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The Projects
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| 1. |
The first writing assignment was
based on the idea that practice writing hypertext (at least a little bit)
would give the students some first-hand knowledge about hypertext that reading
it (or reading about it) would not. Each student first had to explore the
Storyspace©
environment, playing with the program and making initial attempts at mapping
their ideas. Concurrent with this project, they began reading Judith Kerman's
hypertext poem "Mothering."
Class discussions focused on how the hypertext poem worked (or didn't) as
compared to traditional, print-based poems. |
| 2. |
Because the class was under the
rubric of the Division of Rhetoric and Composition, we spent most of our
time discussing rhetorical analysis, rather than literary analysis, though
some crossover naturally occurred. Most of the readings in the course packet
tended to the "literary" side of hypertext, though not all. For Storyspace,
I only covered the basics for the program: how to open it, create nodes,
write in the nodes, and link between nodes and text. The students were encouraged
to explore, collaborate, and try importing images. |
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| 3. |
Stuart Moulthrop's Victory
Garden was the next hypertext the students read, and they also
began reading articles in the course reader to introduce them to the
ongoing conversation about hypertext and hyper-literature. At this point,
class discussions focused on "what is hypertext literature?" and a few
of the assigned readings. The second project asked them to write a fairly
traditional synopsis of three articles they chose out of the reader
(or on their own), but which we had not read as a class. They also were
to respond with their own thinking about one or more of the issues raised
by their readings and propose a topic area for the next two projects.
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| 4. |
This writing assignment was primarily designed to assist the
students in learning how to develop an annotated
bibliography and work as a team on developing ideas and citations to
support their arguments. While each student needed to develop their own
topic area and research, they were encouraged through synchronous discussions
and the e-mail list to work together and share the results of their searches.
One component of this was that each student needed to e-mail
someone outside of class who demonstrated expertise regarding the topic
area. This could be a friend, professor, prior teacher, or one of the authors
of the articles they read. Another aspect of this collaboration was the
class AddLinks
page, which they had been assigned early on. Essentially, the AddLinks page
is a Perl-based web page to which class members could add links by filling
out a form on the web page to give a URL and some comments about a web site
they had found regarding hypertext. |
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| 5. |
The planning and work on Project Four actually started prior
to the mid-term break with a tutorial on basic HTML, web page construction
and design, site structure and design, and lessons from the tutorial in
Claris HomePage©. The students practiced designing web pages by building
a personal page and could convert either their Project One or Project
Two into a web site. Ultimately, the goal of the project was to build
a group web site on a group topic which would then include writing about
the individual subtopics each student chose. We brainstormed for the group
topics very early on and continued to refine these as Project
Three got closer to being assigned. Each group gave a presentation to
the class on their topic area and inter-linking between the group sites
was actively encouraged. |
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