Assignment Summary 

We are about to embark on a technological adventure.  We will be using technology to explore the role of technology in our society.  For your final project in this class, you will be working collaboratively with several other class members to construct a web page that makes a statement about some aspect of technology in today’s "postmodern," "democratic" society.  You might explore how technological advances, such as computers, have changed some segment of society, or you might want to show a glimpse of how technology may change us in the future.  Whatever direction you decide to take, I want you to consider how the technology that you discuss has affected our claims to an "equal society."  In short, has technology had a divisive effect or an equalizing effect on society?

I used this assignment most recently in an honors first-year writing course, which was organized around an exploration of some of our cultural beliefs, searching for their origins and then tracing their evolution/devolution to our time.  Establishing a theme of separatism versus equality, I posited a hypothesis, which held that throughout history, "out-groups" had formed, espousing equality as one of their tenets, only to find that once the group achieved "in-status" they became exclusive, rather than inclusive.  Throughout the semester, as we looked at our societal views about the individual in a "democratic" community, and technology and progress, we considered how the concepts of separatism and equality were evidenced in a changing society. 
For this assignment, as the final project in this class, I asked students to work in small groups, who had been working together throughout the semester, to create a hypertextual Web document, which made a statement about technology’s role in our culture.  By this time in the semester, students had been evaluating Web sites and they had been working on the Web page design of their electronic portfolios, so they were becoming fairly technologically proficient.  Furthermore, the collaborative groups had been arranged on the basis of Web writing experience, giving each group both experienced and inexperienced Web writers.