.

Patchwork Girl in the classroom

The Grade 11 English class, most of whom are young women, gathers in one of the three computer labs in the school. I am a bit dismayed to see the machines in a large square, each facing outward to a window or a wall. As the students begin to turn on the computers I notice that the equipment seems dated and many have difficulty just getting the log-on to work. Several of the computers do not load the software we have asked the school technician to install. I note that one of the girls is using a mouse that has no ball. She holds it upside down and puts her finger inside to click and scroll.

Our plan is to invite students to read Patchwork Girl and make notations within the digital text to comment on their reading. The teacher begins by introducing us and reminding the students that while some of them have agreed to participate in the research, everyone is expected to engage in the activities that she considers part of regular class work. Someone asks about marking. As the teacher explains that there will be no specific marks assigned to this activity I note that some seem to mentally file these few days as unimportant.

The class does not respond when I ask them if they know about hypertext, but once I describe how the Internet is a large and seemingly endless sampling of hypertext some nod. I briefly show them how to navigate in Patchwork Girl. I do not want to give them too much information because we want to see how they discover the features of the text for themselves. Within the first few moments everyone is busy clicking away, but it does not take long for differentiations to appear. It is easy to see the kind of engagement the students have with the text: who is clicking on links, if they are even in the program, and if they are reading alone or with a classmate. Because this is not something organised, marked, and led by their teacher (although she is present), some feel free to disregard the e-literature altogether.

I make a brief survey of the room. Nicola is reading intently and already making extensive comments in the notes feature of the e-literature that we asked them to use. She is recording guesses about what will happen in the text. “I like the puzzle in this text,” she tells me.

Kerry, who sits next to her, seems to be lost in the instructions (although there were not many). She asks Nicola, “How do we get to the page? What are you reading now? How did you get there?” But eventually she settles in to reading. She and Nicola occasionally ask each other questions and compare navigation through the text. They develop an easy rhythm of working side by side.

Margi has opened up Patchwork Girl, glances at it and tries to follow a link from the title page. She glances at a text box and writes a comment: “I don’t like that we aren’t told who the characters are. I find it confusing and I am therefore uninterested.” She pulls out a novel from her backpack and settles into her chair to read for the entire period.

Jessie is one of the students not to have a working computer and she readily agrees to share with Andrea. At first they seem to be talking more than they are reading, and it takes them some time to get into the story, but after a while they are reading and discussing which links to take and what comments they might make on different pages of the text. They agree easily, and occasionally they discuss what is happening in an attempt to figure out who is speaking or what is going on in the story. They sit close together, their comments lively and often interrupted by laughter. Andrea notes that the story is confusing because they keep adding characters, but they have figured out that there is an outline view (a feature where all the textboxes and links are displayed), allowing them to read sequentially rather than clicking on links.

Four girls across the room are working together: Esther, Eugenia, Theresa, and Doreen. They are all reading different parts of the story, but they show each other what they find, or make comments such as “Eww gross” or “That’s a little too graphic for me” or “This is the boobs page”, which draws attention from other students. They, too, laugh a lot as they read, and they seem to be a group that works and socialises together frequently, as suggested by their easy and familiar manner with each other.

Later, Eugenia and Theresa take on the role of literary critic in our discussion of the story. Theresa, especially, is poised and confident about her opinions. She tells us that “the writing is not all that good” and that the author “seems to tell you, not show you”. She adds, “The writing is so short that it is hard to see much value in it.” Eugenia seems to have a good grasp of the character of the “monster” but she remains confused and frustrated by the different voices in the story. “Who is speaking?” she asks. “I cannot really tell.” It makes me think that if the four of them had spent more time actually reading the text they might have a richer sense of what was there.

At the end of the first class we ask the students to give us feedback about what they have been reading. Doreen tells us that she finds it really disjointed, although the short pieces are helpful. “To be honest,” she says, “I have a shortened attention span. I agree with Esther because on the computer it’s hard to read big blogs and things. I just lose track and I don’t pay attention.”

The teacher speaks up and asks, “Is anyone getting a sense of the story? You know, when you read the first chapter of Jane Eyre, you sort of follow in the story. But, is anyone feeling that there’s a story building you know, or what’s your sense of it?”

“I just kind of got to a sense of the Patchwork Girl, and she keeps talking about how she feels like other people are her and … it’s just … yeah … it’s weird,” Eugenia says.

“So something is building in your mind. You’re seeing things?” the teacher asks.

