| weaving
a virtual web:
practical approaches to new information technologies edited by
Table of Contents
Sibylle Gruber discusses
the uses of hypertext and hypermedia as a means to explore diverse forms
of literacy practices. She argues that authors and audiences of hypermedia
are encouraged--and required--to transform established perceptions of writing
and reading practices, and to weave a "virtual web," a writing space that
can provide more flexibility than traditional print texts. However, she
also argues that hypertexts do not present an entirely new approach to
texts and to teaching. Instead, their application in classroom situations
enhances many of the already existing educational practices–from teaching
writing as a process to increasing audience awareness–by combining newness
with familiarity.
1. When Media Collide
David Gillette explains how to create an English course which focuses on the web as a media collage where textuality is examined in connection with all elements of the "text" which constitute an "internal narrative logic" (Gillette). Reading "When Media Collide," interested audiences learn how to plan for a course which includes media seminars in which the class analyzes the storytelling "interfaces" of the pivotal media technologies—texts, film, television, still photography, and painting—that interact in a web-based environment. 2. Encountering Hypertext Technology: Student
Engineers Analyze and Construct Web Pages
J.D. Applen discusses how to create a course plan which encourages students to read theory about hypertext and the World Wide Web, analyze web pages, and then construct their own web pages. Applen shows how careful initial planning enables students to devise a set of criteria that allows them to analyze an effective web page. Applen also outlines how the specifics of a proposal statement—the objective, problem statement, and audience analysis—prepare students to construct a web page. 3. Preparing Future Teachers of English
to Use the Web: Balancing the Technical with the Pedagogical
Asking how instructors can cover not only the technical, logistical aspects of the Web but also the theoretical and pedagogical ramifications of using it, Larry Beason’s chapter shows readers how he structures the different components of a web project in a course that prepares future teachers for implementing computers in the teaching of writing. 4. The Creation Project
Golson, the instructor of
the course, discusses how her pedagogical goals translate into planning
and creating a web project. She examines both the successes and shortcomings
of the lesson, and offers suggestions about how to plan future electronic
efforts. Sagel, one of the students in the course, discusses how the class
reacted to the project and puts forward suggestions and technical advice
to students or teachers writing web documents.
5. Can Anybody Play? Using the World Wide
Web to Develop Multi-Disciplinary Research and Writing Skills
Elizabeth Sommers begins with an explanation of her pedagogical stance and the concept of research that defines the course. Sommers describes the most important skills and knowledge students learn in her course. After providing practical information on how to use the web for research, she concludes with an overview of what she has learned and what other teachers might expect to gain from incorporating web-based research and writing in their courses. 6. Surfing the Net: Getting Middle School
Students Excited about Research and Writing
Jean Boreen discusses a university course which provided university students as well as veteran teachers an opportunity to work one-on-one with a group of middle school students on web-based projects. Boreen shows how using the Internet as a research tool can influence students’ rhetorical choices in their writing and can engage students in an active use of resources, leading them to "take charge of their own education". 7. Foreign Language Resources on the Web:
Cultural and Communicative Wealth on the Wires
Jean LeLoup and Robert Ponterio elaborate on how the web can be used as a resource tool. In "Foreign Language Resources on the Web: Cultural and Communicative Wealth on the Wires" they discuss the rationale for using the WWW in the foreign language classroom and provide the pedagogical underpinnings for integrating electronic communications technologies with their wealth of information into the foreign language curriculum. Their sample projects—visiting two "virtual" French museums and presenting a news broadcast in Spanish after students collected information available on the web—show well-thought-out objectives for language teaching while also incorporating research about a country's culture. 8. Building a Web for Literacy Instruction
"Building a Web for Literacy
Instruction," provides a model for English teachers who want to incorporate
technology for conducting meaningful and independent research and for writing
instruction. In this chapter, Sarah Rilling and Eniko Csomay present projects
used in a freshman composition course in the United States and a teacher
education course in Hungary. They point out that students who were able
to use the web for conducting research "learn not only how to be more independent
learners, but they also acquire various learning strategies from their
peers".
9. Changing Writing/Changing Writers: The
World Wide Web and Collaborative Inquiry in the Classroom
Working with students in college composition courses, Patricia Webb’s chapter, "Changing Research/Changing Writing: The World Wide Web and Collaborative Inquiry in the Classroom" provides an example of how the web can support and encourage collaborative inquiry. As a result of integrating the Web into her class, Webb found that students started to view "writing and thinking as part of a dialogic process in which we are in continual conversation with others" (Webb). Discussions were richer, students had more of a sense of their audience, and they took more responsibility for the collaborative writing they produced. 10. Using the Web to Create an Interdisciplinary
Tool for Teaching
Aijun Anna Li and Margery Osborne discuss collaboration on the web as a major component of student learning in a fifth-grade classroom. In "Using the Web to Create an Interdisciplinary Tool for Teaching," Li and Osborne look at a teacher in a "real" instructional setting to understand the dynamics and social processes of community building and information sharing in the classroom. Li and Osborne show how the fifth-graders collaboratively—with only minimal equipment—use the Internet and other information technologies in everyday instruction. 11. Alewives
Katherine Fischer explores the possibilities of the web as a "living sea" which allows students to interact not only with each other but with an audience outside the conventional classroom walls. She stresses the immediacy of the web and the capability of interaction between students and sources—such as war veterans responding to students’ queries online—which creates an experience of literature as "living and breathing." 12. Writing Images: Using the World Wide
Web in a Digital Photography Class
Anne Wysocki argues that the structures of her class and of the classes use of the World Wide Web can be compared to a city. Not only did the Web pages built by students feel like city streets, but they encouraged the interactions that can happen in cities, leading to spirited communication and interactions rarely attained in regular classrooms. 13. From Castles in the Air to Portfolios
in Cyberspace: Building Community Ethos in First-Year Rhetoric and Composition.
