Transcending Classroom Boundaries:
Constructing Internet "Home Pages" for Writing Courses
Paper Presented at the Annual Convention of the Conference on College
Composition and Communication, Milwaukee,
Wisconsin, March 29, 1996
Abstract:
Few of us take advantage of how a "web browser" such as NetScape or Mosaic allows us to construct our own "home pages." Through this technology, we can benefit our students by constructing hypertext documents that link our handouts to each other and other parts of the Internet, links annotated for the demands of a particular course.
This presentation describes how writing teachers can design home pages for the particular courses that they teach. It briefly addresses some practical questions, but will focuses on larger issues such as the following: What are some of the reasons that someone would want to develop a home page for a particular course? What are some of the disadvantages of doing so? What are some good possibilites for organizing the home page of the typical writing teacher? How can a writing program or a department use information from interested faculty to organize its own home page(s)? How practical is it for students to develop and use their own home pages in a writing course? The paper provides some examples of how customized home pages have benefited both my own courses and the way that my department presents itself to the world through the World Wide Web.
Text of Paper:
Just a year ago, I had heard of the World Wide Web, and I had even browsed fairly extensively on it, but it wasn't until April 15 of last year that I created my first useful home page. Within two weeks I had made home pages for the classes I was then teaching; my students regarded them as sort of a novelty. That was when the proposals for this year's 4 C's were due, and I sent in the proposal that became the presentation you're hearing now. It's hard to believe that less than a year has passed-the "Web," as we now call it, has changed dramatically. There are thousands, perhaps even millions more home pages, and browsing the Web has become so commonplace that many TV commercials even include web sites for their companies.
The significance of the Web has changed so dramatically that it's difficult to determine what you in my audience today know about it. A few months ago, I could be confident that few of my colleagues had home pages. Browsing the Web more recently, I see that many of us supplement our courses with this technology. Most of us start by creating a personal home page-this might be a place where we present an informal version of ourselves to the world, but the home pages of most academics describes this only breifly-the personal home page usually describes a person's professional persona. The main user of many personal home pages is the author of that pages; in this conception of a home page, its main purpose is to provide easy access to the author's favorite sites so that it functions as an extended bookmark file.
I'd like to describe some possible uses of a different sort of home pages--one that functions as the site on the Web for a particular course. These pages could be conceived as a subcategory of the professional side of one's personal page, or they could reside and be considered as part of the Web site for a department or a program. Or--this is the beauty of hypertext--they could be both. As a practical matter, let us assume that I'm speaking of a sort of extension to one's personal home page. I will address myself to those of you who, with a minimum of computer support, are on the verge of writing your first home page, or of expanding the one you have to include links to a class home page. I say this to distinguish my audience fromthose who can count on some expert assistance in developing a Web site as well as those who are accomplished authors of HTML documents.
HTML, for those just getting started, stands for HyperText Markup Language, a fairly simple way of adding formatting codes to a straight text document. A browser program, such as Netscape, read and interprets that text so that it is displayed with the correct formatting and graphics. These texts must be stored on computers that use HTTP, a special protocol to communicate with other computers--these computers are the Web servers.
At my institution, the Web servers are a series of Unix work stations. To work on a Web page, one must have a Unix account, which most people already have to read their e-mail. The Unix system makes developing a Web page unusually difficult: as the predecessor to DOS, Unix, with its case-sensitive commands, can be pretty intimidating. It is probably more common for Web servers to use an operating system like Windows NT. An HTML document then only has to be saved in a special directory that is readily available to anyone with the right kind of account. The great advantage to this is that it eliminates problem of uploading and downloading files.
When I first learned that creating a Web site would involved creating and editing text files in Unix, I was pleased because I had earlier directed our department's computer lab at a time when it operated with two Unix minicomputers. I had been a Unix system administrator and felt at home in that operating system. With my Unix skills, I quickly became a kind of Unix guru to many people who suddenly needed to learn just a little about Unix in order to construct their Web pages. In my excitement, I volunteered to expand (our department's Web page), a task that was begun by a team of enthusiastic, but undisciplined student employees of the computer lab, and last summer I approached our college dean and arranged to author web pages for all the departments in my college that did not already have one. (See the at College of Letter and Sciences' Home Page.) I also wrote a program (a Unix shell script, actually) that guides people through the creation of their first Web page. Starting last fall, I have used web pages for all the courses I teach with, I think, some success. (Some examples include English 309, Advanced Prose Writing English 404, Special Topics: Honors - Cultural, Ethical, and Historical Legacies of the Holocaust, or English 512, Studies in Literary Theory: Literacy and Technology.)