“Yeah, like you’re getting an image, but it’s kind of convoluted. I find the writing so short that it’s hard to, like, see much value in it. I just don’t think it gives them enough time to make good writing.”

“If it was a book,” Theresa suggests, “it would probably have a more straightforward narrative. Like, you wouldn’t be able to skip ahead and think back. There would be things presented in a certain order.”

Eugenia comments on the forms of text presented in the e-literature as a way of beginning to understand the characters. “There are the ones that are, like, actual paragraphs,” she says, “that seem like normal books, and then there are the ones that are, like, two sentences or an odd little poem. So, like, Patchwork Girl might be the ones that aren’t as well put together because she’s all patchworky.”

Others pick up on the literary criticism theme with comments that indicate they don’t find the writing all that great. Emery suggests that “I think that’s also because it’s so short. So you’re, like, oh I want to know what happens next, so you just read it really fast and because I don’t think there’s a whole lot to the writing itself, you don’t focus on it as much as you would like other books.”

Nicola counters some of the opinions: “You’re the one that decides where the story goes in a way. Like, you’re a lot more interactive with the story as opposed to just whenever the story unfolds. As I was going through it—like, you’re trying, like, to figure out what path to take—I just kept thinking about how long it would take to actually write this with all the different, like, stories … I couldn’t understand it but I was just really surprised about how detailed it is.”

Eugenia suggests that “because there’s so little on the screen and there’s, like, so many different opportunities of where to go, I found myself kind of rushing through the text and just like reading it really quickly because I want to know not what happens next, but where it goes next basically. And so I don’t really absorb it as much as I want to.”

“It seems less passive,” Nicola suggests. “Like, you have to really get involved and you’re, like, really concentrating on one part. Like, if it was a book I would just skim right through and I wouldn’t really, like, pay attention. But I think it forces you to pay attention more to its being constructed.”

“I also find that I get distracted a lot using the screen. Maybe it’s just that we’re in a class setting but, like, the clock’s changing on the bottom corner and, I don’t know, I just, I keep getting distracted and I can’t get into the book because there’s always so much going on with the screen,” Emery says.

Sandra notes that her MSN¹ is on “24–7”, even when she is reading, so that she is often distracted from her reading by talking to someone.

The teacher asks, “So when you’re writing your essays and you have MSN on too, and in the middle of an idea and all of a sudden someone— it’s like a phone call in the middle of a thought?”

Eugenia says, “I play busy”, and Sandra notes, “I put myself on away and … if someone comes online that I want to talk to then I do.”

I laugh. “Well, see, that’s really interesting. You’re talking about wanting to read Patchwork Girl and not liking the interruption, but when you’re writing and doing your homework and your MSN is on and you’re interrupted, that’s different?”

The students laugh, too, but I can tell they don’t really appreciate the irony. As we leave the classroom I consider how much I sensed the presence of school impinging on the day’s digital activities. Many times it felt like students were engaged in trying to bring together two familiar worlds—but ones they usually keep far apart.

On reflection

I was surprised by the students’ responses in class because, based on the digital literacy camps, I expected them to engage fully and with a certain adeptness. While that was true for a few students, Nicola for instance, most of them dipped in and out of the activities, engaging with other things online such as checking postsecondary schools, ratemyteacher.com, or email, and reading novels, doing homework, or visiting with friends. My sense was that they were sampling the possibilities but without much attention or depth. It was not until the individual interviews that I better understood what might be happening.

During this process most of the girls were very earnest. They seemed to want to translate their experience into something that would be useful in school. Rather than considering how this technology could transform school, though, they thought hard about how to transform the technology to be part of school. They offered their assessments and opinions from a strong schooling lens that had been developing in them for nearly 13 years. Many of them looked to the “younger” generation to take up the digital age in school, such as this observation from Andrea:

I thought it was interesting and I think that that kind of writing will appeal to [a younger] generation because a lot [of] people have video games and TVs, and they have really short attention spans. This kind of writing is kind of broken into paragraphs and short sentences, so it would appeal to this generation. But I personally didn’t really like it because I don’t spend a lot of time on the TV and stuff. I have a fairly long attention span. I prefer novels.

Emery had this perspective:

I guess it was hard in that in school we’re taught to introduce an idea and develop it and conclude it because there’s a format that you learn in school and this was very different from that … This is the one thing that I thought would be interesting as a school assignment just in the way that it’s easier to allow students to have their creativity showing and have whatever they want to express—it’s a lot easier to express your ideas.

