My analysis here focuses on three freshman composition courses that combine Web writing and community service. In these courses, the Web writing assignment is intended to enhance curricular goals; in each case, differences in goals, along with differences in student population and institutional context, can be clearly seen to shape the particular features of the Web writing that students do. In other words, the Web writing component of the course is—and, I argue, should be—developed "ecologically," in a manner that is responsive to the influence of such factors as the aims and interests of the teacher, the needs of students, the availability of technology, and the larger institutional context. In the case of community service and Web writing, the needs of the local community being served are obviously a significant component of this ecology.

The Web writing assignments and the resulting student work in the courses I analyze here differ not only from each other but also from the most ambitious and longstanding project incorporating community service and Web writing: "Going to Class, Getting Online, and Giving Back," a course developed by Alison Regan and John Zuern at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. This is an inspirational example for faculty wishing to integrate community service and/or Web based writing into their courses. However, it would be difficult and unwise to simply replicate the design of Regan and Zuern’s project at another institution. Differences in institutional and community context, student population, curricular structure, funding, and a host of other factors would make changes to the project necessary. In this and other instances of computer-enhanced writing instruction, a "one size fits all" approach is ill-advised. Rather, as I hope my arguments here demonstrate, we can learn much from analyzing what others are doing in order to see what might carry over successfully in the context of our own classrooms.

Potential of Web Writing Assignments
As a new medium for teaching the skills and strategies we currently value in freshman composition, the most obvious advantage the Web brings is that it provides student writers with an audience beyond the confines of the classroom, and it provides them as well with genuine rather than hypothetical contexts and demands in which to situate their writing. Publishing their work on the Web may serve to increase students’ motivation to write correctly and well, and it may also enhance their awareness of rhetorical dimensions of audience and purpose. Because of their unfamiliarity with this medium, the various stages of their composing process may be more evident to students as they decide on the content, structure, style, and tone of their site.

In addition to advancing current goals, writing for the Web introduces new areas in which students may develop expertise, potentially broadening our practices in freshman composition and in the field of composition as a whole. Questions of navigation and interactivity enter into the picture as the hypertextual structure of Web documents allows students to create multiple paths through their texts. Stylistic choices may shift as students consider the differences between reading from a page and reading from a screen. The multimedia capabilities of Web bring visual communication into the mix of what might be taught in writing courses. In these and other ways, Web writing assignments have the potential to introduce interesting new classroom practices that might help prepare our students to participate more effectively in an increasingly technologically-mediated society.

Constraints of Web Writing Assignments
The most obvious constraint in incorporating Web writing into composition courses is the still uneven distribution of technology resources among our students, their families, and their high schools and grade schools. This uneven distribution, which often (though not always) leads to uneven development of computer skills, functions as well in higher education, with faculty at some colleges and universities hampered significantly by poor access to computers and to the Internet in their classrooms and offices. Considering the fact that freshman composition is most often taught by adjunct and non-tenure-track faculty and graduate students, the inequities of access are likely to be exacerbated for this course in particular.

A related and equally serious constraint has to do with time and training. In the classroom, the introduction of Web writing assignments takes time away from other important assignments and activities. It requires a heavy time commitment from individual teachers as well, for it involves many skills which we may not yet have acquired. Again, teachers of freshman composition are precisely the group least likely to have the time, financial wherewithal, and institutional support to acquire the necessary skills. This group, particularly adjunct faculty, is also in the most precarious position with respect to the academic freedom needed to incorporate innovative and unusual curricular changes, such as Web writing assignments, into their courses.

Web Writing and Community Service
The combination of Web writing and community service is, in many ways, quite natural and appropriate. Much of the early optimism about the Internet and the Web centered on its potential to involve and inform people, to democratize social and political institutions by enabling greater responsiveness to citizens’ input. As a one-to-many publishing medium, the Web theoretically empowers individuals and small groups to reach large audiences. In actual practice, of course, the sites of individuals and small groups are much less likely to be accessed than those of large corporate and media entities. Much of the Web has been taken over by commercial interests; as Michelle Sidler puts it, the Web "is a site of commercial and popular exchange, often promoting the hegemony of corporate culture and offering little civic reflection or critical engagement" (1-2).*

Assignments that combine Web writing with community service can engage students in projects that capitalize on the initial democratic promise of the Internet. Because of its reach into millions of communities, homes, libraries, and schoolrooms, the Web provides a means for students to address target audiences with useful information, for instance about local events and issues, social services, or legal rights. Of course, this potentially valuable activity is compromised by the fact that in many instances the target audience, those who would benefit most from the information, are precisely the ones least likely to have access to computer technology. "Falling Through the Net," a study done in the year 2000 by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, reports that, despite gains since their 1998 study, "noticeable divides [in Internet access and computer ownership] still exist between those with different levels of income and education, different racial and ethnic groups, old and young, single and dual-parent families, and those with and without disabilities."*

Assignments need to be designed with this divide in mind, either by directly addressing disparities in access and computer skills (as Regan and Zuern’s project does), or by using the Web in a different way—for instance, to promote community service and social service agencies (as two of the projects discussed in this article do). I use the term "community service" broadly, then, to encompass both projects in which students work directly with members of the community and those in which students use the Web as a publishing medium, serving the community by delivering valuable information or promoting community involvement and volunteerism, particularly among other students.

