| |
A Word About "Audience"
|
| 1. |
I had made the decision early in
the planning stages for the class to ask each student to correspond with
at least one author or hypertext scholar about their interests as it might
relate to the student's project. My purpose for doing this initially was
to give the students an experience of the larger ongoing conversation about
hypertext and to reinforce the collaborative nature of knowledge. However,
another benefit emerged from the technique on which I had not planned: it
expanded their awareness of who the potential audience would be for their
work because several of their correspondents
told them they would visit the site and view their projects ("a consummation
devoutly to be wished!"). |
| 2. |
An awareness of audience seems to
be one of the most difficult things to "teach" novice writers (especially
in a traditional classroom). One of the great benefits to telling the students
that all of their finished work would be published on the web is that it
helps to expand the audience from the singular (the teacher) to an imagined
web readership. |
| 3. |
There are drawbacks to this
approach, however. Some students will want to define their audience
as "everyone on the web." Such a definition of audience is of little
use. However, the fact that several of our correspondents would be reading
the works on the web made the audience both broader than the classroom
and narrower than "everyone." It gave the audience a name and a level
of expertise, making my students' writing seem much more real to them
and motivating some of them in an attempt to do an especially good job.
|
| |
|
| |
|  |