Weaving the Web

Although this period started off with a strong emphasis on *reading* the World Wide Web, using it for research, assessing sources, and just straight up basking in the newness of this exciting new cyberworld (Graves 1995; McGlinn 1995; Noden 1995), we eventually noticed an uptick in articles that attend to the writing of web texts and composing with multiple types of hypermedia for various platforms. Increasingly, teachers recognized the impact of supporting students as active composers--or netizens--of the web.

Beyond HTML: Alternative Approaches to Hypermedia Composing

In addition to creating web pages, websites, or developing other types of web content, we found that English students and teachers were engaged in other kinds of hypermedia authoring, creating hyperlinked collections of cards or interactive hypertexts that were not ultimately destined for the web. Although we identified an example of web writing assignments back in 1998--Ted Nellen’s “Surfing the Internet: Sink or Swim!” discusses the advantages of having students create “internet portfolios” as a means of motivating students and facilitating robust peer review--many of the earlier articles dealt with “offline” hypermedia production using programs such as Storyspace, HyperStudio, and HyperCard. These programs enabled composers to make nonlinear hyperlinks to various multimedia “cards” or “nodes,” but these links only functioned on a local machine.

In many of these cases, we see teachers coming to terms with a new medium, with new genres that were still evolving, and with new tools that required steep learning curves for teacher and student alike. Given these conditions, it makes sense that early hypermedia composing pedagogies tended to prioritize familiar alphabetic writing, even when the software afforded a wider range of multimodal expression. Here are some examples of the kinds of alternative hypermedia composing activities happening back then:

• In 1995, Jeffrey Wilhelm had students converting their research papers into linked collections of HyperCard stacks (HyperCard is a hypermedia authoring application from Apple). After being less than pleased by the linear, text-heavy drafts students were creating, he had them reflect more deliberately on their composing process: “I attached a designer’s diary to each stack, which I began requiring as a part of every student hypercard document. Students used the diary daily to tell what they were doing as hypermedia designers and why. I asked students to use the diary to justify each link they created between cards” (37). This turn to reflection was crucial in getting students to move beyond linear conventions of print writing and take more advantage of the nonlinear forms of connection that the HyperCard program enabled. 
• In a similar vein, Victoria Haviland and Mary Jane McCall (1999) assigned hypermedia research projects on the history of selected words, using HyperStudio program. Whereas Wilhelm had reservations about the linearity of his students’ work, Haviland and McCall required that their middle-school students complete a more conventional text version of their projects before using HyperStudio, worrying that students would focus on design elements more than content if they started hypermedia composing right away. They were pleased by how engaged students were when collaborating with one another during the HyperStudio design component, becoming “active producers and consumers of [. . .] information” (65). They, like Wilhelm, saw value in creating a reflective instrument in the assignment as a means of having students account for the design choices they made throughout the process (67).
• In 1999, Nancy Patterson wrote about a hypertext poetry assignment where students used Storyspace (the stand-alone hypertext reading/writing software developed by Jay David Bolter and Michael Joyce at Eastgate) to create richly annotated and hyperlinked versions of poems by indigenous writers.
• Peter Dreher recounted an interdisciplinary English-German poetry presentation assignment. Students created multimedia presentations of animal-themed poems using a program called Mediator. Drawing upon the hypermedia pedagogy of Jonassen, Peck, and Wilson, Dreher’s assignment incorporated the following guidelines: “(1) incorporate large chunks of time and curriculum; (2) integrate ideas throughout the curriculum and from different disciplines; (3) promote interdisciplinary learning; and (4) use a hypermedia authoring tool that supports and emphasizes different link structures (112–113)” (68).

What do we learn by considering this niche history? Well, for one, adopting hypermedia encouraged teachers to conceptualize and teach the writing process in multiple, complex ways: invention could involve spatial mapping and creating rudimentary networks; a composition’s organization could move radically beyond the five-paragraph model; what counts as evidence, example, illustration, and other supporting elements could expand beyond textual quotation and into the world of image, audio, and video content. Building moments of reflection into such assignments was, and in many cases remains today, a popular way of making this process more visible and deliberate for students. Nevertheless, English classrooms didn’t uniformly come to embrace hypermedia composing fully, as many were still tied strongly to the linear, hierarchical nature of print textuality.

In the early days of hypermedia teachers weren’t always comfortable with the idea of having their students dive right in and start composing richly mediated, hyperlinked texts. As mentioned above, Haviland and McCall (1999) had students compose their projects as conventional papers before remediating them as HyperStudio presentations, “not because we considered the effects, pictures, and colors to be unimportant, but because we predicted that students might tend to work more on this part of the project than they would on the text” (64). On occasion, teachers even took on the work (play?) of hypermedia composing themselves, allowing students to participate in the process in a somewhat reduced capacity: Sutz et al. (1998) describe utilizing HyperStudio, PageMill, and video editing software to develop a “Florida Writers Fair” to showcase the works of lesser-known state authors in a multimedia exhibit (26–27). In this case, students primarily contributed their responses to remediated poems, as well as other written content, mostly because the article’s authors were learning these various technologies for the first time, and the time constraints associated with their own learning curve conflicted with key goals of the class (27). Reviewing Sutz et al.’s reflections on how their own learning curve constrained their pedagogical use of hypermedia, we can be reminded that teachers must often first learn to compose with a new technology themselves before they can feel comfortable teaching that technology to students. We definitely need to make more space and time for teachers to have a chance to explore new media composing for their own purposes.

