Mike's tells a chronological tale of ...
How the Site Came About

Our Web originated with a discussion between Will Hochman and Beth Kolko at CCCC '96. The discussion focused on the opportunities and advantages of theorizing hypertext as hypertext. Rather than talking -- or reading -- about hypertext, panel members and the audience could experience hypertext. Emily Golson, Mike Palmquist, and Douglas Brown, in succession, joined the conversation and the panel proposal took shape over the next month.

After the panel was accepted for CCCC '97, Douglas Brown left the panel (and academics, for that matter) to take a position working on the Web for ABC in New York. Jonathan Alexander, a colleague of Will's at the University of Southern Colorado, took his place on the panel. When we began coding the website, Luann Barnes, who works with Mike on Colorado State University's Online Writing Center project, brought her experience coding HTML to the project. After the conference, Kate Kiefer, who had worked with Mike on the study that forms the basis of their web, joined the group as well.

Our initial idea was to create a hypertext about hypertext, but our discussions as we worked on the panel proposal shifted us away from that idea. We felt that the ideas we wanted to explore might be better illustrated by a topic other than hypertext itself. Our CCCC '97 proposal, as a result, outlined the idea of a hypertext on professional life within the academy -- and within composition studies in particular.

As we began to weave our Web in the winter of '97, however, we found that creating a Web from scratch would take more time than any of us wanted to devote to a conference paper. We found it more useful (and feasible) to extend work that we were involved in at the time. Mike provided a report on research conducted in computer-supported writing classrooms. Will created a Web that brought together several projects that had emerged from his teaching. Emily drew on work from a larger project that she had completed with her students a few years earlier. Beth created a Web that reflected on her work in a graduate seminar. And Jonathan integrated his work as a teacher and queer theorist with his relatively recent experiences with hypertext.

Together, these five Webs formed the basis for what we are now calling Teaching Lives. Teaching Lives formed the core of our presentation at CCCCs and, within the larger context of what we now call Hypertext Reflections, forms the object around which so much of our discussion revolves. As a result, the five core Webs do not provide a unified whole so much as they create prisms through which each of the others can be seen.

As we worked to bring the five webs together for our presentation at CCCCs, we found a number of intersections. We also found that the divergent structure of the five Webs (ranging from completely Web-like to hierarchical to virtually linear organizations) allowed us to "play" a great deal with the site. This play takes the form of links between the Webs and, in some cases, of simultaneous display of two of the Webs on the same screen.

After the panel presentation in Phoenix, Mick Doherty approached us about the idea of submitting our project as an article for KAIROS. After a bit of discussion -- and some double checking to make sure that Mike's text (which is based on sections of a forthcoming book from Ablex) would not raise copyright concerns -- we went to work on an expanded version of the project.