online syllabus for a first year composition class and as part of an American Literature Survey Site developed by my literature class. At points throughout this project, you will encounter samples from student work. The samples are set off by a purple border and surrounded by analysis. Click on the images or select the sample number in the text to move out to the original projects and online courses. Remember following the samples will take you away from this essay; use the return functions of your browser to get back. Please add your thoughts about this project to the message board, or feel free to contact the author. Scroll through the project as if it were a talk. You can also jump to...
samples from first year composition projects
samples from American Literature projects
both projects in rhetorical terms
The conclusion.

From Browsers to Builders:
Student Composition on the World Wide Web
Daniel Anderson

While the web has been around for five years now, most of us are still in, or just coming out of, the honeymoon phase. The potential for diverse new audiences, hypermedia, more seamless interfaces with the net, and the capacity for feedback and interaction on a global scale all enthuse and fascinate us. At the same time, people are already beginning to think more critically of the medium, to chart the web, and to note problem areas and sites of success. Sites which try to delineate stylistic axioms about the web, the Yale style guide site, for example, are emerging and most teachers of web building are realizing some of the basic characteristics of and tenets for using the web.

On a practical level, early realizations include an understanding that graphics should be thought of not just in visual terms, but in terms of file-size and loading times. We're also beginning to agree that documents should contain return or other navigational links, that long lists of links may not be as informative or dynamic as a mixture of explanatory text and links, that pages and pages of scrollable text don't take full advantage of the web's hypermedia potential, or more preciseley each of these forms will work best in specific web situations. These pragmatic understandings of the workings of the medium, however, only initiate the task of determining what are the best ways to teach the web.

[Return to Top] After we point out that a two or three minute loading time is a poor implementation of graphics on the web, we must still determine the best ways to implement the graphics that do load on time. Take, for an obvious example, two web film evaluation papers. The projects evaluated the movie The Accused and were built last year by students in my first-year composition class

(sample 1)
In the first example You'll see that incorporating a graphic into the composition works fairly well. The student accompanies the graphic with a textual description of the scene from the film. The description doesn't rely on the still to do the work of explication, but uses both the still and explication to further the argument of the paper.

Now look at another example from the same batch of projects.

(sample 2)
It seems as if the student assumes that the graphics will make his point for him. On the pages where the graphics are placed, there is little explication of them or explanation about how they work with larger themes of the project. It is a page solely emphasizing graphics at the expense of text. A second look at this sample, however, reveals not only a lack of explication but an interesting nodal development. The graphic below illustrates the organization of the two sample projects.

(picture 1)
The frame on the left shows the first sample; this project uses subnodes for analyzing the film. The links to the graphics in the second sample actually could work well; had the graphics pages included some description or expansion on the project's argument, the level movement of the project would have been a funneling back and forth toward further insight and reiteration of the main points, and this form might have been more successful than the first sample. Of course there is still the content to consider, the ideas themselves to challenge. The point is that we can focus on organizational structures and successful work with content media, like graphics as we think of new ways to develop and to deliver our ideas.

[Return to Top] A set of samples from my Spring semester American Literature course further illustrates the need to look at both project organization and media implementation. These projects worked at delivering literary analysis of the play, A Raisin in the Sun, by Lorraine Hansberry. They also included analysis of the 1961 film version of the play. The first thing to note about the first example is that it too seems to suffer from poor nodal organization.

(sample 3)
It might be suggested that this initial page seems to work well. The larger claim that we should evaluate hypertexts in terms of the way they provide choices for the reader, and by extension how they allow for multivariate, reader-determined texts might argue well for this page. Note how the page offers the reader the choice of seeing the quicktime video clip from the film, of moving on to a transcript of the relevant passage from the script of the play, or of moving on to the student analysis of the scene.

(sample 4)
However, the implementation of these options suffers from the same divorce of text and graphics that debilitated the second sample from the Accused projects. When a reader moves on to the analysis of the Raisin in the Sun clip, she moves away from the clip itself. In a sense, the analysis node assumes that the reader has downloaded the clip and memorized it, before moving on to the analysis. In this case, it is not so much poor explication of the clip, but a project organization which separates the analysis from the clip, that potentially causes a problem.

Now look at a second sample from the same batch of projects.

