“How about the American classroom? Our method of teaching hasn’t radically changed over the past century. It’s stuck, it’s dated, and it’s in need of radical transformation. While there are bright spots in the private school system, the public education system–where the vast majority of our children are being taught, guided, and motivated–is a dated, bloated, inefficient, bureaucratic dinosaur. It lost sight and understanding of its consumer a long, long time ago.”
1 Historical context
Our current education system, built on the Industrial Revolution model, focuses on IQ, in particular memorization and standardization, skills that will be easily and efficiently supplanted by artificial and augmented intelligence (AI), where IQ alone isn’t sufficient. A good blend of IQ (intelligence) + EQ (emotional intelligence) + RQ (resilience) is critical to unleashing a student’s potential. The latter is particularly relevant to the uptake of individualised distance learning.
In 1979 Professor Denis Bellamy, a UK advocate for educational reform, created a network of educators and organisations who were exploring new ways of handling and communicating cross-subject knowledge about the use of natural resources for human production (natural economy). This developed during the 1980s in the Natural Economy Research Unit (NERU) within the Department of Zoology of the National Museum of Wales, which was funded by the education directorate of the EU. One of NERU’s first contracts was a consultancy to help produce a new examination syllabus about world development for the Cambridge University Local Examinations Syndicate. It was promoted as the subject natural economy within the Syndicate’s International GCSE.
From 1992 NERU’s educational projects focused on new opportunities arising from the Rio Environment Summit to work with Welsh and English schools and their communities to create citizen’s environmental networks for democratic participation in local economic development. This work was centred on the use of educational IT tools to promote systems thinking about ‘sustainability’. The belief was that a new hybrid model of education would eventually emerge, for individualised collaborative learning with significant benefits to society.
An important practical outcome was the Schools in Communities Agenda 21 Network (SCAN), which is now an integral part of the education/ interpretation work of the National Museum and Galleries of Wales. Current projects are concerned with packaging classroom resources, which have been produced and tested by teachers, to embed environmental education in the Local Agenda 21. SCAN makes the resources freely available on-line to help bring the study of systems for resource management off the sidelines of the National Curriculum.
The Cambridge natural economy project led to the production and testing of an self-navigating cross curricular knowledge system. This is applied as a text-based computer format for voyaging the global issues, problems and challenges of population, business, and natural resources. Formatted on Longman-Logotron’s pioneering ‘Hyperbook’ software, it was used in 1994-96 as a basis for groups of teachers, and their sixth form pupils, to begin producing educational models of the relationships of jobs to local resources.
The hyperbook system for localised learning germinated from a discussion between Colin Tubbs (English Nature), Denis Bellamy (National Museum of Wales and the Countryside Council for Wales), and Emma Wrigglesworth (the New Forest Committee/New Forest Museum). The idea was to produce interactive computer resources for schools focused on the New Forest as an ecological island in an ‘urban sea’. Colin Tubbs agreed to the use of the text of his book, ‘The New Forest; An ecological history’, for this purpose. The aim was for it to be formatted by NERU as a self-indexing programme, and made freely available within the SCAN schools as a cross-curricular exemplar of environmental management. The idea was that Tubb’s text should be cross-referenced by students with hypertext to other relevant materials, particularly with regard to updating. It became a hyperbook, which at the moment is hosted in a basic format as The New Forest Flip Book by Publitas.
2 What is a hyperbook
A hyperbook is a digital app designed to be strongly related to the book metaphor. Books are the traditional repositories of information and knowledge. People know how to read them, how to use a Table of Contents, how to use an index, etc. By maintaining the same model on screen, people’s access to electronic information can be a representation of the book itself, which can be consulted like a physical book. This approach helps to overcome some of the limitations inherent in reading through a computer screen.
In 2003 Gilles Falquet and Jean-Claude Ziswiler published a paper entitled ‘A Virtual Hyperbooks Model to Support Collaborative Learning’. It was a report on several pedagogical projects exploring the collaborative construction of a scientific hyperbook. They established that the core of a hyperbook is an exposition of a distinct subject presented in a document format as a pdf file’ This core file is freely available and can be customised with annotations, and links made from it, to extension/updating material. Thus, people can personalise the file without modifying its original content. Hyperbooks, together with mind maps, wikis, blogs and personal websites comprise the infrastructure for self-learning. As such they are important resources for a humanistic education where the pedagogy is focused on facilitated learning to guide students to create their own personal body of knowledge. A hyperbook allows each learner to build this unique understanding using hypermedia elements (texts, images, audio, video, animations) which are stored in a modularized way.
In making a linear document (article or book) a single desired reading order is predefined. Readers always know where they are. When authors are writing a book, and are adding pages, they always know what they may expect the reader to have read when that reader reaches the page being written. However, in hyper documents this assumption is no longer valid. Given a rich link structure there are so many ways to navigate through a hyperdocument that it is impossible for an author to foresee which pages a user will have read when jumping to a certain page. Hyperbooks are a prime example of a type of hyperdocument that is written in such a way that the user can jump to any page, understand the information on that page and see links to other related pages that can also be understood. Users are also compilers so building a hyperbook is a good example of what has been called ‘fingerprint self learning’.