Still Social: Students Composing for The World Wide Web

Coinciding with the turn of the millennium (and once the paranoia of the Y2K bug died down, we imagine), teachers began to focus more and more on web-based hypertext composing, either by having students code directly in HTML, using WYSIWYG web editors, or contributing content to established online spaces. In the latter half of the period covered in this act, we notice several examples of articles promoting web-based writing (Sara 2000; Nellen 2001; Walton and Bork 2001; Kern 2001; Kellen 2002; Weiler 2003). Some teachers dipped their toes into the web by assigning web writing within established corporate spaces, such as when Donna Graves (1995) had students participate in America Online’s “Scrapbook USA” writing exchange project, or when Cindy Bowman and Renn Endenfeld (2000) had their seventh-grade students submit book reviews to Amazon. But students also participated in hypermedia composing in more organic, emergent corners of the web--and often in ways that legitimately contributed to the creation and dissemination of original research, scholarship, and art. Take, for example, Katherine N. Kellen (2002), who engaged her students in combining hypertextual poems, prose, and photographs into web pages (coded using only Notepad!) that were ultimately published on the school’s website.

Additionally, Dennis Lawrence (1999) recounted the work done by his students as part of the Kansas Collaborative Research Network (KanCRN), what he described as “an open community made up of K-12 students, teachers, researchers, and mentors interested in conducting Internet-based, collaborative research” (58). Based on field trips to historically significant locations (e.g., locations emphasizing the state’s problematic history of racism), students then developed websites that included associated images, descriptions, and relevant secondary sources. As part of an international network of schools, Honey Kern (2001) helped her students work on expanding an already ambitious interdisciplinary research project on the history of the Holocaust and other genocides by transforming it from an annual print magazine to a website, “The Holocaust/Genocide Project,” that students, teachers, historians, and others could use in their research on the topic.

In an exciting example of literary digital humanities pedagogy, Brenda Walton and Tara Bork (2001) wrote an article highlighting the Romantic Circles High School Project, an effort by Lake Highland students to contribute to an international scholarly resource. Romantic Circles, a still-active archive of multimedia material hosted by the University of Maryland and pertaining to the study and teaching of the art, history, and culture of Romanticism, is truly hypermediated, and includes such spaces as a MOO, textual archives, image galleries, and sound files, among other content. Walton and Bork’s students contributed to the project by composing a variety of deliverables: “A ‘creature gallery’, a collection of images and text links related to the monster in Frankenstein; a virtual tour of John Keats’ London home, Wentworth Place; a virtual tour of Newstead Abbey, Lord Byron’s ancestral home; an ‘Art and Object’ gallery, featuring images from painting related to Romantic poetry; and a Regency Cookbook” (103). What’s so inspiring about all these website production projects is that teachers were engaging students in collaboratively making knowledge and then sharing that knowledge with broader communities. The rhetorical sense of exigency and audience came through so strong in all these projects because it was clear that teachers and students alike could see how their web composing could contribute to broader collaborative publishing efforts.

In addition to the emphasis on how web composing helped expand audiences for student writing, Huntington Lyman (1999) gave voice to a particularly crucial reason for encouraging student participation in composing for the web: working with multiple media forms allowed even those students who aren’t the strongest writers a greater potential range of rhetorical expression. As he writes, “hypertext’s easy incorporation of images and sounds has the potential to involve students who are strong in the non-verbal intelligences. [. . .] Hypertext helps integrate word, image, and sound, allowing students to draw on their strengths and discover new possibilities in their writing” (58). Although the notion of multiple “intelligences” can at times be used in overly reductive ways, Lyman’s emphasis on the value of using web media to engage students with diverse learning needs in composing with a wider range of modalities remains an important argument for digital pedagogies today.

The year 2003--the last year covered in this act--featured an article that was in some ways a teaser for what was to come in the next big moment in computer-based English instruction. Greg Weiler’s “Using Weblogs in the Classroom” gave EJ readers a glimpse at Web 2.0, and hinted at the eventual emergence of social media, as well as the coming proliferation of genres, modes, and platforms that would push beyond the static web page paradigm. In this article, Weller discussed the affordances of using template-based weblogs (we call them “blogs” today), explaining that content management systems such as blogs take the messiness of design out of the equation to allow students to focus on developing content. While Weller’s pedagogy still touted the advantages of writing in a non-academic style for an online audience as a motivating factor for blogging, eschewing the design aspects of hypermedia composing could be seen as step back. We’re mindful of Kristin Arola’s 2010 article “The Design of Web 2.0” and her powerful plea that “in a Web 2.0 world, composition teachers need to engage, along with our students, the work of design” rather than acquiescing to the default ideological assumptions embedded in corporate design templates (4). But alas, template-based design is where the web starts heading later in the decade, but that is a story for our next act!