As Emery suggested, and as other students noticed, they sensed creative possibilities in hypertext that were not necessarily available in other ways in school. Nicola also recognised that the fragmentary possibilities of hypertext “represents your thinking more … I don’t know what the right word is. It’s just that it’s easier to put your thinking into, like, some sort of form. I think it is closer to the way you would think.”

Most of the students saw the possibilities of hypertext as an alternative to what was happening in school, but they did not seem to relate this activity to the computer activities they engaged in outside of school requirements, such as participating in blogs or instant messaging. I sensed that they were responding from a belief about a set type of curriculum in school that remained firm in the face of technological change. But perhaps considering that the computers were in a special lab, were rather outdated and were in poor repair, it is no wonder they did not see the integration of such technological capabilities as being important in school.

Interestingly enough, the students who seemed least part of the class in terms of social connection engaged most deeply in reading Patchwork Girl. Sal, for example, was a slightly older girl who wore the clothes and accoutrements of Goth culture. She did not interact with her classmates and spent the time closely working through the hypertext. She appreciated the open invitation to explore and engage with the story and noted that having a chance to read what she called “darker” material was interesting, and that it encouraged her to write her hypertext responses in a similar light. She told us that in school she could not usually talk about such things, and that the fact that it was not being marked was important for her enjoyment of the process.

This response from someone who may be thought of as “marginalised” in school reflects similar findings in other projects of mine, where the students who feel “outside” of school culture because of their status are the ones who are also least bound to act according to the structures of schooling (Luce-Kapler & Klinger, 2005). For me, such students have become a signal for activities and approaches that lie outside or on the margins of typical curriculum structures.

Digital writing camp

Stevie was a 16-year-old secondary student who signed up for one of the camps held in the e-learning lab at Queen’s University’s Faculty of Education. We scheduled five mornings to meet with students during a school holiday time and arranged a second camp over a weekend for those who could not attend during the week. (We specifically used the term “camp” to differentiate it from school activities.) The participants engaged in hypertext reading and writing activities—the same ones that we used in the classroom later that year.

Stevie responded to the project with enthusiasm and quickly began to read Patchwork Girl. After a few moments she realised that she would have to take a different approach and I noticed her checking the underlying map view of the hypertext, clicking between that and the text boxes as a way of orienting herself in the story. Later she described how the visual aspects of the hypertext helped her to get a sense of the different characters present and how she checked the story chart to see the underlying relationships. From that view of the hypertext she could “look at all the big parts” to organise her reading, using the colours of boxes and noting the names of sections and links. For instance, she focused first on the red-coloured boxes because she believed they had a certain importance for character and plot. She also recognised that the font shifted in size according to which character was speaking. She offered this theory: “I guess that way you could easily tell who is talking. I mean, sometimes there are books written and they’ll be in first person, but here there are three characters in first person and so the font is different.”

Stevie also pointed out how the author used links to include what she identified as “afterthoughts”. She described to me how in novels and other print literature, writers usually omit such details or relegate them to a back page as they balance the demands of the story with the minds of characters. With e-literature, Stevie noted, the author is able to signal that these ideas are part of the character’s consciousness, but they’re not necessarily critical to the storyline. She explained that “In Patchwork Girl there was one word, ‘Dream’, and then you clicked on it and the whole thing was in brackets like one long continuing extension. So you can have the same experience reading it as the writer had writing it. It makes you feel closer to the story.”

Stevie recognised that the writer wanted to develop the character’s dream or stream of consciousness and was able to do so using a visual cue from the print tradition (parentheses), but also by creating a separate textbox for the character’s musing so that it functions as an aside.

Throughout our conversation about her reading, Stevie searched to find language to describe the opportunities to experience the characters’ consciousnesses through e-literature. She mainly drew on standard literary terms, but it became clear that she was not finding them entirely adequate to describe her experience with hypertext, such as when she talked about the use of point of view. Stevie commented that when reading first-person accounts, the reader thinks of that “I” being almost like one’s self, but with Patchwork Girl there is an ever-shifting cast of first-person opportunities that at times can be confusing. When she finally gave an overall assessment of the story, however, she was able to point directly to the notion of how one experiences consciousness through literary engagement. “I think it works,” she said, “because the whole story is thoughts, basically. I know that my thoughts bounce from one thing to another, so I think it’s almost a stream of consciousness. It’s like a written portrait of the human mind almost.”

