How can colleges better prepare you for interacting with hypertext systems? Or Hypertext and Rhetoric in the College Classroom

In the end, the class returns to the fourth question we considered: How can colleges better prepare you for interacting with hypertext systems?

At this point the question becomes a question about the question: Should we answer this question? Should we rewrite the question into something that is more interesting to us? something that has more meaning for us as a group? I explain that my intention in asking the question the first time was to move the class toward a discussion of the value of hypertext for us.

Some of the questions that emerge are:

• Should colleges prepare all students for interacting with hypertext?
• Does a discussion of hypertext belong in composition courses?
• If hypertext is to be the communication medium of the future, do instructors (and institutions) have an obligation to prepare students to write in this new medium?
• Since most help systems for software will be in the form of hypertexts, is a knowledge of hypertext and methods of reading/navigating hypertexts required to be computer literate?
• Can we write a comparison/contrast essay on the web and a book?

Here's the latest version of the question and some answers:

Composition courses serve as the “one required” course in almost all American colleges and universities. Should these courses teach students about reading/writing for the web?

Here's Nick Athineos's response:

Although I've personally enjoyed this part of the class [the section on hypertext], I don't think everyone was as interested in this as they were in the myths of gender or the crossing borders units. In those other sections, everyone seemed to have something to say. In this unit, some people couldn't even get a handle on how to use the computer. As a result, I'd say that hypertext or hypertext writing should be an elective. It should count like a 120 course [Composition 2]. That way those of us interested in computers could write on them for a whole semester.

And Holly Amato's:

I want to say yes and no. I want to tell you that I wish we would have used the computers at the beginning of the semester rather than the end. That way I would have been able to type all of my papers. I would also have had access to a spellchecker. I want to tell you that I learned more about writing in general by talking about the difference between hypertext and print than I did the rest of the semester. But I also don't know if hypertext should be required. We worked on it in here because we wanted to--you convinced us we should do it. Other students, in other schools might have a very different response. Remember you're the one who told us, students should always have a choice about what they study, what they read.

As last year recedes into memory, I look back over student papers and my own notes, I wonder if hypertext and rhetoric really do converge. Bizzell has said that “the study of rhetoric contributes to social change by helping people better to use the persuasive discourses that are powerful in their society.” Has the study of hypertext as a system of communication helped us better use the persuasive discourses that are powerful in our society?

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