Much of the literature related to the study of hypermedia is actually based on its forefather hypertext, and refers to the experience of "authorship" and "reading" of interactive literature. Hypermedia, on the other hand, draws upon a broader range of creative talents -- not just technology and story construction skills, but also skills of animation, video, sound and image manipulation. Rogers reminds us that metaphorical art language has been created to describe technological art processes, and calls for a synthesis of art and technology disciplines to invent new terms that do not refer to traditional art processes i.e. "pixeling" in place of "painting".¹ New media demands new vocabulary; if we continue to use traditional terminology for processes that are similar in nature, but in fact quite different in the digital domain, these processes will be doomed to live in the shadow of traditional techniqes and never come into their own.

In the spirit of building up this new vocabulary I have begun to use a word to describe the body of work that can emerge from ongoing hypermedia creation: that is the creation of a Sketchstack. This work is a hybrid of terms that are drawn from traditional media: first, the sketchbook, a collection of drawings, doodles, collages and works-in-progress that typically proceeds in a linear, bound sequence. Second, there is the stack, a collection of index cards that scholars typically use to help organize thoughts in preparation for a speech, report or research paper. The term stack was swiftly appropriated by hypermedia software programmers and propogated by the creators of the early and popular multimedia authoring tool HyperCard, to symbolize the non-linear poossibilities of being able to flexibly "shuffle around" ideas and multimedia experiences like a stack of index cards. And so a sketchstack is precisely that: a hypermedia document that is a collection of artistic works-in-progress. Due to its inherent non-linear nature, a sketchstack is the perfect medium for a digital art portfolio.

Support for and curiosity about the general idea of creativity facilitation through something akin to a sketchstack is strong. Chung et al pose a challenge to software designers: "The concepts and the structure of hypermedia are basically consistent with the associative (creative) thinking process. Thus, hypermedia provides a solid foundation for the design of creativity facilitation programs. Hypermedia technology itself can readily be adapted for the design of the creativity facilitation programs. Many important issues deserve further investigation. Can a 'generalized' creativity facilitation program be constructed?"² Although I believe the authors here were seeking a creativity facilitation program that prompted creative thought, 7th grader Stephen's own creative self-stimulation through the composition of his sketchstack, as described later, is evidence that a computer program need not have planted prompts to nudge creativity. Reflection on the work itself is often enough for an artist to know "what needs to be done next". I believe that sketchstacks are the "generalized" creativity facilitation tool that Chung may be seeking.

A number of art educators have hypothesized that hypermedia will become a dominant mode of information-retrieval in the new millennium, and the already democratic nature of hypermedia creation will only continue to grow in popularity as individuals become empowered by the possibilities of the World Wide Web. If this forecast is true, the young artists in Technology Transformations may have come closer to realizing that they are no longer required to be passive vessels for processed information, watered-down culture, and prepackaged edutainment; instead, they are the authors of experience and masters of the new media. A number of the students in the class expressed a desire to continue authoring on their own after the course sequence was over. A follow-up interview five months later revealed that two of the high school students were actively involved in hypermedia publishing on the World Wide Web, and two adult students were sharing their new knowledge and expressive skills in Hyperstudio with their peers.

There is no argument among scholars in the arts and technology research circles that more documentation of the digital arts are needed. So often we just "make digital art" with our students without time or resources to write up the results. So often we must rely on the research of computer scientists and instructional technology specialists to guide our own innovative work in the art room. We must become our own researchers in the technological sphere, and deal directly with arts-specific problems and possibilities.

There are few studies to turn to that relate directly to the use of hypermedia in the arts, more specifically visual art. To further compound the situation, multimedia is such a fast-growing industry that tools which were once cutting edge ten years ago now appear dated an dobsolete. Early literature on the educational implications of hypermedia has focused on how teachers can use it as a tool for the presentation of information to students, not by students.³ With the availability and development of more powerful software, however, this has since changed. In fact a significant portion of the most relevant literature has been informally authored by educators themselves, and published on the World Wide Web as hypertext documents or posted through newsgroups such as EMIG, the NAEA's Electronic Media Interest Group. The significance of home-grown publishing on the world's largest multimedia "small press" (the Internet) cannot be underestimated.