Stevie was able to recognise that reading the hypertext required a different kind of attention than what she normally brought to print literature. The sense of immersion in a story that was typical for her was not possible in the different genre, but Stevie found the experience of reading “differently” interesting, and she was willing to experiment and pay attention to what was happening in the process. She had to be more conscious of her response to the text and of how those thoughts were represented as dreams, asides, and storytelling. As with a conversation with her friends, Stevie had to remain alert to what was unfolding with a level of attentiveness that was different from the sort of awareness associated with reading novels. Stevie was clear about how Patchwork Girl focused on each character’s consciousness rather than being concerned about the plot. She also read “across minds”, and her sense of the story as an exploration of identity emerged. She compared Patchwork Girl to the way the mind works, suggesting that it is like “stream of consciousness,” where connected ideas unfold in a type of loose narrative.

Reflecting back

The differences between Stevie and the English-class students were important. Whereas the participation of the class was driven by the social and institutional practices of school, the engagement during the digital camps was focused on the texts and activities, partly because the adolescents had not necessarily met before and partly because we were not bound by the timetables and restrictions of schooling. As a result, Stevie played more with Patchwork Girl and was willing to explore the dimensions of the hypertext, including the mapping functions and the features of the text. She was the first to alert us to the fact that the size of font changed for the different characters, something none of us had noticed. (Another digital camp participant discovered another feature that we had not been aware of: the “sticky note”, whereby a reader could post responses within the body of the program.)

Even though we pointed out several of these features to the English class and told them that they had been found by peers in another context, no one in the class brought the kind of attention and interest to searching for other dimensions of the hypertext.

As we had done with the English class, I interviewed the participants of the digital camps, asking for their insights and opinions about the program. The latter group showed a willingness to consider the challenging questions of using hypertext for learning. For instance, Stevie made links back to her history class, where she created a hypertext after reading Patchwork Girl. Using what she had learnt about the Code of Hammurabi, she researched images and quotations on the Internet that she could use as part of the details for her story. She noted that the author of Patchwork Girl had similarly used texts from other sources.

Her experience of building on this earlier learning extended her understanding of Hammurabi as she began to see him as a real individual rather than a line in a textbook. She noted that using hypertext could help one create an interesting research project. As she said, “If you wanted to be really creative with it you could do it just like a story and have little notes with actual research put into them and then the rest just as a story. I think it would be interesting not only to write but for a teacher to read.”

In her approach to the hypertext reading and writing, Stevie revealed an emerging Mindset 2 (Lankshear & Knobel, 2007). Her sense that expertise was more distributed and not solely residing with the teacher was clear in her relating learning from history class with Internet research, and in her using approaches she noticed in Patchwork Girl. She understood the qualities of the hypertext as opportunities to explore and create new structures. She was prepared to “see” in different ways, and could imagine how the digital activities she was experiencing could disrupt some usual schooling practices. This possibility was not disturbing to her; in fact she seemed to welcome the potential of such forms.

The English class, conversely, seemed more comfortable in Mindset 1. They were concerned about how teachers would assess and mark the products of hypertext if it were used in the class, and they showed a definite preference for the “social relations of ‘bookspace’ … [and] a stable ‘textual order’” (Lankshear & Knobel, 2007, p. 11). Any collaboration that appeared during their readings seemed to be instances of social interaction and not attributable to the possibilities of the hypertext. While some of their discussion and other activities such as surfing the Net suggested a comfort with Mindset 2, their ultimate responses fit a physical world operating with industrial principles and logics.

In such familiar and tenacious structures of schooling, how can teachers and students experience the learning offered by the Mindset 2 perspective?

Schooling and a digital curriculum

We know that injecting new digital technology into classrooms has largely not been successful, nor have professional development initiatives been significant (Walz, 2008). I would argue that this has been due primarily to the differences in mindsets that Lankshear and Knobel have identified, and that we have focused on the “technical stuff” rather than the “ethos stuff”. How can one encourage and value collaborative knowledge building or references to multiple sources when schooling is still tied to individual assessments and performances (Luce-Kapler & Klinger, 2005)?

I think we can look to some of the qualities that describe Mindset 2 to recognise the habits of mind it promotes, and then notice opportunities in schools where we can encourage those practices and create a more welcoming niche for digital work when we interrupt the familiar curriculum. As a small example of how this might occur, I refer to one other research project where we introduced the use of wiki writing in a Grade 6 classroom over three years. (Further details about this study can be read in Chin & Luce-Kapler, in press; Luce-Kapler, 2007.)

