Working with students enrolled in basic writing and first-year composition courses drives me toward a definition that focuses on the written, on the textual, aspects of hypertext/media. If the goal of the course is to help students become better (academic) writers, then it follows that the multimedia aspects of hypertext should be minimized in order to focus on the written, the textual, elements of this medium. However, what complicates this move for me is the question of rhetoric--if my aim is to teach students to be effective communicators, effective rhetors, then shouldn't they be exposed to the media aspects of hypertext/hypermedia as well. [click here for an example of the potentials of hypertext as a collaborative medium influenced by visual artists, film theorists as well as by literary scholars....] That is, if the world will communicate through the Web and the Web is moving away from--or perhaps more accurately--combining the textual, the static graphic, the moving graphic and aural representations, then shouldn't these elements be addressed in a composition course?
Still the answer seems to be no. That is, within one semester there is only so much time, so much work that may be completed. Within the current structure of the Queens College curriculum, the primary goal of English 95 and English 110 would seem to be textual--would seem to demand the production of written texts.