Deborah Greh's handbook Computers in the Art Room (1990) was one of the first in-depth publications to directly address issues of technology in the elementary and secondary school art room, and is due to be republished in a second edition with updated examples in 1999. Although the terms and the examples from 1990's technology inevitably date what Greh presents in the first edition of the handbook, the principles of creation of art mediated by technology still speak to a contemporary audience. Two themes emerge, which are generally acknowledged by peers in the field to be true. One theme is the idea that technology restores playfulness to art: images may be infinitely manipulated without endangering the original idea and composition. Another theme is that technology returns the child's focus to process over product: images may be saved in sequences, "and if they become accustomed to doing so, one can literally see an image unfold"⁴. Hypermedia is lightly addressed in terms of how optical disk technology might facilitate art research and criticism in the classroom, not how hypermedia might be used as a tool for self-reflection. This is perhaps a reflection of the newness and availability of the technology at the time of publishing; Hypercard software was capable of making interactive artworks but was likely used as a cataloguing device for art databases, or for the cataloguing of the child's own digital art. I look forward to Greh's asessment of how times have changed in the second edition.

When discussed in an art curriculum context, hypermedia is often addressed as component of a larger technology-friendly program. Diane Gregory's article Art Education Reform through Interactive Integrated Media illustrates how hypermedia capitalizes on a non-linear instructional design that is ideally suited to the way the human mind works, thereby supporting a constructivist view of education.⁵ Again, however, the suggested focus is on using hypermedia for art historical inquiry with an aim to the students developing their own art historical documents.

Patricia Rogers turns the dominant vocabulary of computer art on its ear in her revolutionary article Towards a Language of Computer Art: When Paint Isn't Paint. She critiques our acceptance of metaphorical terminology in electronic "paint" and "illustration" software, and asks us to examine the "issues that concern the language we as art educators and researchers use to describe, discuss, analyze and philosophize about imagery that includes characteristics and processes from many arts filtered through the 'hidden point of view' of computer-based technologies."⁶

In Authors of Knowledge: Patterns of Hypermedia Design (1995) Richard Lehrer describes a constructivist approach to knowledge design with hypermedia. It allows the children to transmit information into an "n-dimensional space" in contrast to the two-dimensional space of print, it encourages the children to make decisions about appropriate modes of media to convey information, it promotes a sense of authorship through the production of a useful product, and encourages the authors to consider the role of the reader thereby promoting reflection and revision. The HyperAuthor software is designed to facilitate both construction and reflection on project design. One tool prompts thoughtful choice-making about semantic relationships between cards by asking the student to consider appropriate connections between "nodes" of information. There is a built-in notetaking tool that is a public scratchpad for jotting down ideas, problems and reasoning behind the document design. Another set of tools promotes reflection on the overall organization of the hypermedia document by providing maps of the document nodes and showing the connections between them. Lehrer used this software in a social studies context with 8th grade students studying the Civil War. He found that the construction of hypermedia documents helped may students, "particularly those who were less successful in the classroom, change their conceptions of themselves a learners, away from receiving knowledge and toward authoring knowledge. This transition in self-conception was evident both in their actions and in their identifications of these actions as self- rather than other-directed."⁷

In The Design of a Hypermedia-Based Creativity Facilitation Program Chen-Hua Chung, Chang-Yang Lin and In-Jazz Chen posit that hypermedia is ideal for enhancing creativity. They provide a summary review of the nature of creativity: origin-oriented approaches and process-oriented approaches, and problem-solving approaches.

"As the user navigates through the path of the hypermedia, the individual is in fact going through a creative process of associative thinking. Hypermedia, a generalization of the hypertext concept, is an approach that attempts to mimic the function of the human brain to store and retrieve information by associations. With the aid of computing and communication technologies, hypermedia can provide greater flexibility by these associations to facilitate creativity for information management. The facilitation program can reason through user's inputs and help the user review his/her own thinking process. Frequently, new ideas are sparked by reviewing old ones."⁸

The authors pose an interesting question as to the nature of any creativity facilitation program: would it be necessary to capture the individual's creative thinking process in order to design an appropriate creativity facilitation program? Since the sketchstack are authored by the artists themselves, they do in fact provide us with a complete cognitive map of how the artist might have been thinking about ideas as they progressed. Although nothing can substitute for the actual experience of personally navigating through 7th grader Stephen's sketchstack on the computer, the schematic of Stephen's sketchstack provides great insight on how he revisited ideas and made alternate attempts on specific artworks, and shows hidden areas that the casual observer might not know exist. It was primarily through revisitation of his own ideas that Stephen grew the most.

