Beth ponders the answers to ...
What the Site is For

Why this site? What is the purpose of this site, we have asked ourselves. After all, the CCCCs session grew out of a clearly defined set of goals that Will and others describe elsewhere in this site. But why the revisions and rewrites for KAIROS?

When Mick Doherty approached us after the session and discussed the possibility of submitting a version of the presentation to the journal, we were alternatively skeptical and intrigued. The session itself was both a failure and a success. And, quite frankly, it was via the failures that much of the success was understood. We learned a great deal both from the creation of the session and the presentation itself. And seeing how the audience negotiated the ideas we had presented was a stark lesson in the limitations of teaching.

As experienced instructors we assumed we were good at communicating ideas, instructions, and goals. As rhetoricians, we assumed we had the ideas of "purpose" and "audience" down. It was obvious, though, from the shape of the CCCCs session, that there were some communicative gaps. But it is precisely those gaps that have proven so rich and promising as we continue our investigations into hypertext theory and practice.

Hypertext is a part of all of our teaching lives, and we continue to struggle with how to make those lives as successful as possible. This site is part of a larger exploration of language within our lives as teachers, scholars, and writers.

Why this site, then? Because the learning experience of the proposal, conference session, and the aftermath were too nuanced and evocative to let die, because as writing teachers we value the premises of process and we would like to take advantage of the opportunity to model process in our own work, and because, finally, we see this site as a way to continue our attempted answers to the intriguing and complex questions that arose during the CCCCs.