Hypertext Environment Essay Research Paper Computers finds

Hypertext Environment Essay, Research Paper

Computers finds a unique selling point to attract customers: their advertisement

shows a young man ecstatic after getting the latest computer in the market.

However, on his way home, he reads a billboard sign, which displays that a newer

version of the same computer is launched. Apart from marketing Gateway

Computer’s upgrading strategy, the advertisement reflects the rate of change in

a technology-oriented world; the dichotomy being that such rapid change

undermines the possibility for users to cope with emerging, changing technology.

The situation exemplifies a new and unstable era for pedagogy in the age of

information technology where technical communicators must be provided with a

conceptual framework for the comprehension of malleable information and complex

discrete elements (Basseur 78-79). Rhetoric plays an important role in

navigating a technical communicator. In a hypertext project, it is the

rhetorical framework that aids the communicator to translate multimedia into a

tool for persuading an audience. For example, Power Point as software uses the

visual component as the dominant feature to process information in a graphical

manner. The added components would be movie files, sound files, animated

graphic, and embedded graphics. Thus, hypertext environment incorporates

multiple variations of multimedia. For a novice communicator, it is possible

that the tools may become the focal point of the presentation, as a Web page

designer using an overabundance of animated graphics for the sake of visual

stimulation. In the process, the focus shifts from the gestalt principle of

figure-ground to the creation of visual noise (Kostelnick-Roberts 59). In this

case, the designer overlooks the role of the graphics. Instead, the graphics are

used as decorative images in the broader framework. An instructor teaching

software applications may run the same risk of concentrating on the utilities

and ignoring the contents that are stored and manipulated through the functions

of the utilities. As Basseur explicates in "Visual Literacy in The Computer

Age," "the ease or efficiency of computer [applications] has the

potential to influence our choices, often in ways that we not even aware

of." Thus, it is possible for the designer or the user to lose track in a

"post-modern" landscape with the lack of "structural design"

(Basseur 92). In "Multimedia and the Learner’s Experience of

Narrative," D. Laurillard emphasizes the importance of a structural

framework: By contrast with traditional media, one of the key benefits for

interactive media is seen as being the lack of imposed structure, giving much

greater freedom of control to the user. However, in the context of instruction,

this benefit runs counter to the learner’s need to discern structure if there is

a message to be understood. We have found, from observation in previous research

studies, that learners working on interactive media with no clear narrative

structure display learning behaviour that is generally unfocussed and

inconclusive. Thus, one of the key benefits of interactive media, the greater

learner control it offers, becomes pedagogically disadvantageous of it results

in mere absence of structure. As pedagogy faces shifting, ambivalent changes in

a technological world, it is imperative to uphold the conceptual structure for

the user’s navigational purposes.