(sample 5)
In this example the student is able weave the clips into the analysis of the film. Note how the second still, for example, is embedded in the body of the analysis. The language of the original page acknowledges the scene, outlining a connection with the larger theme that, "no amount of money can make up for the loss of pride and that it is sometimes better to sacrifice the goals of one for the good of many..." The analysis then performs a kind of run-on line past the still, continuing, "this bold and unselfish move helps to propagate the family's long standing ethics, values, and pride." The still is incorporated into the original analysis as visual support. It also functions as a link to a new node for fleshing out of this point.

(sample 6)
It is important to note the distinction between this new node and the analysis node from the previous sample. Here the still which links the video clip, the video clip itself and the analysis are all present at the same time and work to provide details and support for the point that was mentioned on the initial page. Although it was the author who determined to provide these materials, and the page fails to provide a sample from the script of the play, this may be a better implementation of hypertexts based on choice.

I think this is important, because it reveals the need to focus our organizational choices on these media intersections when teaching web composition. Even more important, however, may be the way that the different samples illustrate the need to think of the web along with specific rhetorical strategies. In a sense, the two sets of samples seen today should be looked at as two distinct forms of web composition.

[Return to Top] The first projects worked toward fulfilling an evaluation assignment in a course based on argument. The second group aims to perform literary analysis. These terms shed light on the projects as web compositions.

(sample 1 excerpt)
Note how the sample from the Accused projects uses the return link to tie this thread of the argument back into the project as a whole. This impulse is well placed, but the explication of the connection in the return link is not completely adequate. As an evaluation assignment this project could have benefited from some analysis that makes the connections between various aspects of the argument--criteria like realism, for example--more clear. This analysis should be incorporated in the body of the page.

On the other hand, the sample from the Raisin in the Sun projects at first glance seems more successful.

(sample 6 excerpt)
In the sample, the connection between the clip itself and the larger theme of individual sacrifice for the good of the group is made explicit. However, we might ask ourselves if the rhetorical aims of a film analysis project are exactly the same as those of an evaluation argument. Surely they are working with similar materials and have some of the same goals, but I would suggest that in a literature assignment more attention to the details of the texts themselves may be required. Note the level of discussion given to the clip in the sample. "In this scene he stands up and puts his arm around his son." One might suggest that more attention should be given to the language of the clip. More information about the gestures, the tone, or the imagery, would make the literary analysis stronger.

Questions about specifying the aims and measuring the rhetorical success of hypermedia are in part brought forth in part from traditional classroom experience. It may be wrong to map these demands too explicitly over the web medium. Perhaps using a video clip changes the rules of the analysis game. Should we expect as much detailed explication of the clip, when the scene itself can be downloaded? Perhaps the sample works better as a sort of video quotation. These are questions to be considered, but the point for this discussion is that this web composition has particular forms that in some way should correspond with particular rhetorical aims.

[Return to Top]
I'm not advocating an avoidance of the larger issues of web organization. In fact, before even mentioning the requirements of a particular assignment, it is crucial to establish an understanding of the general nature of web composition. For example, without first demonstrating the spatial organization and functioning of the web itself and the relationship between web pages viewed through a browser and their underlying html documents, very little composition will take place. It will be important temper our thinking of organizational structures and media implementation with understanding of general web axioms in terms of teaching.

Building better web compositions will involve understanding web axioms, making media work well together and implementing careful organization and composition strategies. I'd like to leave with one other suggestion, however. Learning to link and build with new media probably won't prove to be too difficult. These forms are already comfortable to more and more of today's students. What the use of the web really means is that we as instructors need to devote a lot more time and energy into understanding unknown forms of composition, and that means that we must redefine for ourselves--and more importantly, for those who may not share our enthusiasm and convictions--what we see as writing and as literacy (see the American Literature Survey Site). Projects like these question teaching models based on lecture, put pressure on models of coverage, and reinvent collaboration. When incorporated into daily course activities they change the operation and definition of the classroom. An inward movement is suggested perhaps by the small group or individual study and work sessions initiated by these projects. At the same time shared links with other sites and, forms and message boards have made us part of an outward movement, a global classroom. One recent contact wrote "I'm an EE major who wishes I had time to take some literature classes, but I don't These pages let me participate in your classes vicariously." Another contact sent us a detailed list of references for use on our Yellow Wallpaper site. We are defining a classroom that works with the specifics and also realizes the larger potentials of the web. It is a classroom that assumes priority for new kinds of activity, that takes time and resources, but, it is a classroom that extends well beyond even the walls of our institution, that is extending even now in this project.

Don't forget to add your thoughts to the message board, or to contact the author.