Week 5 -- Chunking

As usual, I share my concerns and criticisms.  This is my way of working out struggles with the readings.  Don't take this as too negative.

What I'm having trouble with is the concept of "chunking."  I see how this applies to certain courses--where facts, equations, methods build into more advanced facts, equations, methods, theories.  "Chunking" isn't so easy in a liberal arts class, where associations between "content" occur in dialogue, digressions, and the like.  I think that we do chunk content now in a f2f course, though so often it doesn't build up to, but instead connects with material.  Sometimes these connections happen in class, but at other times students must themselves connect the pieces in the chunks, as it were.  They impose organization on material that's already there.

(I say this as I read Dante, Aristotle, Thomas Pynchon, etc. this summer, and make connections between them.  If I put them altogether in a section of a course, am I necessarily "chunking" them?)

I don't see how "chunking" is part of a hypertext world.  The entire premise of hypertext (i.e., the form(s) of the Internet) is that the user proceeds from one text through to another text through yet to another.  "Surfing" the Internet is the casual term for this, but we do this kind of passing through texts when we are looking for something or learning something.  (I went to Wikipedia looking for an entry, which linked to other connected entries that I click on, and so on.  Or, I went to amazon.com looking for a book last night, found it, saw a link to another, similar book, went to it and looked at it, then through to other recommended books, ad infinitum.)

So is "chunking" on in a hypertext space the illusion of organization on the part of the organizer, the teacher?  As students take our online courses, they are surfing, passing through, all of the linked portals between texts.  And they see the possibilities on every page to pass through to more texts.  Students may not necessarily follow the paths we lay down for them, because we are not aware of all the possible paths we are constructing.

I suppose that the modules are a way of limiting passageways through our course material online, but if we link to places beyond our LMS, we are inviting travel beyond the chunked content.

How does learning, sound learning, work in a hypertext environment?