A Note From the Professor of This Class
College students and those interested in the topic of this Web page (or others curious about the creation of Web pages) will discover all the excitement and difficulty of using, as these students did, this latest tool of dazzling technology available to the academic community. The WWW presents enormous possibility as writers and teachers gain access to a truly universal audience. Students still write "to the teacher," as they should in order to benefit from a teacher's instruction and experience, yet they quickly realize that they must find a specific audience within the WWW community. Attracting that specific audience is made easier on the Web because of the availability of pictures, graphs, diagrams, and links to other sites about the same topic.
At the same time, one difficulty for the professor of writing arises the minute the Web page is up and running. How does one evaluate this work? At what point in the process does one evaluate? Does one wait until all indivdual work is posted on the page or ask for hard copies as the page evolves? I chose, in the case of this English 114 Freshman Writing Seminar, to collect hard copies and grade each student's work as individual effort. No one person is responsible or identified as the creator of the page; however, each student has given his or her contribution to me for evaluation before the page is complete. Those in the class with technical expertise have taken responsibility for the technical aspect, so they receive credit for that work. The same standards that I apply to the essays and research papers written earlier in the semester are applied to the Web work as well.
I hope all who visit this site will discover the high energy the 114
students brought to their work and the questions that must be raised
and debated if this tool is to be used to increase knowledge and to
help students improve their writing, reading, and critical thinking.
This page is not my page; it belongs to the students who created it.
The gaps in thinking, the hyperbole, the lapses in standard usage, as
well as the creative expression and the willingness to tackle
electronic literacy are theirs. What I claim and take responsibility
for is a pedagogy that allows for a Web page as one part of a standard
one-semester writing course in a traditional English Department. My
brief experience with the WWW and its potential in the teaching of
writing encourages me to adapt it in the future to my goals and
objectives in the writing and rhetoric classes I teach.
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