Three Pedagogical Components
 
There were three fundamental pedagogical components to the course.
1. First, I wanted to use "projects" as the core metaphor in the syllabus for student work, emphasizing the collaborative nature of learning, on the one hand, and providing the greatest possibility for emergent knowledge on the other. Second, the Online Learning Record, developed by M.A. Syverson from the California Learning Record, provided the foundation for evaluating student work. Third, I was determined that the topics for each project would be student generated, rather than my assigning them for each group.
2. The projects were designed to build one on the other and to require collaboration with peers. As discussed elsewhere, the level of required collaboration increased as the course moved on; however, in using a minimalist approach to teaching the technology, students found it necessary to assist each other through the e-mail list and in class. In this way, knowledge became shared and the class became very cohesive as a working group.
3. The OLR requires students at the beginning of the semester to write about their thoughts and experiences and about themselves with respect to the four strands of the course: rhetoric, research, technology, and collaboration. They also interview someone who knows them well (a friend, former teacher, parent, etc.) about these same strands and their strengths and weaknesses. I also ask them to specify what they want to get out of the class and emphasize that this is their education and what they want is important (not simply what I want to teach). Students also keep an observation journal which will be included in their OLR as part of the evidence for their grade proposal. These observations help the students see how much they've learned and me to see where I may need to make some course corrections or pay special attention to a student on an individual basis.
4. While I was open to topics which would be guided by political, philosophical, or literary concerns, I did not impose any of these on the students and required only that they use methods of rhetorical analysis and argumentation to develop their projects. My personal agenda in all of this was not only an attempt to "test" pedagogy, but to find out what kinds of observations about hyperfiction might emerge from a group of undergraduate students who had virtually no prior exposure to either hyperfiction or literary scholarship (and, in most cases, little exposure to writing web pages or using computers for anything more than rudimentary word processing).
5. Because the course was primarily designed as a writing-intensive course for analysis and argumentation, we did not focus on literary analysis as much as we did stylistic, organizational (structural), and other rhetorical aspects of hypertext fiction. We also spent quite a bit of time discussing the arguments made in the course readings about hypertext and analyzing those.
   
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