Will shares a first-person account of ...
How the Site Came About

"Teaching lives". . . I can't write any further without stopping to play with this phrase. In one sense, it's a cri de coeur from all teachers that despite necessary and valid criticism, teaching today is very much alive--and in no small part the new life to teaching these days comes directly from exploring cyberspace as teaching space. Another take on the phrase, "teaching lives" is that it simply shows where the authors of Hypertext Reflections are writing from--that living and teaching with hypertext demands an organic sense of growing and linking that helps our text-based thinking make more sense. Bringing together different aspects of our teaching lives with some of the concerns and opportunities that hypertext presents to us as we evolve is not necessarily a traditional approach to scholarship. But we believe our use of hypertext and our expressions of both human and scholarly ideas converge in ways that may indeed benefit our teaching lives.

I remember bumming a cigarette from Beth Kolko at the l996 CCCC, but I didn't need to bum a light since I was already combustible beyond belief. I had just attended another session on hypertext, about hypertext, of hypertext, but glaringly without hypertext. I began an interest in hypertext when I met John McDaid during my graduate school days at NYU in the mid-eighties. The term hypertext was exotic and alive with uncharted possibilities. Here we are more than a decade later and hypertext is now so clearly embedded in our teaching lives that we sometimes forget the underpinnings and evolution that got us here. Hypertext did not simply show up as a convenient theory in our lives and field, but grew through the visions of Ted Nelson, George Landow, Jay David Bolter, Michael Joyce and the practices of many of us who had already journeyed into screens for word processing and file sharing and email.

"We do hypertext everyday in class," I told Beth. "Why can't we do it at a damn CCCC conference?" Beth and I stopped. Beyond my normal ranting and raving, this question hit us both between the eyes. Our cigarettes weren't half finished before we began to imagine a l997 CCCC session that used hypertext to be about hypertext--that not only told what we had found in our research and experiences as teachers, but showed how hypertext links us and our teaching in ways that change the ways we work.

After enlisting Mike Palmquist and Emily Golson (and later Jonathan Alexander, Luann Barnes and Kate Kiefer), we began to develop a proposal for the l997 CCCC where the audience would present our hypertext -- that is, where the audience would take over the reading/narrating/reflecting of the hypertexts we would develop and "present" at the 1997 CCCC. As I've said in various publications and presentations, I believe hypertext offers some clear moments of how critical theory is shifting toward making readers more writerly. Of course Barthes saw this shift without stressing hypertext, but it's our contention that hypertext has changed our teaching lives in some ways that not only make students more writerly, but also make our teaching lives more teacherly. By teacherly, I don't mean that we are able to deliver even more information than we used to with our lectures, but that we are able to connect ideas more powerfully.

The screens you will find in this hypertext will not link perfectly because life doesn't link perfectly. However, as scholars and teachers, we do link frequently at conferences and that, indeed, was the initial link of this text. Consider, if you will, that many of us attend conferences and listen to dynamic ideas in static contexts. We began the work in Hypertext Reflections with the hope of changing the very essence of what a conference presentation is. Our profession of teaching writing has advanced beyond lecturing and in many ways is a leader in developing pedagogy in higher education. WAC so powerfully supports this point that I won't belabor it here. Why did we accept so many papers being read at us and why do we continue to do so?

Even though we see a renewed value on teaching, "publish or perish" has not gone away. In my life, conference presentations are often a way to start a project that frequently has become something publishable. In fact, I believe that teaching students to see their writing as publishable is a good way to teach caring about what one writes. Hypertext Reflections is also about our lives and the way we teachers have come together with our experiences and insights about hypertext. In all candor, I couldn't be happier with this new home for a decade of research and teaching life online and also with the disjunctive way our teaching lives touch each other. What this hypertext lacks in smooth connectivity is less important to me than presenting how early stages of hypertext have influenced our teaching.

I can't speak for the other collaborators of this hypertext, but I believe that we have each integrated the possibilities of hypertext into our teaching lives. We have created Hypertext Reflections to capture not only our individual concerns, but also our shared attraction to theories and ideas. That is why we know it makes sense to place an empirical study next to a student text about rape and power, next to metatext about students publishing a hard copy book, next to an essay about how hypertext and sexuality converge in a teaching context, next to some thinking about media shifts from orality. Teaching is the central core of this hypertext's authorship. As writers, we came together with our desires to present something radical at the CCCC and to publish our work in an entirely new forum. We hope that our hypertext comes together now with the desire of readers to understand more about how hypertext can become part of their teaching lives. To get this point, we need to agree that linear progressions in texts and lives are increasingly less an aspect of our modern lives and that multi-linear paths and links across space, time, and even lives are now more powerful than ever before.