Risks/Trade-offs | 8 Levels | Adapting Assignments | Reactions | Suggestions | Works Cited Pedagogical Strategies For Moving From Traditional To Hypertext Research Projects Based on my observations in class and interviews with the students about what worked and what didn’t work so well, I came up with the following conclusions which might help others to learn from my mistakes and successes. Don’t abandon linear paper; use it first, but shorten normal length. Many of the students felt that they learned how to revise better when they were in the process of doing the web paper, but some expressed the wish to have the whole project graded as one grade. Others mentioned how if they would have had to do a longer paper, they wouldn’t know how to handle the greater number of connections they might find. Show the differences and similarities between the two types of projects. Illustrating traditional (print) research paper characteristics and how they compare with the hypertext research project’s characteristics may help students understand the differences, as well as the similarities. Offer a range of options for the variation in technical skill. Students were very when they were assured that they did not have to be graded (in a writing class!) for their technological skill level. When they learned that the low-tech project was “just a poster,” they often brought ideas to the project based on what was familiar to them in doing previous posters, such as using pictures and special highlighting. The students who were web-savvy were challenged appropriately as well, and even those who weren’t so web-savvy but who learned quickly and were eager to learn often outdid themselves. Aimee’s project on hyperthyroidism is an example of a student who said she had had no web experience before this assignment, and yet hers was among the best in the class. Emphasize the thesis as a controlling force in determining conceptual links. In both the low-tech and high-tech options, Students were strongly advised to take the parts of the thesis statement that could become linkable phrases and use them for a center hub for various sections of the project. Show lots of examples, different types of examples. In showing one primary example and having not done this in previous classes, I often wished I had had many types of examples to show the students so that they could get a prototype in their mind of how to construct the project. Only a few instructors nationwide (Keith Dorwick, Daniel Anderson, among them) had web pages with student work posted on them, but it helped the students tremendous when I showed the students a project that one of Keith Dorwick’s students had done about five years ago. Fortunately, I showed them the site early on in the semester (but unfortunately when they had no conceptual framework in which to put it), but when it came time to show online examples, this site was no longer accessible. Such is the nature of student websites. Discuss how to incorporate web design principles to enhance text and meaning. Doing this may seem alien to the rhetoric instructor, but it is essential to incorporate design principles and concepts of visual rhetoric into your teaching content in order to keep your students’ work from being simply uploaded text (aka a “primitive” type of webtext). Provide clear grading criteria, distribute, and reinforce. Though I did do this early on in the project, in fact, in several different ways, I could not stress this enough. Even when I had stressed it often, many students still did not realize how important some grading criteria were. Figure out if “firewalls” exist at university level for off-campus web-building possibilities (geocities, angelfire). Only after the semester had nearly ended did I find out that our university, probably like many others, had set up a “firewall” to keep students from downloading too much onto the main servers. Apparently, with web-building tools, such as found on geocities or other servers, templates are downloaded each time a user elects to use one, which would be often unless the university set up a block on such downloading practices. This block is similar to what they did during the controversy over Napster. Allow the excitement of web page making to carry over into classroom. The fun of web page building created an excitement in the classroom that was never so present as in the typical research paper writing classroom. Harnessing this excitement was crucial to preventing the students from getting stressed out about doing something they thought was “extra” or “different” from what their friends were doing in similar classes. Don’t let “technophobic” students make it more complicated than it is; simplify; let peers teach also. I had one student in my class ask over and over again the same question that I myself asked when first learning how to put a web page together years ago: “but how does it go from here (my disk) to there (the network server and then, the screen). This idea seems reasonably easy to address now, but I remember having trouble conceptualizing it myself when I first started, so I tried to have patience with this repeating questioner. The other students were not always so patient, however. They would moan and groan every single time he asked that question, and think the answer was obvious. It began to be funny, actually, but I know his question was a serious one. Another time I was unable to explain how geocities handles uploading files, and a student showed me, so I turned over the next class period to him and let him demonstrate how he did his project and how to upload files. On the other hand, the low-tech project is actually very simple, but yet another student kept misunderstanding the whole setup of the assignment, thinking it was much more complicated than a poster with lines representing links and connections. Patience was a necessity in this instance, as well. * Student Examples: Aimee, Julie M., Amber, Don, Katie, Bryan, Holly, Julie S.