Mary Karcher, Wayne State U
“Hansel and Gretel in Cyberspace: Following the Breadcrumbs in a Forest of Hypertext”
What happens when we’re in a nonlinear environment?
“we need to id language an pedagogy that allows us to addres lack of coherence in the hypertextual documents our students produce”
Recent scholars have looked to other genres of writing and other disciplines to see how other mediums convey coherence
avant-garde movement (Sirc)
collage artists (Janangelo)
Hypertext fiction (Bernstein)
Hip-hop (Sirc)
constructive hypertext
exploratory hypertext
common website navigation tools
site map
drop-down menus
back button (follows user’s navigation through the site)
breadcrumbs
Has grown in popularity: breadcrumbs
creates links, show hierarchy of the website
sometimes are overlooked, but never misunderstand
3 types of breadcrumbs
location – conveys the position of the pg within the overall site hierarchy
path – show the specific path a user has taken to arrive at the current page
attribute – uses many breadcrumbs representing possible locations
When they produced research papers, I told them to be careful. It may be related, not necessarily relevant. Here (attribute breadcrumbs) is where you can put all that info.
Breadcrumbs increase the site’s coherence…