Hypertext Indexing Applied to Computer-Mediated Conferencing and ...

Hypertext Indexing Applied to Computer-Mediated Conferencing and Teaching: An Aid to Group Memory Audrey E. Mason Weiss, Duane G. Metzger, and James H. McDonald Computer conferencing provides opportunities to explore the relevance and utility of remote, asynchronous1 instruction and learning. Individuals participate in a computer conference by dialing into a mainframe computer with their own personal computer and modem. Once connected to the mainframe, they can join conference(s), read previous entries, add their responses, create new entries, and turn in completed projects. A computer conference on a given topic unfolds over time as participants exchange ideas and data and request more information and clarifications from one another. If a conference has many active members, three problems arise. Within a reasonably short time, there may be hundreds of messages that layer up chronologically. A participant is faced with the task of remembering who said what and when they said it. Furthermore, participants must also attempt to remember how the discourse of a particular conference developed and transformed over time. Finally, new participants are faced with too much information to adequately review or understand past discussions. This article examines these problems in detail, using our experience with the BESTNet computer conferencing system as an example. We will then offer a solution to these problems that blends basic ethnographic methods informed by ethnosemantic theory with hypertext software. The result is a custom information management system that functions as an aidem6moire\o help computer conference participants come to grips with the problem of information overload: too much information to remember and too many people to keep straight over time. BESTNet and the Problem of Information Management The computer technology necessary for connecting geographically dispersed sites in a computer-mediated conference is available worldwide.2 In fact, throughout most of the world, universities are interconnected through their computer mainframes, creating a vast electronic network in the manner of a world telephone system (Arias and Bellman 1987; Bellman 1988; Feenberg1988; Hiltz and Turoff 1993(1978]; Houser and Wallace 1989; Kerr and Hiltz 1982). 23

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HYPERTEXT INDEXING

An example of a multiuniversity computer conferencing system is the Bilingual English/Spanish Telecommunications Network (BESTNet), which is made up of a consortium of universities in Argentina, Canada, Mexico, and the United States. The institutions share computer conferences, computer-based courses, electronic mail, and data bases that are available to interested students and faculty. Computer conferencing holds tremendous potential for instruction. It also facilitates the exchange of ideas and data between individuals who are geographically dispersed or have schedules that do not permit them to be in the same place at the same time. BESTNet offers a wide range of conference topics including agriculture, anthropology, botany, engineering, intercultural communications, medicine, psychology, and telecommunications. BESTNet has the advantage, then, of bringing together a diversity of people and experience that otherwise would not have the opportunity to interact. In our experience, however, individual recall of past dialogue in a computer conference is problematic. Individual and group memory of the conference is faulty. A computer-based course or conference on BESTNet often involves as many as 100 individuals distributed across eight institutions over durations as long as one year. This results in a chronologically ordered sequence of hundreds of entries by numerous participants over the life of the conference. The problem for a participant, then, becomes one of organizing this mass of information in a way that is both useful and meaningful. This problem is further compounded by the chronological structure of the conference itself. Responses to an original entry may not necessarily fall immediately after the entry on which they were commented. Additionally, long strings of commentary that began as a discussion of one theme or topic often evolve into another. Simply keeping track of a discussion and its various mutations can pose a major problem for participants. It is helpful to think of these conferences as analogous to an extended, and sometimes unwieldy, conversation. To better understand the problems facing conference participants, it is useful to examine in more detail the actual structure of a computer conferencing system. In our case, BESTNet uses the widely available Vaxnotes (Digital Equipment Corporation 1986) software, which employs a fairly common conference structure. At any given time, there are a number of concurrent conferences running on BESTNet (e.g., pertaining to anthropology, agriculture, or psychology). Within a conference, the basic communication structure can be termed "topic and response." A "topic" is an entry that requests or provides new information that is not strongly related to previous exchanges in the conference. A "response" is attached to a previous "topic." For example, a participant in a BESTNet conference on "Ethnobotany" requested information on ethnobotanical remedies for diabetes. Shortly thereafter, another participant "responded" by describing an indigenous plant remedy she

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collected while doing fieldwork, and another "responded" with a short list of relevant literature. Each entry receives a unique number within the conference, and entries are listed chronologically. Referring to Table 1, the three entries described above are topic/response numbers 5,9, and 16, in an abbreviated listing of entries from this conference. This exchange sparked a lengthy discussion of traditional remedies that continued over several months, involving faculty and students from many different universities in the BESTNet consortium. A conference, thus, grows through the linear addition of sequential topics and responses. Earlier entries, as they become remote in time and context, may lose their value at later stages of the conference discussion.3 Such a linearly arranged sequence of entries quickly passes beyond both the individual and collective memory of the participants as their recall falters. The designers of computer conference software have recognized these problems and have taken steps to help conference participants manage these huge information data bases. Vaxnotes incorporates a number of memory-aid devices to mitigate the information decay described above. These include directories that sequentially list entries and their titles, keyword indexes, and the ability to conduct searches within the conference by numerical identification (each entry has its own unique number), date,

Table 1 Title Examples Directory Conference Topics: Ethnobotany [-»Titles