Hypermedia software technology is causing upheavals in our ways of thinking. How documents will evolve, what changes will take place in the methods of accessing them, how these alterations may affect our modes of access to information in general are complex matters.

 Watch a child move about in a kindergarten playground. His moves are unpredictable. His steps lead him to where his curiosity is attracted. Now his curiosity works along associative thought patterns. One stimulus generates an idea, which calls for verification, which in turn generates another idea, and so forth. The experimental process whereby the child gets in touch with his environment is therefore absolutely random, and this is what allows him to absorb the most, to maximize learning while minimizing acquisition time. Random access to knowledge —or direct access, as I.T. terminology goes— seems to be an inborn and natural mode, and very likely the most effective, too.

Now watch adults move along in, say, an art gallery. Their moves are totally predictable, as if they were following a track, which is probably the case since the exhibit has to be sequentially organized for sheer practical reasons. Besides, adults will always tend to look for some sort of order, because this is how society has broken them in, in all encounters with culture. Order will be of a chronological kind, or biased by the person in charge of organizing the exhibition. In all cases it will be forced upon the individual. Only a few mavericks will stray away from the mainstream —sparking off outraged remarks— in order to look at that particular painting there. But basically everyone will follow the same pattern. This is because sequential thought patterns, for both accessing and transmitting knowledge, have been so deeply ingrained into the individual.

Now it is precisely through this lens, i.e., the discrepancy between sequential modes of access to knowledge, and random or direct modes, that the evolution of the document should be viewed. Throughout history and up to a relatively recent date, sequentiality has prevailed. In all tribal communities, the village storyteller maintained a single, linear string chaining the events he was telling. Oral speech does not allow for interaction, being essentially sequential, since any utterance is unique at one given moment in time. The Bible, the Scriptures, most born of oral traditions are also characterized by this straight, linear path which is to be found as well in any type of lecturing. Learners listening to a teacher have no alternative but to comply to his vision of things, his sense of history, his line of thought.

In other words, we tend to find this paradox absolutely normal that in a didactic setting, the teaching approach should be exactly the reverse of that naturally assumed by the child in the playground. It seems as if for centuries we have placed the learner in the worst situation for learning. This is because of the inevitable sequentiality of any information presented.

This is no longer entirely true. For example, examined as a document, the press today stands somewhere in-between the pure, hard-line sequentiality of the past and the elusive, randomized mode of access of the future. It actually works on a parallel basis, on some sort of complementary interaction between sequential and direct reading modes. This is the case for such news magazines as Newsweek, Time, etc. They target hurried readers whose attention must be captured, and then held captive to elicit purchase. Now these magazines, it should be noticed, are as much designed by layout specialists as written by expert journalists. Information is accessed visually as well as textually. The visual layout, respective size, content and positioning of the pictures in the left-right dynamics of the page are all elements informing the trained reader on whatever he is to find in the article. To the extent that he needn't read the article sequentially, but simply collect here and there any elements required for his information. In other words, when not reading for his pleasure, the efficient, modern reader implements a random, rather than linear access mode.

Press advertising, when of the better kind, uses the same type of approach. The eyes of the reader are first and foremost those of a viewer guided towards elements capturing his sight and emotions in direct access, and gradually leading him to the copy, which rounds off the seductive operation by a more linear, intellectual argument.

As is obvious, the trend is towards a retreat of the sequential mode. This is where a new phenomenon sets in, one that is nothing short of a revolution affecting how the media are both designed and consumed. The way parents watch TV is sequential: duly equipped with slippers and cup of coffee, a father will sit throughout his favorite soccer match or TV drama. The younger generation and the remote control have radically changed that. Zapping from one channel to the next actually boils down to taking information in random access, a process that is very close to that of the child in the playground. This is multiple tapping from a variety of sources which the kid handles in a synecdochical way, i.e., by constantly reconstructing the whole from fragmented glimpses, so that he is capable of reading several programs at the same time. This is authentic competence, not something to be looked down upon.

This zapping approach is now being built in as it were to the state-of-the-art television technology referred to as multi-layer imaging. I was fortunate enough to take part in a seminar held at the Centre International de Création Visuelle in Montbéliard, France, and to view some of the most creative and innovative aspects of research in the field. It must first be known that this technology is already much in use in TV advertising. It allows the viewer to watch a superposition of several films merged on screen from different sources. For example, a well-known commercial will show a peaceful seascape at sunset (background layer, say, #5); a flight of birds moving to the right (layer #4); a Scandinavian visual —i.e. a lithe, blonde girl with little clothing on, sitting in the posture of the Little Mermaid— on a rock awash (that's layer #3); the visual of the product on sale (layer #2); the advertising copy for the product, made hazy by a watery effect (layer #1). Five layers of information converge to create the visual experience, making it difficult to consciously handle it all. This is very close to subliminal viewing.