When it comes to the technical aspect, wikis are about as easy a digital form as one can find. (See, for example, http://pbwiki.com) Within moments, students can learn how to write, insert pictures, and create links on a Web page. At the same time, a wiki offers expansiveness and openness for discovery, such as through using html (hypertext markup language).

For several weeks in each of three years we visited a Grade 6 classroom, working with the same teacher to introduce wiki writing (Luce-Kapler, 2007). The first year we started by reading picture books that represented in print form some of the hypertextual features of the wiki, such as David Macaulay’s Black and White (1990). We then went to the computer lab and taught the class how to use a wiki. We encouraged them to respond to the books by trying some of the same features they had noticed in those stories. For instance, we suggested they could think about multiple storylines and link to each other’s stories.

We made several observations that year. First, the teacher remained on the periphery, mostly worried about classroom management issues. Second, the children worked individually or in pairs on their wikis, but they did little or no linking with each other’s pages unless we directly encouraged them to do so. Third, some of the “better” students in the class expressed concern that this was not “real” schoolwork. Finally, what was exciting for us and gave us the impetus to return was their enthusiasm for using images in their texts and their important conversations indicating a new understanding of visual literacy. One of the students also discovered how to use animated images, and the excitement this engendered and the rapid way it was taken up by the other students indicated potential for this work.

In the second year, before we arrived the teacher read a novel (A View from Saturday by E. L. Konigsberg, 1998) with the class because it had features of a hypertext, such as multiple viewpoints. He also decided that he would work alongside the students on the wiki. The first activity we did was to check the students’ Internet skills. The previous year we had made assumptions about the students’ abilities. This initial work showed us the need to create definite structures for their wiki work—just presenting them with the technology would not open up the possibilities for writing. We organised them in groups of three and four and let each group have only one computer. We had them visit each other’s developing sites and created some “rules” for links. We asked them not to edit each other’s work (which had been the tendency the year before), but rather to find connections between that site and their own and then make links. Or they could link to other pages on the Internet. The idea was to broaden the stories and directions one could pursue, not to critique or narrow them.

We made several observations. First, the teacher’s working alongside them provided an important model for the students. As the teacher participated he could see how the wiki was a learning tool, although this observation also created struggles for him as he tried to reconcile his understanding of typical curriculum expectations with what he could see emerging through wiki work (Chin & Luce-Kapler, in press). Nevertheless, in the month after we left he had the class develop a collaborative project about electricity using the wiki site.

Second, students were developing a collective sense of learning, at least in their groups. We heard more discussion that indicated a shared sense of a developing story. Third, there was no discussion about this not being “school work”. They were working hard together and enjoying it. Any classroom-management issues disappeared as students deeply engaged in their projects.

The final year, rather than the research team, one doctoral student (Jane Chin) went back to work with the teacher. This time the teacher was prepared to be a partner in the process. Jane and the teacher co-planned the activities, with much of the implementation and initiative coming from the teacher. The collaboration among students and groups was smoother than in previous years, and the understanding of the emerging texts being part of a larger whole was clearly recognised by the teacher and his students. The learning and the teaching had changed dramatically from the first year. The wiki was now a tool the teacher felt comfortable using, but, more importantly, it was a tool that encouraged a visibly different way of learning and working in the classroom.

What this process revealed to us was that changing the ethos as well as the technical “stuff” is important for the potential of digital forms to be realised. Only when the feeling of connection and relationship was present, and the valuing of the dispersed knowing was enabled, did the wiki become a tool for learning. This experience suggested that the structures of schooling are not impervious to change, but rather that our focus has been on the use of technology and not on the habits of mind that are necessary to support a different way of learning.

While this study was only a small moment in the larger school life of these students and their teacher, it does show how, if we really believe that the skills and dispositions ushered in by Web 2.0 are important for our students, we need to change the ethos as well as the technological tools we work with in schools.

Acknowledgements

The research projects described in this article were supported by two grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Note

1&;&;MSN is a software program that allows synchronous chat online.

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The author

Rebecca Luce-Kapler is Professor of Language and Literacy in the Faculty of Education at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. She is the author of Writing With, Through and Beyond the Text: An Ecology of Language, and co–author of Engaging Minds: Changing Teaching in Complex Times.

Email: rebecca.luce-kapler@queensu.ca