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Davis and Shadle
With students struggling just to practice web development, I decided that
theory would have to wait until later in the term. We took a six week
break from theory to focus on practice. When we returned to theory, we
read Davis and Shadle's "'Building a Mystery': Alternative Research
Writing and the Academic Art of Seeking" (2000). At this point in
the term, students were more comfortable with both HTML and image editing.
They were also in the midst of their final
academic hypertext projects. While many students still seemed not
to recognize the relationship between their individual projects and ideas
in Davis and Shadle (2000), the class discussions began to include applications
of ideas.
Kolb
For our final conceptual discussion as a class, I reassigned Janangelo
(1998) and assigned David Kolb's "Socrates in the Labyrinth"
(1994). The result was a highly productive discussion of the limits of
nonlinearity in academic hypertext. Together, these readings enabled students
to explore the complex demands academic hypertext composition places on
the author. For example, students wondered how they might create the "appearance"
of nonlinearity while still controlling the reader's experience of the
essay. This development was a milestone for the class because it signaled
students' recognition that they needed to create multiple
paths through their academic hypertexts and exercise some authorial
control over those paths.
My sense is that the students could only engage productively with the
hypertext theory after they had produced academic hypertexts and could
insert their own concrete examples into the theory. One of the lessons
I take from the course is that it would be more successful as an advanced
course that built on prior web development and research writing coursework.
If I were to repeat the version of the course I taught in Spring 2003,
however, I would move all theory readings to the latter half of the course
and write assignments that required students to use theory to both critique
their hypertexts and inform revisions to their hypertexts.
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