One lady director in residence at the CICV presented a video document where this approach was taken to its limits. The screen simultaneously showed a number of smaller screens, each of them dealing with a particular, autonomous documentary subject, complete with visual information, music and soundtrack in different languages. The work was aptly entitled Parabolic People. The smaller screens were moving back and forth in the larger screens in a random pattern, akin to tropical fish in a watertank.

What was interesting about it was that the multiple sources made it impossible to consciously select any one of them in particular. The result was that amongst a group of ten persons viewing the same, 3-minute multi-layer document, none had kept the same mental trace of the common visual experience. In other words, every one had taken in their own information, their own vision of things. From the visual plurality emerged not one audience but a number of individualized spectators, whose personalities had been left intact, perhaps even enriched by the experience. This is personality-enhancing video, a rare concept indeed.

Another innovation in the field is the emergence of hypermedia software applications in the wake of MPC technology —relatively cheap computers capable of satisfactorily handling pictures and sound. These allow for a presentation of information in successive layers which the user accesses directly, by targeting only the items he needs when he needs them, eliciting them on screen by pressing a button.

In a hypermedia document, certain areas —words, sentences, paragraphs or pictures— are designed as doors opening direct paths to other documents, other areas, other pictures. Those doors are activated by the user when clicking a button on the computer mouse. Granted, these paths have been paved by the person in charge of designing the application, who has inevitably used his own biased logic to integrate the variety of sources —texts, encyclopedic references, visuals— into a coherent information network. But it is for the reader himself to implement his own logic of access to information, according to his needs. There again, we are in the playground, not imprisoned in a book whose pages we are forced to thumb through one after the other.

Such observations remain valid when confronting a far more impressive mass of data, that represented by the Internet. Any recent hypermedia encyclopaedia can be regarded as a microcosm of the Internet. Granted, the quantities involved are different, as is the cost of accessing the data, which is carried by telephone lines instead of being available within the same computer.
But the accessing strategies are the same, except that on the Web you can ask your way to real persons who are present on the network. In this perspective it seems important that we teachers carry out some thinking about teaching with the Internet.
Suppose a group of students are looking for some specific information, i.e., the name of an author, the title of a book, and for some reason cannot find it. They may go over to a forum and directly ask for help to those people in there. On connecting the next morning, they will find replies which may be answers to their request, or directions as to where to find them. So that the pleasure of finding will be associated with the pleasure of authentic communication. That is where we leave the traditional context of the teacher asking false questions whose answers are already known.

This chronicle of a mutation to come, no matter how fascinating or scary it sounds, should not prevent us from thinking about the didactic issues at stake.

First of all it has considerable impact on learning. It is our belief that sequential transmission of information and knowledge, if used alone, is an elitist method of teaching. We have shown how opposed it is to the cognitive processes natural to the child. As a result, only those learners capable of gathering and using information presented in that manner, those capable of handling abstraction, i.e., the happy few trained from infancy by their family environment, will be in a position to handle it in such a form. The rest will only laboriously digest it, if at all. It is therefore obvious that those information technologies which are based on direct access will see new talents emerge amongst learners so far discarded by the very mode of access to knowledge.

Also, sequential learning results in intellectual standardization in that it is based on a one-way descent of information down to its target. On the contrary, as has been shown, random access to information preserves the user's personality.

Now for about one generation, teachers have been trying to re-define the rapport between the learner and knowledge. Admiration for the erudite has become obsolete, what matters is that intellectual energy must be devoted to the real tasks at hand. What matters is no longer to massively store facts, but to classify, integrate them and reveal their relationships. The advent of CD-ROM dictionaries and encyclopedias makes this extremely easy. As facts are now instantaneously accessible, they are no longer the first and foremost object of learning. Handling them is what matters. Therefore our role as teachers, more than ever, is to transmit skills, techniques and methodologies for accessing various data. Our role is to help students handle overabundant information and select appropriate paths through complex data environments.

This does not preclude our traditional didactic concern, which consists in making students constantly move from high-guidance level activities, where they acquire methodology, to high-autonomy level activities, where they test and transfer their newly-acquired competence. As designers of these new tools, as well as facilitators for their use, we must be aware of all their properties and specificities, to make the best of them without betraying their logic —and revert back to sequential modes, as is often seen.

One last point, but certainly not the least, lies in the effect these instruments will have on the type of schoolspace required to use them. As the teacher is no longer the only dispenser of knowledge, the traditional classroom will no longer be the only learning environment either. Conversely, the computer room, too large, noisy and collective, should not be the only place of contact with the computer. In between, language booths, or boxes or stalls, whatever they are called, housing two to three students operating a workstation on their own, will probably spread in institutions. They will enable students to explore, within their school time but out of their course time, both the access modes and the contents of the new documentary media.

Bernard Moro
Professeur agrégé
Hypermedia specialist
Académie de Besançon
France