In this article, the author discusses how she applied autoethnography in a study of the design of hypermedia educational resources and shows how she addressed problematic issues related to autoethnographic legitimacy and representation. The study covered a 6-year period during which the practitioner's perspective on the internal and external factors influencing the creation of three hypermedia CD-ROMs contributed to an emerging theory of design. The author highlights the interrelationship between perception and reality as vital to qualitative approaches and encourages researchers to investigate their reality more fully by practicing the art of autoethnography.

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The initial conceptionHUGO is the name given to an on-going project being conducted within the Faculty of Education to present the research methodology components of Masters and Doctoral programs in interactive multimedia format, disseminated as a CD-ROM. The name was adopted as a result of a reference in Bolter (1991) to Victor Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris 1492, in which the priest, holding a copy of the Bible, newly published in the vernacular, looks up at the dominating edifice of Notre Dame Cathedral and says, with some regret, 'Ceci tucra ccla' (This will kill that). We do not believe that technological innovations in information transmission will 'kill' either the use of traditional print media, nor the authority of universities, at least in the immediate future. However, the reference to Hugo's book reminded us of the potential of these innovative media to challenge traditional notions of higher education.The first conception of HUGO l emerged in 1993. A group of QUT academics engaged in teaching the introductory research methods unit in the Master of Education course became excited by the potential of the hypcrmcdia format for teaching and learning. The notion of translating the suite of research units currently taught in the Faculty of Education into this format emerged. Such units are frequently regarded with some t~epidation by students, and we had rcalised early in their development that the academics involved had idiosyncratic styles of teaching and strong feelings on how best students should be helped to become the creative and innovative researchers of the future. The intensity of emotion generated in research unit planning meetings was probably second only to that generated by discussions over parking provision.The controversy emerged not only from the 'quantitative-qualitative' debate, nor even from the 'neo-positivist-constmctivist' division. These were solved very early by the creation of teaching teams which represent both sides of the divides. AUSTRALIAN EDUCATIONAL RESEARCHER VOLUME 23 No 3 DECEMBER 1996 13 14 LIDSTONE AND DUNCANWithin the qualitative camp, the philosophical and practical foci of the various staff involved varied considerably. Some were deeply committed to ethnographic approaches, some to phenomenographic analyses, and some to the generation of production systems for computer simulation. The variation in approaches favoured by the staff probably reflects the status of qualitative research as an emerging paradigm, in Kuhn's (1970) definition of the term. However, our neophyte researcher students expressed the desire for higher levels of simplicity, direction and explanation than the eclectic nature of this type of research readily permits, and in both the usual weekly part-time delivery mode and in vacation schools, our students found the units to be very dense conceptually. The conflict created by the student desire for authoritative input from lecturing staff, and the academic acknowledgment of the dangers of not presenting the qualitative research paradigm as being well stru...

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