Curricular Goals of Freshman Composition
It would seem to be no more than common sense to say that a Web writing assignment, like any assignment, should advance course goals, and yet it is important as a corrective to an approach that starts with technology rather than with teaching. As Lester Faigley notes in "Beyond Imagination," "we have to keep the focus on learning and not on technology, and to do that we have to ask: What do we want students to learn?"* Learning goals for our students should guide our use of any technology. But, of course, technology is not simply a tool, and its introduction into the curriculum may change our goals and classroom practices.

In freshman composition, curricular goals vary widely from campus to campus and from one classroom to the next. The "WPA Outcomes Statement for First Year Composition" identifies four categories of goals (Rhetorical Knowledge; Critical Thinking, Reading, and Writing; Processes; and Knowledge Conventions) and, within these categories, 34 specific outcomes that may be expected of freshman composition at different institutions.* Given this range, it is important to consider what type of Web writing assignment might best help students achieve a particular goal. While my analysis here focuses on community-based Web writing assignments, there are other genres that may be more effective in other contexts: Web papers or portfolios, personal homepages or blogs, webzines, annotated "webliographies," hypertext arguments or narratives, or image- or collage-based sites.

"Going to Class, Getting Online, and Giving Back"
In "Community-Service Learning and Computer-Mediated Advanced Composition," Alison Regan and John Zuern describe the 1997 pilot project of the Center for English Studies Technology (CEST) at the University of Hawaii at Manoa: an upper-division "Rhetoric, Composition, and Computers" course, entitled "Going to Class, Getting Online, and Giving Back."* Designed by Regan and Zuern to be a technology-centered course with a strong service-learning component, students worked with residents of the Kuhio Park Terrace and Kuhio Homes (KPT), the largest public housing facility in Hawaii. The students visited KPT’s computer lab (which had been upgraded through funding associated with the CEST project) and tutored residents on using a variety of software and Internet programs.

As assignments for the course, students "produced print and Web-based learning materials for members of the target community, essays reflecting on their service learning experiences, and formal research papers on topics such as literacy, public access to technology, and social policies relating to computers and the Internet." Regan and Zuern comment that "Rather than viewing technology as the centerpiece of our project, we see computer-mediated communication as a means of facilitating a variety of coordinated service learning activities that can help prepare members of underserved communities for life in a society that relies increasingly on information technology." Lessons learned from the pilot project guided the development of subsequent CEST courses. More information on these courses and examples of the resulting student work can be found at the CEST website.

Emphasis on Writing
How might an assignment that combines Web writing with community service help improve students' writing skills? As noted elsewhere, the fact that the Web provides students with a "real-world" audience--that is, an audience external to the classroom--may help increase students' motivation to do their best writing. Clarity, correctness, and stylistic effectiveness may become more meaningful goals to students if they know that their writing will appear on the Web for all the world to see.

The element of community service may also increase students' motivation to write well; for instance, if they are creating a site that represents a community organization or agency, students may spend more time revising and correcting their work so that it presents a professional, detailed, and accurate portrayal of this group.

An example of a Web writing assignment that achieves these goals is found at Freshman Profiles of Social Service Agencies. This site presents work done by students in Floyd Ogburn's and Barbara Wallace's composition courses at University College of the University of Cincinnati. Ogburn and Wallace asked students to write profiles of social service agencies in the Cincinnati area. The profiles were then compiled, categorized, and posted on the Web. As explained at the NCTE Service-Learning in Composition site, the assignment was the capstone project of a collaborative, year-long sequence of composition courses taught by Ogburn and Wallace in 1996 and 1997. In earlier courses in the sequence, students were introduced to community issues and to the concept of community service learning; they worked on developing critical thinking and writing skills, and they received preparation for the community service-learning they did in the third course of the sequence.

A reading of the profiles makes it clear that students spent time crafting their work. For instance, many of the profiles begin with an engaging introduction: a quote from an interview, an anecdote, a detailed description of the setting of the agency, a surprising statistic. In most of the profiles, attention is given to integrating quotations smoothly and citing sources correctly in the bibliography. Although the profiles are not devoid of errors, the quality of the writing is impressive, especially for students in a first-year course.

