Will's Reflection
Accepting the Deep Play Challenge

There are many exciting ways educators can accept the deep play challenge of offering interactive information and ideas. At the University of Southern Colorado, we (I co-authored each of the following pages with Gretchin Lair) have created four pages that are designed to help our writing students. Though we are only beginning to explore the learning possibilities with these pages, initial feedback has been positive.

First, we created a department homepage (http://meteor.uscolo.edu/english) so that our students could learn about their teachers. We created links to some of our professors' syllabi, academic interests, past schools, favorite authors, personal interests, and personal home pages, as well as offering such standard communication information as office hours, telephone numbers, and an emailer. We offer more information about professors and more "play" with who they are than students can obtain anywhere else on or off campus, except through face-to-face experience. Most department members feel that students who access their page have a better sense of their teachers. None of us believes that our department Web page is a substitute for the value of students understanding their teachers, but we do know that it increases the ways students can learn about us and our interests.

Second, we created a "MacLab" page (http://meteor.uscolo.edu/maclab) to help students in our computerized writing lab access both the lab's resources and the Web's writing resources. This page offers information about the lab, monitor hours, and Macintosh resources, as well as collecting a good array of writing resources such as an online dictionary, thesaurus, style guide, etc.. It is actually a good "jumping off" spot for web surfers, because it offers links to the Web's most common search engines. The page is designed to help students in Freshman Year Composition classes understand their "MacLab," experience online writing resources beyond those of a wordprocessor, and begin to surf the Net for research purposes.

Third, we created a Writing Center page (http://meteor.uscolo.edu/writingcenter) to make it possible for our students to send their writing to a tutor and receive feedback. Though cybertutoring doesn't replace face-to-face tutoring, it can offer a paperless way to quickly access writing help. This page includes many links to a huge variety of writing resources and exercises that are especially useful for developmental writers.

Fourth, we created a student "zine" for our creative writing publication, The Hungry Eye (http://meteor.uscolo.edu/hungryeye). In light of shrinking funds, we may not be able to publish further issues in hard copy, but we can keep student interest strong through publishing their work on the Web. We are also able to feature student writers and give them a sense of value and place in their writing community.

Politicians, generals and administrators take heed--I am not suggesting that Web sites replace classrooms or teachers. Nor do I think that computer screens will replace books. However, I am suggesting that educational Web sites with effective links to learning resources do add to the ways teachers may interact with students. Although the pages I've described are small educational steps, and although we clearly risk "TVing" our students, I believe that the hypertexts I've mentioned and those many more that already exist and will exist on the World Wide Web (there's a new Web site created every 4 seconds--) can succeed in giving students a more playful and deeper educational environment. The ways of experiencing education are changing just as the nature of reading is changing. Despite the risks of our "deep Web play," if we are going to win the "screen wars," educators must learn how hypertext changes reading and begin to create Web sites to better interact with our increasingly online students . . . and world.