In a paper based on seven years of observations of children using computers in the art studio, Deborah Greh concluded that computers "present artist, art teacher, and student artist with the possibility of expanding artistic vision, of watching ideas grow, and of playing with and integrating images"⁹. From here, I become interested in the relationship between the development of "standalone" artworks intended to be viewed in isolation from others and the creation of hypertextual documents intended to show a body of work. Greh notes that in the creation of standalone artworks, there is often a sequencing of thought from initial development to completion, and the child's ability to make revisions to a work-in-progress is a powerful stimulus to experiment with alternate solutions. This sequence is often recorded by the child's collection of works-in-progress: self portrait version 1.1, for example, may branch and develop into three distinct self portraits: version 2.6, version 4.8 and version 5.2. Any good digital art educator will encourage this type of sequencing (or seriation), thereby allowing the student to take as many playful risks as needed to develop an artwork to its fullest potential. The sequential art creation patterns students develop when creating standalone digital artworks can easily be documented in a sketchstack. The "story" of an artwork's creation can be told from beginning to end in a sketchstack, like unpeeling the layers of an onion to its core. While this can be done on a most basic level by simply studying a student's folder full of artwork, the presentation of it in a hypermedia context allows the student to select pivotal points in the creative process, and to self-select the most seminal works in a series.

One advantage to keeping a sketchstack is that a number of multimedia projects can be easily accessed through a single computer application. Whether Photoshop, Painter, Avid Cinema, or GIF Builder was used to create the peice, all of these visual media can be viewed through a single sketchstack. This allows the student easy access to all of her projects in one central location, and by virtue of their high visibility, the student is more likely to revisit past artworks and improve upon them as she grows in competence and creativity.

Stephen, a 7th grader in the Technology Transformations course, was a champion of revisitation. He grasped the value and meaning of keeping a sketchstack very early on, and unlike a number of students, created cards in his sketchstack for every single piece of artwork he created, even an illicitly obscene illustration. During class time he frequently flipped through his sketchstack and contemplated ways to improve upon it. Examples of revisitation include the first and second attempts at creating an art gallery (Stack for Me and the Finger Pointer tour). In the Stack for Me, he has kept a copy of his clown painting intact, in its original form. In the Finger Pointer tour, the same clown has been modified to an animated version, with swirling eyeballs and dancing buttons. The original clown painting was executed in the first or second workshop sessions. The animated version wasn't created until at least the end of that week. No prompt was given to revisit, yet he did this time and again. The Helicopter and Picture animations are similar in content as well; content from the original Helicopter illustration have been cut and pasted into the Picture illustration. One of Stephen's most striking revisitations was in the Car animation. The first scene with the cars and crosswalk was created during the first week of classes. The second scene was created a week later when he learned how to use the scanner to make textural enlargements. By pure chance the dark green hologram he chose for the lawn texture ended up casting a shadow-like shape beyond the car's garage. Absolutely delighted by the effect, Stephen later dubbed this the "night time" version of the animation.

Lehrer identifies the importance of hypermedia as an assistant in the development of personal identity, which I believe is one of the main facilitative function of sketchstacks. "...many of the changes anticipated in student learning go beyond skill to matters of self-identity and epistemology. These areas are typically neglected in evaluation, perhaps because they often occur slowly and thus extend beyond the course of a typical school year. Yet these epistemological transitions are the lodestone of instruction. In this regard, hypermedia-based design promises to provide a practical context for aligning instruction and identity."¹⁰ Lehrer's observation about evaluation is valid. However, I would ask if it is no so much important that we are able to evaluate our students, as they are empowered to evaluate themselves?

The nature of multimedia and hypermedia is such that it draws out a range of talents, including mathematical, logical, spatial and musical intelligences. Greh notes that "When using computers, students seem to come to an understanding that there is much more to artistic talent than the ability to render objects realistically. Computers... may open the world of art to a number of students who assumed they had no artistic talent and therefore, no business being in an art course."¹¹ In addition, it has long been recognized that adolescents are capable of self-reflective and formal operational thinking. In Being Adolescent Csikszentmihalyi and Larson have proposed that the adolescents themselves are in the process of reconstructing their own personalities. A sketchstack is, by design, a story of one's own artistic and psychological transformation over time. This process was the inspiration for the name of my hypermedia course, Technology Transformations. I anticipated that over the course of time students' perceptions of themselves would change.

Endnotes:

1. Rogers p. 18, 20.
2. Chung et. al, p. 19
3. Turner and DiPinto, p. 187
4. Greh p. 14
5. Gregory p. 13
6. Rogers p. 17
7. Lehrer p. 22
8. Chung et al p. 15
9. Greh p. 400.
10. Lehrer p. 22

Full citations are listed in the Bibliography