In their College English article, "The Case for Hyper-gradesheets: A Modest Proposal," authors Harkin and Sosnowski propose to look at grade sheets as institutional text. Here's what they claim their new hyper-gradesheet (HuGs) could accomplish:
In a hypermedic situation, we could not only call up the texts of Muffy's [the student's] assignment, her textbook, and her evaluation of her teacher, but we could also see a videotape of the actual classroom and observe directly the instructions that Muffy was given." (26)
Satirically, the authors argue that the hyperlinking of performance data (PD), like that mentioned in the above quote, successfully solves the problem of performance invisibility (PI).
Harkin and Sosnowski's arguments foreshadow developments on the web, noted in the term paper and classroom sites of a
previous screen where instructors, employers, family members, administrators and lawyers all have immediate access to the work records of our students. The Web might not include all that HuGs offers us as a hypermedia database, but imagine combining elements of
inner city surveillance with the papers.
In essence, this is a mapping of extremes to make an argument. Practically, however,
how might one go about reconstructing the relationship between students, writing instructors, and the material that we share on the web?