It may sound to you as if I am here to sing the praises of this wonderful new technology and to announce the beginning of a new age in which information technology, led by new developments from such marvelous companies as Netscape or even Microsoft, will solve many of our teaching problems, improve student motivation, increase their learning, and even improve our teaching evaluations. This is part of my purpose, but my larger purpose is to caution you that, for reasons that I will elaborate on, using WWW home pages for writing courses is a moderately good thing that for many of us may not be quite worth the effort at this time.
First, though, let me describe a few reasons that writing teacher may want to develop a class home page.
A Web Page Can Provide Direction for Students on the Internet. The WWW is currently an almost overwhelmingly complex space, and it is not at all organized. It easy to waste lots of time looking around at things that are not immediately relevant. A Home Page for a particular Course can contain links with descriptive information included that provide an easy way for students to get to useful parts of the Web. Some students are of course very proficient at using the Web (it's almost a sure thing that some will be more efficient than you); these students may very well offer suggestions for Web sites that you yourself didn't know about. Once a Web page is established it is an easy matter to add additional links to it based on these suggestions.
Because a Web page is usually as accessible at a remote location as it is on your own campus, it also possible to provide links on a class home page to other home page for classes at other universities. This is one of the easiest ways to provide a wealth of material for your students--have them use the links on someone else's page. Many of us teach courses that are similar, so it makes sense that there may already be similar Web pages.
We are also aware that the web is notorious for the amount of dubious or unreliable information it contains. A class home page can provide your students with some guidance and even lessons in how to separate the wheat from the chaff.
A Class Web Page Can Provide Useful Information about You and Your Course. The basis of a Class Web page can be the syllabus for your course with links built in to any handouts that your develop. For example, I typically have several major writing assignments, each with its own handout. Each of these handouts can easily be converted to an HTML document and posted to the class Web site. Students can easily print any of these pages by clicking on a button on their browser. In addition, the Class Web site can contain information about you or about links to your personal page. Not only can you include your e-mail address, but by clicking on it, students can be put in a form that allows them to send e-mail to you, using the e-mail capabilities of the browser.
Students Need to Become Familiar with Browsing the Internet, and Better Yet, Most of Them Like It a Lot. According to this argument, students who are familiar with the Web will benefit in at least two ways: (1) they can take advantage of all the information that's "out there" and (2) they will become literate in language and conventions of the Web, so that they can use this tool better in the future.
Netscape (and Possibly its Competitors) Provides a Convenient Way for Students to Participate in a Newsgroup and/or Read Their E-Mail. A good web browser like Netscape can become a multi-purpose Internet tool. The e-mail interface that is included with Netscape is currently just about as good a stand-along mail program like Pegasus or Eudora. Netscape include a newsreading program that allows students to participate in one of the Usenet discussion groups in an easy-to-use environment. It is usually possible to establish your own newsgroup for a particular class and then include a link to that newgroup on the class home page, so that students can use the browser to read and respond to articles in the newsgroup. I like to use the newsgroup as a place for semi-public journal writing; sometimes I ask students to respond to a particular question that I end the class with; other times I simply tell them to think of the questions and responses. I usually require participation on a weekly or semi-weekly basis; the newsgroup of course provides a complete record of when they posted their mail. Such local newsgroups can be set up so that they are not accessible from off your own campus.
Home Pages for Classes that You Teach Can Become Part of an On-Line Teaching Portfolio That Can Help You Professionally. Teaching portfolios--a self-selected compendium of the courses you have taught, the assignments you gave, examples of students' work and comments--are becoming an increasingly common method of evaluating teachers, especially in the area of tenure and promotion. Much of this material can be part of your personal home page. It could include links to your class home pages. If you are required to assemble a formal teaching portfolio, an elaborate addition to your personal home page cannot replace the hard copy version, but it can provide an excellent supplement to other class materials.
A Class Home Page can Be Used to Easily and Inexpensively "Publish" your Student's Work. Once a home page is established, it is not difficult to add more material to it. I have found it useful to assemble student responses to one in-class writing task and then present the information on the Web for students in future classes to consult.
