LOSING
CONTROL: Writers, Readers, and Hypertext
This web is adapted from a paper given at the Midwest Modern Language Association Conference in October 2000. It contains observations that both formed the basis for and which have arisen from a course called Writing for Interactive Media offered at Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, Kansas. The Writing for Interactive Media (WIM) course at JCCC differs from composition classed featuring a strong hypertext element primarily in that WIM is designed as a career course rather than as a liberal arts elective.
The
influences of creative thinkers and teachers like Michael Joyce, Jay David Bolter, and
George Landow as well as the essays from individual scholars in collections like
Landow’s Hyper/Text/Theory and Dewitt and Strasma’s Contexts,
Intertexts, and Hypertexts, plus the theories of congitivists like John Von Neumann
and the fuzzy logicians all informed the course’s philosophy on writing
with hypertext; however, JCCC’s Writing for Interactive Media class itself
arose largely from the work of an interdisciplinary task force that oversees an
advanced certificate program in Computer Interactive Media (CIM). Unlike our
composition courses, which use hypertext to explore rhetorical concepts as well
as reinforce and transfer composition skills to new media, Interactive Media
focuses on the most common genres of interactive products on the market.
The web, I think, offers a superior metaphor for this collection of remarks -- not only because allows the ideas to be presented as a loosely connected set of observations, but because it circumvents the need to design or offer artificial conclusions. Like the course, my own ideas and conclusions change the way the technology does -- each new version brings slight advances to familiar themes as well as a fair share of bugs to be worked out.
Losing Control: Computers as Communicators
By Maureen Fitzpatrick, mfitzpat@jccc.net
Associate Professor, English
Johnson County Community College