Mike tries to explain ...
How the Site is Organized

Our site is organized like a series of Russian nesting dolls. When you enter the site, you can go to one of four places: A Good Place to Start (where you're at now), Teaching Lives, Looking Back, and Looking Forward.

From each of these places, you can move further into the site, exploring the hypertexts that make up the core of our site, found in Teaching Lives, or reading our reflections on the origins of the project, the CCCC 1997 roundtable, and the concepts underlying our collaborative endeavor.

If you go to Teaching Lives, you'll find even more choices. Five core hypertexts comprise Teaching Lives, each representing a different kind of hypertext:

• Emily Golson's Fences: A Womyn's Web is a true Web -- with all the surprises and complications entailed by that concept. The text was written by one of Emily's students several years ago (her name is withheld for reasons associated with the personal nature of the text) and adapted for presentation on the site.
• Mike Palmquist's and Kate Kiefer's Contrasts: Traditional and Computer-Supported Writing Classrooms is a hierarchical hypertext, with extensive use of frames and pop-up windows. Contrasts presents a summary of a year-long study of teaching and learning in four traditional and four computer classrooms.
• Will Hochman's Poetic Electric: Experiencing Hypertext with Writing Eyes combines elements of linear text and Web text as it explores the connections between hypertext, teaching, and learning.
• Beth Kolko's A Short Story of a Short Course on Orality and Literacy is a sequential hypertext (almost but not quite linear) about one of Beth's courses.
• Jonathan Alexander's Hypertext and Queer Theory is a linear text (a single hypertextual node, if you will) about connections between queer theory, teaching, learning, and (you guessed it) hypertext.

Together, and through extensive cross links among the texts in Teaching Lives, these texts form the basis for our discussions, for our examples, and for (we hope) your reflections about the connections among teaching, learning, hypertext, and our lives.

Navigation Hints: You can move around the site in several ways. You can rely on the navigation bar on the left of the screen to move to the homepages for the site and for Teaching Lives. You can also access our table of contents, site map, and site search from the navigation bar. Please note that the "Home Page" button will show up when you're in the reflections sections of the site (A Good Place to Start, Looking Back, Looking Forward); when you are in the Teaching Lives, the "Home Page" button is replaced with a "Teaching Lives Home Page" button.

We hope you enjoy the site.