A Class Home Page Can Become the Joint Project of the Whole Class and Later Become a Valuable Resource to the Web. A colleague of mine who is teaching an honors course in the Arthurian Legend has made the main project for the entire course the construction of a home page on the subject of the course. (You may see this completed page at http://www.uidaho.edu/student_orgs/arthurian_legend.) Some classes at the first part of the semester were spent in teaching the students how to put their word processed text into HTML code, how to FTP it up to their Unix directories, how to create bit-mapped clickable graphics. Each student is working on one aspect of the Arthurian legend. The plan is to bring all the student information into a single web site, which the class will then register with a service like Yahoo (www.yahooo.com). It will then remain as a semi-permanent web page.
Class Home Pages can Be Linked by Departments and Programs in Order to Clarify the Overall Goals of your Department or Program and Publicize It. If enough people in a department or writing program have created Web pages, a department or program can create a web page that provides links to each of these individual pages along with brief descriptions of the courses themselves. My department had in the past published a prospectus of future course offerings that we would distribute to our majors and anyone else who wanted one. Of course the clerical task of assembling such a document and photocopying it was formidable. Furthermore, it was quite difficult to distribute it to all the majors. This year, we asked instructors to submit course descriptions on disk, which we were then able to assemble into a single file. We then converted it into a big HTML document, complete with internal hypertext links and included as a subpage on the department site. This resulted in every course having at least a brief description that was available to students at course selection time. Instructors could then use that description as the beginning of a class home page.
Students should Learn to Write their Own Web Pages so as Learn (a) to Present Material in Hypertext and (b) to Present Themselves through the Internet. The personal web page may, in a few years, take the place of the typical resume, so students, especially those in advanced writing courses, need to have some training in how to present themselves through the Web. As writing teachers we need to introduce our students to techniques involved in writing hypertext, and in presenting themselves appropriately through the Web. We have hundreds of student Web pages at our university; some are very interesting; a number of quite dull, but almost all of them were created for what is basically a recreational, rather than a real professional purpose in mind. Of course, playing with various configurations is an excellent way to learn, but Web pages will probably be taken more seriously in the future.
It is probably more rewarding to encourage students to
collaborate on building a particular web site. The skills
involved in making a complex web site are various enough that
many different talents are required from the students. Because
the ability to collaborate is an increasingly valuable skill, we
should foster in our classes whenever we can. Many local
business, university departments, and nonprofit organizations
need help in designing attractive web sites.
With all of these possibilities, you might wonder why we all don't rush out and develop these class home pages. It is tempting to let this presentation become an example of what Ellen L. Barton calls the dominant discourse, which is "characterized by an optimistic interpretation of technology's progress in American culture and by traditional view of the relations between technology, literacy, and education" (56). According to this view, the Web simply makes all that we doe easier and better, with no adverse side-effects, at least none worth mentioning.
In fact there are several problems to consider, problems that are serious enough for me to advise prospective web authors with little computer experience to postpone the experience for six months to a year or to commit themselves to learning computer technology as an end in itself. Using the WWW at this time is a little like word processing programs were at the beginning: you have to master a lot of arcane codes that you probably won't have to use in a few years. Remember those times when you had to incorporate the formatting code right into the text and then run it through the "formatter" portion of the word processor? If you're good at this, I advise you to go ahead. If not, it would be better to wait for better Web authoring software.
I don't want to give the impression that creating a Web page is difficult--it's not. It's a fairly simple procedure, and if there are a few new concepts in Unix, such as the fact that every file as three classes of permissions and within each class there are three sorts of permissions, making a total of 9 features that each file has, you can rest assured that these are all fairly simple ideas that anyone of normal intelligence will be able to grasp once they've had it explained. It is possible that your web site may run a much more user-friendly operating system, where the only important thing to remember is which directory you are storing you files in. And there are lots of materials out there that will teach you all this--both on the Web itself and in the bookstores. But the important thing to remember is that all of this will take time, and you must ask yourself whether you really want to spend this time.
Now if you're like me, and you truly enjoy writing a well-executed shell script or you delight in such small things as making your computer perform some complex task, then you just dive in. But you're more like lots of other people I know, and you see the computer as a means for accomplishing something useful without finding the technology itself particularly exciting, then the investment of time will probably not be worth it.