After addressing how to translate
new technologies into one's teaching method and pedagogical goals, Burow-Flak
documents how students can learn to evaluate new technologies critically,
and how web activities can establish community not only in cyberspace,
but also in face-to-face interactions in the classroom. She shows how students
in her classroom have grown—through World Wide Web construction—"into a
critically savvy community of writers" (Burow-Flak).
14. Living Texts on the Web: A Return to
the Rhetorical Arts of Annotation and Commonplace
Dean Rehberger shows how the web can be used as a tool to help students focus on portfolios, workshops, group projects, collaboration, revision, and process. Rehberger argues that the Internet can be used by instructors to create more effective assignments and responses to student writing. Using the Internet as a writing tool, according to Rehberger, allows instructors to merge older rhetorical arts of linking, cataloguing, annotating, and collecting emphasized by hypertext with contemporary theories of writing and cultural studies, creating what Rehberger terms "living texts," thus expanding Fischer’s and Wysocki’s use of the term to include not only the environment of the web but also the texts created on the web. 15. Students as Builders of Virtual Worlds:
Creating a Classroom Intranet
The structure of Eyman’s hypertextual class in his essay "Students as Builders of Virtual Worlds: Creating a Classroom Intranet" moves students from creating public personal narratives (acting as individual writers, but writers with a real audience) to working in collaborative teams to produce knowledge bases which can be linked to and explored by other students. The four primary assignments discussed in this essay are an autobiographical description intended for a small, known audience (the class itself); the writing of an individual hypertext essay, organized as linked lexia; the linking of the previous essays to other students' essays, with the creation of "bridge" pages which explore the process of collaborative intertextuality; and the creation of a hypertext journal. 16. Using the Web for High School Student-Writers?
Ted Nellen relates his experiences as a New York City public high school English teacher who recounts some of the activities of his students in his Cyber English class in which each student publishes on the Web. He provides specific writing examples and gives advice and tips to those who wish to electrify their classrooms. This teacher, who calls himself a constructivist, has used many resources on the Internet to excite his students and to draw the best from them. Their webfolios and international collaboration make Cyber English an important Internet application in education and proof positive of the Internet's effect in the English classroom. 17. Systems Analysis and Design Projects:
Integrating Communities and Skills through the Web
Publishing for authentic audiences is at the forefront of Joy Egbert and Leonard Jessup’s chapter on "Integrating Communities and Skills: Systems Analysis and Design Web Project." In this project, learners participate in a process to develop Web pages for a client in the community. As Egbert and Jessup point out, these projects provide community members and teammates as authentic audiences with whom learners interact socially and professionally while learning critical skills such as problem-solving, decision-making, synthesizing, summarizing, and working cooperatively. 18. Nobody, Which Means Anybody: Audience
on the World Wide Web
Audience awareness in publishing on the web is an important aspect of Catherine Smith’s chapter, "Nobody, Which Means Anybody: Audience on the Web." Smith sketches a teacher's recognition of including a "public commons" for web discourse in client web sites developed by technical/professional writing students. For guidance on accountably teaching "audience" in this stage of Web evolution, Smith proposes a synthesis of rhetorical principle, Hannah Arendt's ethics of public life, and recent theory of human-computer interaction. 19. Donut Shoppes and Tea Rooms: Getting
in the MOO(d) for Hypertext
Mick Doherty and Sandye Thompson
explore the pragmatics and theoretical value of utilizing "MOO" technology—a
shared synchronous writing space—to help students reconceive of the writing
process as it is applied in multilinear environments. The major contributors
to this chapter are students from several electronic writing classes, who
discussed the pros and cons of MOOing, and what they learned from the experiences.
The authors note that all of the resources cited in this chapter are electronic
publications, a rhetorical choice of the authors encouraged by the student
participants, as a means of further validating the epistemological value
of the pixelated word.
20. The Craft of Teaching and the World
Wide Web: A Reference-Essay for Educators
The volume concludes with
an extensive reference essay by Kevin Leander in which he provides excellent
web-based resources for teachers and students. As a reference, "The Craft
of Teaching and the World Wide Web: A Reference-Essay for Educators" is
designed as a brief guide for educators who are novices on the web, and
wish to have a broad sense of a variety of valuable web resources. Sections
contain links, descriptions, and extended reviews, and vary topically from
institutional projects to examples of student work, from online journals,
to digital libraries and professional development resources. As an essay,
the piece argues for constructivist, dialogue-based pedagogies with the
web, especially those which have the potential to engage educators and
their students with dispersed and diverse communities of practice.
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