The Writing Assignments

	The Writing Assignments
1.	One of the strategies I employed in the class was to design the assignments such that each following assignment could build on the ones before it. In order to ease the students into the technology, the first assignment was the least collaborative and was more or less to "play" in a program called Storyspace© (Eastgate Systems). The second project was a fairly traditional paper (though turned in online) analyzing readings they had done about hypertext and out of which they were to develop potential topics for their third and fourth projects. The third project required that each student develop an annotated bibliography for use in the fourth project. In the fourth and final project, each project group developed a web site about their topic and attempted to link it to the other project group pages.
2.	I also made the decision not to "teach the technology" any more than absolutely necessary. While I expected (and got) some negative feedback from the students about this particular strategy, I had learned from earlier c-a classes that such a strategy works well in two ways. First, it necessarily involves the students in collaboration with their peers. Second, the students begin to take ownership of their learning in a more profound way than I have ever accomplished through lecture, peer-group work, or a variety of other strategies I have employed over the years. It is not uncommon for a few students to note in their class evaluations at the end of the semester (or in their mid-term OLR) that the class was great, but they had to learn it all for themselves!
3.	Additionally, almost all of the instructions and assignments were provided on the course web site, rather than by paper. Aside from the political and ecological statement that such a move makes, it also made navigating and interacting "within the Internet" a requirement. The major exception to this was the course reader, which consisted of a number of essays I had culled from my own reading over the years and which seemed important to contextualize their study of hypertext fiction.
4.	Finally, aside from the formal writing assignments, which I call "projects," the students in this class did a tremendous amount of writing. The OLR requires that students write regular observations about their activities, three different self-reflective pieces (two of which are evaluations of their own work in the course), and two grade proposals, one at mid-term and one for the final. In addition to this, students posted comments to the forums pages for the class, participated in e-mail correspondence, annotated URLs for the AddLinks page, and wrote evaluations of peer projects.
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