In the Introduction section of the site, Ogburn and Wallace confirm the impression that developing students' writing skills is the key goal of the assignment. They write,

In addition to giving our students a chance to do real writing assignments for real audiences, these profiles provided them opportunities to employ their writing skills to offer real solutions to the social ills they had been examining. That is, the profiles enabled our students to use writing to become productive and socially responsible citizens, perhaps the ultimate goal of any successful freshman writing sequence. ("Introduction" link)

The development of writing abilities is closely connected to students' development as "productive and socially responsible citizens," underscoring the social-constructivist orientation of the pedagogy that Ogburn and Wallace employ here.

Emphasis on Community Service
Can Web writing assignments enhance the effectiveness of courses in which community service is a key element? In these courses, much is already expected of students; the extra commitment of time required by the service component of the course and the time required to reflect on the experience itself are added to the reading and writing assignments of the course. Is there time left to teach students to create a website? What kind of website assignment might help students develop insights into the meaning of their community service experience and thus feed back into the goals of the course?

One function of the website might be to provide students with a space for teaching others about what the students themselves have learned. That is, the website can supplement the private reflections that students have about their experience by enabling them to tell others--fellow students and community members--about the issues they learned about and the effect that community service had on them. In this way, students are taking what they learned and educating others, extending the scope of their potential influence.

An example of an assignment that accomplishes these ambitious goals is found at The Call of Service Learning, an introductory freshman seminar course offered by Lorie Goodman in the fall semesters of 1998 and 1999 at Pepperdine University. This course was linked to Cynthia Novak's English course, "Choosing Civility and Peace"; students enrolled in both courses and completed related reading and writing assignments and service projects. The course website provides an overview, stating that the course "links academic exploration of complex social issues (e.g., homelessness, poverty, education, racism) with service opportunities in diverse Los Angeles communities" ("Overview" link). The course website also provides links to sites that students created.

All of the students' sites begin with a collaboratively written page that provides information on the focus of the students' community service (e.g., homelessness, tutoring), links to additional resources on this topic, and links to personal statements written by each student about what he or she learned as a result of the community service experience. Reading the sites, it's clear that the students are making good use of the Web to educate others about the community problem that they learned about. Students include statistics about homelessness, for example, and links where readers can find out more about the issue and about how readers themselves might get involved in their own communities. In essence, the students become teachers, having learned first-hand about a specific problem that exists in their community and in other communities.

These sites--especially the individual personal statements--also function very effectively as testimonials. For instance, writing about the weekend they spent at the Union Rescue Mission in downtown Los Angeles, fall 1998 students Annalise Brock, Chris Van Reusen, Elizabeth Walters, and Dennis Garcia write:

We left our 40 hour stay feeling that we had received a great deal more than we had contributed. While we gave but a miniscule portion of our time, they shared with us all that they had: their stories, problems, and dreams. In the end, we left drained of all emotions. Those three days took us on an emotional ride, where we encountered hopelessness, pity, compassion, and faith. All of these helped in realizing that we too have a part in solving the problem of homelessness ("Responsibility" link).

Although there are technical glitches with some of the students' sites, it is a moving experience to read them; the students have not only learned from their community service but have taken on the task of educating their readers and exhorting others to get involved.

Emphasis on Web Design
A goal of some freshman writing courses is to teach students to write effectively for the Web and to design websites that use both text and visual elements to convey information. Do community-based websites provide a good context for students to learn how to write and design for the Web? A website that promotes a community organization or delivers information to a specific group of people in a community has a fairly narrowly defined sense of purpose and audience. An assignment that clearly delimits the audience and purpose of a website may help students make more effective writing and design choices. Knowing that their site needs to accomplish a specific goal with a specific group of readers, students may be more likely to craft the style and organization of their writing in a manner that works well on the Web, and they may be more likely as well to select appropriate images, colors, page layouts, and navigation strategies.

An example of a Web writing assignment that, I hope, achieves these goals is one that I gave students in my Writing 50E course in the Winter 2002 quarter at the University of California at Santa Barbara. This freshman-level writing course is designed for engineering majors, and as the capstone project of the course I assign a collaboratively-written website. One element of writing for the Web that my assignments in previous courses had neglected was the importance of creating a site that is useful for a specific audience. Rather than simply posting nicely designed and informative sites on the Web, I wanted my students to create sites that filled a need in the local community.