The teaching objectives of making a hyperbook are:
• to help the students see the relationships that exists between the different concepts presented during a course, hence the hypertextual nature of the book;
• to give students the opportunity to participate in the collaborative writing of a large electronic document;
• to show that the same subject matter can be seen from different points of view expressed as expressions of multi author creativity;
• to provide an individual with tools to assemble a personal body of knowledge about a subject they are really interested in and communicate it online.
3 An example of how a hyperbook is made?
In 1946, a year-long project was launched by the West Wales Field Society to investigate the wildlife of the small Welsh offshore island of Skomer. The report on the expedition was compiled by Ronald Lockley and his brother in law, John Buxton, from the field notes of academics and local naturalists who took part in the island expedition. These notes were the basis of the book ‘Island of Skomer’ edited by Buxton and Lockley, published by Staples Press in 1950. This book is the core of a Skomer Hyperbook and illustrates problems of assembling an electronic version of a paper book..
Estimated costs of the island survey amounted to about £3,000, a third of which was to come from grants and the balance from members of the WWFS. There is no information about the circumstances of the publication of ‘Island of Skomer’. The book carries a notice saying that copyright is reserved. This is a formality indicating that the copyright holder reserves, or holds for its own use, all the rights provided by copyright law. However, no individual or organisation has ever claimed copyright of Island of Skomer. Considering the way in which the Skomer field survey was carried out by a large body of volunteers, in a modern context, ‘Island of Skomer’ would be an item in a commons media file repository. It would be available to everyone in the public domain as freely-licensed educational media content (te.g.text, images, sound and video clips). It is in this spirit, after extensive and fruitless searching for a copyright holder, that Denis Bellamy and Mike Alexander, a former Warden of the island, launched the Skomer Hyperbook in 2020 as a free educational online resource.
From this point, the core document of The Skomer Hyperbook is a digitised version of ‘Island of Skomer’. It provides a holistic menu and topic scaffold for individuals or groups to express their understanding of the island as a humanistic model of cultural ecology. Indeed, the Skomer Hyperbook emerged as an exposition of evolutionary humanism. The essence of a humanistic education is to facilitate individuals to build a personal body of knowledge.
3 Evolutionary humanism
There is no doubt that the pioneer conservationist and President of the WWFS, Julian Huxley, was the driving force behind the 1946 Skomer field survey and its publication. His vision for the island was an educational resource for the promotion of ‘evolutionary humanism’ by personalising kowledge about the connections between culture and ecology. He defined this concept in his introduction to the 1961 anthology ‘The Humanist Frame’, as:
“… a new idea-system, whose birth we of the mid-twentieth century are witnessing, I shall simply call Humanism, because it can only be based on our understanding of man and his relations with the rest of his environment. It must be focused on man as an organism, though one with unique properties. It must be organized round the facts and ideas of evolution, taking account of the discovery that man is part of a comprehensive evolutionary process, and cannot avoid playing a decisive role in it”.
In other words, if you are a Humanist, then accepting Darwin’s theory of evolution as the font of humanity comes with the territory. Science, not religion, affirms that the human species is an emergence from natural evolutionary forces with no supernatural input into its workings or ethics. It was with this in mind that Huxley promoted the use of Skomer island for outdoor learning adventures into evolutionary humanism. The current quest is to resolve how the evolution of ethics comes to be at the heart of humanity’s response to global warming. Hypermedia resources, such as a hyperbook, provide the necessary tools to span these two topics that are central to the future of humanity on Earth.
Unfortunately, Huxley’s vision of Skomer as a cross curricular study centre to promote evolutionary humanism was not realised. He moved on into the international conservation arena as a founder of UNESCO. Skomer was eventually declared a national nature reserve in 1959, largely because of its crucial position in the survival of the vast numbers of seabirds that nest there. Now, Skomer is a first class illustration of the current trend of conservationism, where the aim is to protect the environment for future generations using scientific data backed up with legislation. Its wider and deeper potential as a holistic focus for educational reform, linking culture with ecology, was largely forgotten until Huxley’s vision for Skomer was revisited by Denis Bellamy and his students who began using the island for place-based learning through adventure in the early 1970s.
It is significant that the first page of ‘Island of Skomer’ is given over to a drawing of the Skomer Vole by the Welsh wildlife artist Charles Tunnicliffe. This animal is a distinct subspecies of the mainland vole, which evolved on the island, probably after being introduced by the first human settlers. In this context, the Skomer Vole can be said to stand as an icon, or emblem, of evolutionary humanism and wildlife protection.
