| |
The Products
|
| |
|
| 1. |
Although the students could have
converted their Storyspaces into HTML format, most of them did not, and
the products are not available to show. The purpose of the project was really
to give them an opportunity to work in a topographic style of writing, rather
than the usual formal (and primarily linear) essay style they had been using
most of their lives in school. |
| 2. |
A few of them demonstrated that
they had a certain flair for creative writing, and most of them attempted
creative writing rather than an essay. Two students did attempt a type of
personal history and both were interesting, though sparse. Only one student
actually continued working on his Storyspace after the class time allotted
for it (only two weeks at the beginning of the semester); the others probably
didn't convert them to HTML due more to time constraints than a lack of
interest. |
| 3. |
Because I had planned from the beginning
to allow some students to work on a creative "instantiation" of hyperfiction,
I used the work in Storyspace as an indicator for which students might make
the best candidates for a creative work. |
| |
|
| 4. |
This was the most traditional of
the essays, though ultimately it was rewritten as a web-based essay. Since
I use a variation
on the portfolio system, students were able to continue working on the
assignment up to the end of the semester, integrating what they had learned
over the whole semester as part of the essay if they chose to. Some did
very little in the way of rewriting (and this was reflected in their final
course grade); others worked very hard to create a new essay meant for the
web. |
| 5. |
We spent some time discussing issues
of style and design, and several of the essays reflect those discussions
and concerns. Because UT-Austin's freshman English class focuses on argumentation
and rhetorical analysis, I didn't spend a lot of time discussing these issues
with them, though in retrospect I probably should have spent more. |
| |
|
| 6. |
I had begun the semester asking
the students to search the WWW for articles about and instances of hypertext
literature and to post them to the "Add
Links" page once a week. At the time Project Three started, most of
them had not done much but began in earnest at this point. The advantage
to this, of course, was to reduce the time any one student needed to search
and to encourage collaboration with their peers. Because they were supposed
to annotate each new link they added, the annotated bibliography was an
extension of this activity. Most of the students caught on to the idea very
quickly and had the most difficulty with either finding a correspondent
or developing good questions to send to their correspondent. |
| |
|
| 7. |
The culminating project was the
most difficult of all, on many levels. The students not only had to develop
a group topic, but break each topic down into component parts for their
own individual contributions. Aside from their difficulty with thinking
on these levels, the technological imperatives became even more complex.
They had to discuss, negotiate, and, finally, approve an organizational
strategy for their web site as well as make design decisions that would
carry across each person's individual pages and make the site a "whole." |
| 8. |
Only a few of the students had prior
web page experience, so most had to work very hard to learn how to accomplish
the design and structure they decided upon. Although I had recommended that
their annotated bibliographies become a part of the site, not all the groups
accomplished this. Still, they did an admirable job on the whole. |
| 9. |
The creative writing group was charged with not simply creating
a piece of fiction, but an instantiation of what they and the other groups
had learned about hypertext literature from, especially, a structural point
of view. Their initial proposal was fairly sophisticated and the difficulty
of carrying out some of their ideas proved a bit too much. Still, they managed
to put together a piece
that showed many of the concepts the class had discovered. |
| |
|  |