abstract

background

theory

praxis

models

course

a challenge
slow development
web authoring
lessons

references

One of the interesting challenges for Web Authoring instructors grows out of its location within the Writing Program. Students often see the course as primarily technical. How does one code HTML, use FTP to upload files to server space, edit images in Adobe Photoshop, or incorporate javascripts into a web page? The current version of the course is partly about these technical issues - which helps explain why students continue to enroll in large numbers. Upon leaving Web Authoring, students have a set of skills that are transferable to personal web sites, web development in a professional setting, or elsewhere.

The course's location within the Writing Program means that it is about more than just the technology. It is also about ways of writing for the web. While the Rutgers Writing Program does not teach rhetorical modes, in Web Authoring students are taught to pay careful attention to the opportunities and challenges one faces in communicating to a web-based audience. How does one organize ideas and information in readily accessible ways?

Taking an approach more clearly tied to formal rhetoric, Mary Hocks (2003) has described these issues as components in a "visual digital rhetoric" (p. 632). Hocks (2003) is interested in rhetorical elements like "audience stance", "transparency", and "hybridity" in academic hypertext authorship. Some Web Authoring instructors get at these issues through a series of peer- and instructor-conducted usability studies. No matter how one comes at the challenge of writing in new media, one must ask what it means to write for the web.

My Theory and Practice of Academic Hypertext course began as a special section of Web Authoring linked to the Rutgers Writing Program's advanced composition course, Research in the Disciplines. And like the other Web Authoring courses, my course has had to contend with the tensions between the technical side of Web Authoring and the writing side of the course.

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