Metalog

Today there are many sites of teaching and learning, such as the traditional on-campus classroom, the computer-supported on-campus writing course, or the "virtual classroom" applied locally or at a distance; wherever we teach composition, the concept of transactions mediated through writings is a significant and useful one for guiding our practice. Technology generally available through the Internet and WWW has made it increasingly possible to offer transactional environments for teaching to students at a distance. The teacher's role is crucial here--he or she must make sure the course involves adequate opportunities for transaction, then must be involved actively in the course as learners go through their paces. Clearly, this application of technology will be no substitute for skilled and committed instructors, but will rather demand more from those of us who seek to make technology work for better education.

Teaching written composition at a distance to first-level college students is my focus in this hypertext. In the light of recent experience teaching a Web-based course, I want to explore how one general theory of reading and writing--transactionalism--has helped me to both understand the teaching task more fully and to apply techniques and resources in accomplishing it. Although transactional theory can inform any instance of reading, writing, or teaching, I want to apply it to distance education writing instruction as a way of both understanding what processes are at work and of planning for ways to avoid pitfalls and to achieve the best writing instruction possible in that environment.

The course I want to use as a "laboratory" is a dual-enrollment distance education offered in Spring Semester, 1997. Although I can only discuss here a fraction of what took place in the course, I hope to demonstrate that the Internet allows for a range of individual and group learning tasks to be presented and undertaken--in the context of writers and readers transacting through text. Where such transactions have been most problematical in the past--notably in distance education --the Internet's enabling of communications, to the point where meaningful transactions can occur, is indeed good news for teachers and students.

Many sites of teaching and learning invite us today: the traditional on-campus classroom, the computer-supported on-campus writing course, and the "virtual classroom" applied locally or at a distance. Wherever we teach composition, the concept of transactions mediated through writings is a significant and useful one for guiding our practice. Technology available through the Internet and Web has made it increasingly possible to offer transactional environments for teaching to students at a distance. The teacher’s role is crucial here--he or she must make sure the course involves adequate opportunities for transaction, then must be involved actively in the course as learners go through their paces. Indeed, this application of technology will be no substitute for skilled and committed instructors, but will rather demand more from those of us who seek to make technology work for better learning.

This hypertext seeks to allow the reader to access the course site in much the same mode as students and instructors did, to see the places prepared for teaching and interaction, and to experience some of the conversations that marked learning opportunities--both taken and missed. Linked with this discussion will be parallel considerations of the theoretical basis for the course, and observations about the problems and changes on-line teaching brings about. I also encourage readers to add responses in light of their own thoughts or experiences, which will in turn become part of the ongoing record--transactional signposts--of all of our journeys into this new realm.

"Teaching on the Internet" is really not about the Internet or Web per se--the hypermediated marvels of paned pages and audio-visual displays, the eye-arresting images, the whirling cursors, the text and graphical links--but about teaching. While our attention is frequently and naturally arrested by new means to exploit the astonishing connective potential of the Net, we as teachers need constantly to revisit what teaching is all about; and we would do well to seek knowledge of how electronic networks affect our efforts and, reciprocally, shape how we conceive of our task and the success we achieve in it.

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