The assignment in my Winter 2002 section of this course asked students to work collaboratively in redesigning a website for UCSB's Community Affairs Board (CAB). This is a student-run organization that coordinates volunteering activities in the local community and on campus. The existing website for the organization had a rich database of volunteering positions, but the rest of the site contained very little information and its navigation was confusing. In redesigning the site, my students were well aware that its primary audience is other UCSB students and that its purpose is to promote volunteering and to inform students of CAB's services and events.

The focus of the course was on the design and content of the website; almost all of the writing assignments (both print- and Web-based) and many of the reading assignments were intended to help students understand the principles of effective Web writing and design. Six groups of students worked on the same project with essentially the same materials available to them. The challenge was to take those materials--informational literature about CAB and about community service, photographs, and information that they themselves generated from interviews and other research--and present them on the Web as effectively as possible, given the site's audience and purpose. While most of the groups used similar categories to organize this information, the use of color and graphics varied considerably from group to group, as did their choices in page layout and navigation strategies. When students saw the differences in the content and design produced by each group and when they were asked themselves to articulate the reasons for the choices they made, I think they came to understand how audience and purpose shape communication on the Web; learning this was a key goal of the course.

Concluding Comments
As I hope the previous sections demonstrate, there are different ways to approach the integration of Web writing, community service, and writing instruction at the freshman level. From this range of assignments and student work, I think that we can draw one fairly certain conclusion: that Web writing assignments should be shaped and assessed in the context of local circumstances and course goals. Questions of context are often minimized in discussions of how computer technology should be used in the classroom. But clearly, teachers working in different institutional settings with different groups of students and different technical resources develop quite distinct--and clever--ways to use the Web and community service to enhance their students' learning.

There are other types of Web writing assignments that might be more appropriate in other classroom and institutional contexts. For instance, asking students to create a personal homepage might be a suitable assignment for a course that focuses on personal writing; asking students to maintain a weblog for the duration of the course is another way to use the Web as a space for students' personal or research-based writing.

& Questions
I have used an admittedly broad definition of "community service" here, particularly in discussing my own course project in the previous section. Is it too much of a dilution of community service-learning principles to say that creating a website for a local organization or community group constitutes a kind of community service?

Many Web writing assignments are collaborative enterprises; given the amount of time and the range of skills involved in creating a website, it makes sense that students should work in groups on these projects. What problems arise that are specific to collaborative Web writing? I'm thinking in particular of the impact that an uneven distribution of computer skills among our students might create. If one student in the group takes on the role of computer expert, what role do the other students play? Do they benefit equally from the Web writing assignment?

Assessment is a crucial issue for Web writing assignments. How do we grade students' websites? Do we focus only on the writing in the site, or do we include in our evaluation such factors as design, navigation, page layout, graphics, and aesthetic considerations? If we are assessing students on these factors, how do we teach such matters in a writing class?

Web writing assignments, in and of themselves, do not necessarily enhance students' critical computer literacy. That is, such assignments may teach students how to write for the Web without necessarily teaching them about the impact of the Web and of computer technology more generally on our society. How do we design Web writing assignments that teach students to take a critical approach to the Web at the same time as they contribute content to the Web?

Works Cited

"The Call of Service Learning." [WWW Document]. Retrieved July 31, 2002. URL: http://faculty.pepperdine.edu/lgoodman/GSHU_frames.htm.

Faigley, Lester. "Beyond Imagination." In Passions, Pedagogies, and 21st Century Technologies. Gail Hawisher and Cynthia Selfe, Eds. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 1999: 129-139.

"Freshman Profiles of Social Service Agencies." [WWW Document]. Retrieved July 31, 2002. URL: http://ucollege.uc.edu/ucollege/Departments/LanguageArts/SupServices/IProject/index/index.html.

National Telecommunications and Information Administration. "Falling Through the Net: Toward Digital Inclusion." [WWW Document]. Retrieved July 31, 2002. URL: http://www.ntia.doc.gov/ntiahome/fttn00/contents00.html.

Regan, Alison E. and John D. Zuern. "Community-Service Learning and Computer-Mediated Advanced Composition: The Going to Class, Getting Online, and Giving Back Project." [WWW Document]. Retrieved July 31, 2002. URL: http://corax.cwrl.utexas.edu/cac/Current_Issue/reganzuern.html.

Sidler, Michelle. "Rhetorical Economy and Public Participation: The Challenges of Webbed Technologies in Composition." Composition Forum 12. 1 (2001): 1-18.

"WPA Outcomes Statement for First-Year Composition." WPA: Writing Program Administrators (1999): 59-63. Sidler, Michelle. "Rhetorical Economy and Public Participation: The Challenges of Webbed Technologies in Composition." Composition Forum 12. 1 (2001): 1-18.