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.