3.2.2 The Focus of Educational Goals of Context32
Context32 incorporated discipline oriented goals,
which included helping students describe
the inter-relationships among authors, broad movements, and various extra literary cultural contexts,
such as the social, religious, political, intellectual, artistic, and technological history.
"Overview diagrams", representing a central subject surrounded by related subjects were designed
to guide students through Context32. These emphasized the point that any author or literary
phenomena exists surrounded by a number of contributing phenomena, and that there are multiple
valid ways of approaching the subject (Launhardt & Kahn, 1991, p. 5).
Beyond the discipline oriented value of overviews, Landow emphasized the learner oriented outcome of
"critical thinking" associated with their use:
I intended Context32 to foster critical thinking, which I believe centers on the
notion that an educated intelligence perceives any particular phenomenon as potentially
multi-determined and subject to multi-causation. Context32's graphic representation of data
and its capacity to allow multiple links to individual documents encourages the habit of
approaching any literary (or other) fact from multiple directions.
(Landow, 1989, p. 176)
Not only did the Context32 courseware encompass both discipline and learner oriented goals,
but in fact the courseware was able to achieve both at the same time through the same set of
courseware attributes (Landow, 1989). The degree to which Landow believes that it is important for students to use the system
within a self-constructive, and democratic framework, is reflected in the following passage:
Hopper: You use a collaborative approach in which students build Context32.
How different do you think the future of these kinds of systems in education will be,
if you have professionals develop this for students, rather than having the students
develop it themselves?
Landow: That depends upon what you want. If you want to convey information,
that is essentially conceived of and perceived as, "Known by big people,"
then you have professionals do it. In contrast, if you wish to have students
learn both the information and the philosophical goals, then you have the students do it.
It's a very large difference. (Landow and Hopper, 1992)