What actual benefit to one's teaching can come about with an elaborate class web page? Will the students be better informed about your assignments and even your whereabouts? Yes, possibly, but they could also just listen carefully in class and save the handouts they are given there. Will your students write better as result of having a home page? Well, possibly--getting heavily involved in a newsgroup discussion creates a situation where some students write because they have something really meaningful to say. But you could ask them to keep traditional journals that you collect from time to time and then read and comment on. A newsgroup allows them to read and comment on the work of others, but in practice students can't or won't read everything that the other students write anyway. Some students also find writing in a newsgroup extremely uncomfortable. Will the students use the Web more efficiently as a result of the links that you provide them on topics that are related to class discussion? Yes, of course, but students should also be learning how to search the Web on their own. Furthermore, emphasizing the Web as a source of useful information gives some students the impression that browsing the Web can simply replace rather than supplement traditional forms of research. Will students feel a greater commitment to their own writing if they know that that the best of it will be "published" on the Web in the form of home page that remains there after the course has ended? Certainly, but the question is whether the difference is really worth the effort on your part. Will you feel up to date and modern in your teaching methods and will you be able to speak with some authority of some issues affecting modern information technology? Definitely, but this is a high price to pay for being part of current trends.
Here are some reasons that make establishing your own Web pages appear less compelling:
The Beta Version of Netscape Navigator Gold, which came out at the end of the January, now has a Version 2. In recent issue of PC Magazine, the editors remarked that they had "never seen a category of software as fast-moving as World Wide Web browsers" (PC Magazine (March 12, 1996, p. 4). And the changes are significant ones. If you don't have at least Version 2.0 of Netscape, there are many pages that you can't read at all. (All of this confusion is deliberate--the companies that make browsers, particularly Netscape and Microsoft, are in a tight battle to establish their own product as the standard for the Web. Everyone understands that it's not necessarily the most efficient program that will dominate, but the one that gets the biggest "user base" and can manage to retain it, a scenario that is best encapsulated by the history of how the QWERTY keyboard, invented in the 1870's as a means of preventing a poorly designed typewriter from jamming and then promoted as scientific breakthrough that allowed greater speed and accuracy, a ploy that Wilfred A. Beeching in The Century of the Typewriter desribes as "probably one of the biggest confidence trick of all time." This inefficient arrangement survived an international meeting of typewriter manufacturers in 1905 and and went on to drive from the market the the technologically superior keyboard developed by August Dvorak in 1932. This pattern of technological development has been played out over and over, and the browser designers are keenly aware of the significance of these battles.)
The result is that authoring tools for the Web, like so much in the computer industry is somewhat like the manufacture of automobiles before WW I--there are lots of companies and competing designs, resulting in a situation in which it may be easiest simply to wait until the standards battles have been fought and won by one side or the other.
But you may not have to wait long, for so many other technological developments occurring toward the end of our century, the entire process is speeded up, compared to, say, the development of the typewriter. Netscape Navigator Gold has an editor built right into the browser. Writing a new web page with the program is like typing a document with a sort of cranky and mildly unpredictable word processing program. Beta versions of program can do unexpected things--for example, I have not managed to understand how the new Beta version relate to the previous versions that are already in my computer--but it won't be long before this web editor is released as mature software product. In the space of one year, authoring of Web pages has made surprising changes.
I have encountered web authors who want to write only in the most advanced code--they deliberately construct their pages so that they cannot be read by anything but the current version of Netscape. Their argument is that because Netscape is free for those of us in the education, we need to insist on the most current software (and it's not hard to build in a link that allows the user to download the newest version of the program). At the other extreme is a web developer who works in our library system, who feels that everything essential that the library puts on the Web should be readable by Lynx, the oldest and most rudimentary browser around. Between those two extremes, exists the most prudent course.
So in the end, I must finally argue that developing your own class Web site will be worth it--if you remain keenly aware of how no technological, however beneficial, comes without some negative side-effects. Given the enormous commercial pressure on companies to develop faster browsers capable of handling frames, Java scripts, complex graphics, and sound files, it won't be long before this Beta version becomes the standard version. Within the next year, creating a Web site for a particular course may become commonplace. But then the computing environment will have yet again altered our literacy practices in fundamental ways.