4 Reverence for life
In Huxley’s mind, the core of evolutionary humanism is that religion is a tool invented to enforce a system of ethics that was already established. He argued that the direction of moral progress was toward greater human fulfillment and the realization of values that had “intrinsic worth” i.e. the value that something has “in itself,” or “for its own sake”. Only a society that respected individual rights, stressed education, encouraged responsibility, and promoted the arts, could realize those values. In this respect, we have barely scratched the surface to understand how notions of intrinsic value should affect public attitudes toward conservation. Rather than being a “flimsy notion” that distracts from the development of sound conservation measures, Huxley took the view that the intrinsic value of nature provides a robust and necessary basis for developing a conservation-based relationship with nature. This expression of reverence for life in all its diversity had emerged in the interwar period. For example, writing in 1924, Albert Schweitzer summarised the ethics of wildlife conservation as follows;
“Ethics in our Western world has hitherto been largely limited to the relations of man to man. But that is a limited ethics. We need a boundless ethics which will include the animals also.… The time is coming when people will be amazed that the human race existed so long before it recognized that thoughtless injury to life is incompatible with real ethics. Ethics is in its unqualified form extended responsibility to everything that has life”.
Therefore, one of the key papers to be attached to the Skomer Hyperbook was a biography of Schweitzer feely available in the World Heritage Encyclopedia.
Schweitzer’s theme of ‘reverence for life’ was picked up by Rachel Carson in 1962. She was the ecologist and science writer who campaigned in America against the flagrant use of chemical pesticides. She prefaced her book, ‘Silent Spring’ with a quotation from a letter Schweitzer had written to a beekeeper whose bees had been destroyed by pesticides:
“Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the Earth”.
Through Carson, and others following her path, Schweitzer’s most positive legacy infiltrated the Western ecological movement from the 1960s. Indeed, Skomer played a role in tracing fatal pesticide residues into food chains.
Julian Huxley’s internationalist and conservation interests led him to choose humanism as being more directed to supplying a basis for the ethics of wildlife conservation. He traced his decision to embrace humanism to the evolutionary underpinnings of the early primates, who developed ideas about what was good and bad as it pertained to their flourishing as a species. Morality was birthed in humans from these biological intuitions, and as populations increased, they could no longer depend on smaller communities to govern moral standards. Religion solved this problem, proving to be a successful tool in policing large groups on what was moral and immoral. This goes to show that morality transcends religion as its point of origin.
Huxley believed that our faculties are capable of deciphering good from evil but our relationship with religion is such that we misattribute our moral foundations to the divine. Religions make claims about how things should or ought to be, how to value them, which things are good or bad, and which actions are right or wrong. These normative statements and behavioral norms, as well as their meanings, would have been an integral part of social life as experienced by Skomer’s prehistoric farmers. The norms are an adaptation that evolved in connection with social coordination, cooperation and stability. This capacity involves being in the state of accepting a norm, which we should thus expect to be a standard part of human moral behaviour.
It is relatively easy to see how evolutionary humanism gave meaning to Huxley’s life. It helped him to engage with the self-questioning, common to all humanity seeking connections between culture and ecology: Who am I? What is my purpose? What is our place in existence?”
“[Evolutionary humanism] has enabled me to see this strange universe into which we are born as a proper object both of awe and wondering love and of intellectual curiosity. More, it has made me realize that both my wonder and curiosity can be of significance and value in that universe. It has enabled me to relate my experiences of the world’s delights and satisfactions, and those of its horrors and its miseries to the idea of fulfillment, positive or negative. In the concept of increased realization of possibilities, it provides a common measuring rod for all kinds of directional processes, from the development of personal ethics to large-scale evolution, and gives solid ground for maintaining an affirmative attitude and faith, as against that insidious enemy … the spirit of negation and despair. It affirms the positive significance of effort and creative activity and enjoyment. In some ways most important of all, it has brought back intellectual speculation and spiritual aspiration out of the abstract and isolated spheres they once seemed to me to inhabit, to a meaningful place in concrete reality; and so has restored my sense of unity with nature”
There are many institutes devoted to the study of ethics and studies of current ethical issues that range from labour-management relations to human trafficking. We need the arena of cultural ecology to explore ethical issues that may arise in the future at the interface between people and Nature, which are not well understood today. These issues have to be resolved to fully assess and address the 2050 plans for human survival. Hyperbooks are tools for learners to take early steps in that process.
Appendix. Five simple steps to make a hyperbook
1 Each page of a paper book is scanned to produce a collection of jpeg files, one file per page.
2 Each jpeg picture file is inserted, in sequence, into the pages of a word processor document using an app such as Word or Google Docs.
3 The document is saved as a pdf file that can be opened in a pdf viewer, such as Adobe Acrobat, and navigated by scrolling the pages up and down.
4 The pdf file is opened in a pdf editor, such as Pdf Elements, where text, pictures and hotspot links can be added to customise it.
5 Finally, the modified pdf file may be converted to a flip book, using an app such as FlipPDF, which can be navigated by turning pages horizontally left to right and right to left.